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New Book Admits Fani Willis’ Get-Trump Investigation Began With Illegal Recording
A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis’ political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare.
For context on the bias of the authors, Isikoff was an original Russia-collusion hoaxer, and his articles to that end were used to secure warrants for the FBI to spy on innocent Republican presidential campaign advisers such as Carter Page.
The night before her official first day, word leaked of a recent phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The phone call had been dishonestly portrayed by Trump opponents, and Willis hoped that Raffensperger had been in Fulton County for the call, so she could prosecute Trump based on that false understanding of the call.
However, the person who recorded the phone call wasn’t in Fulton County or even in Georgia. That’s a problem. Jordan Fuchs, a political activist who serves as Raffensperger’s chief of staff, was in Florida, where it is illegal to record a call without all parties to the call consenting to the recording. She neither asked for nor received consent to record.
Fuchs was one of the main sources for Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, they admit in their acknowledgments.
Fuchs first gave The Washington Post fabricated quotes they later had to retract about a phone call President Trump had with someone in the elections office. Though Fuchs was not busted for her lie until March 2021, months after the fabricated quotes were used to impeach President Trump, the authors of the book say the embarrassment of being found out taught her the importance of recording phone calls such as the early January 2021 phone call that forms the basis of Willis’ investigation. They do not explain how this lesson worked in terms of the space-time continuum.
In any case, Fuchs recorded a phone call between Trump, Raffensperger, and their associates. Fuchs ended the call by saying they should get off the phone and work to “preserve the relationship” between the two offices. Instead, she immediately leaked the phone call to The Washington Post, which published it hours later.
This is where the authors of the book admit that the very recording of the call was a crime:
Fuchs has never talked publicly about her taping of the phone call; she learned, after the fact, that Florida where she was at the time is one of fifteen states that requires two-party consent for the taping of phone calls. A lawyer for Raffensperger’s office asked the January 6 committee not to call her as a witness for reasons the committee’s lawyers assumed were due to her potential legal exposure. The committee agreed. But when she was called before a Fulton County special grand jury convened by Fani Willis, she was granted immunity and confirmed the taping, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her testimony.
The problem for Fani Willis’ political prosecution is that the book convincingly shows the entire prosecution rests on a piece of evidence that everyone now knows was illegally obtained — never mind that the evidence has also been completely misinterpreted.
“Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained,” according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. “As the metaphor suggests, if the evidential ‘tree’ is tainted, so is its ‘fruit.’
With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of a phone call that was illegally recorded, defendants might pursue legal recourse.
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