A new book which holds up Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as a paragon of the legal profession nevertheless reveals that Willis based her investigation of former President Donald Trump on a piece of evidence, a recorded phone call, that was illegally obtained.
The book, "Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election", by Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, notes that the person who recorded the phone call in which Trump asks Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find me the votes," Raffensperger's chief of staff Jordan Fuchs, wasn’t in Fulton County or even in Georgia when she recorded it.
Fuchs, the book reveals, was in Florida. In Florida, it is illegal to record a call without all parties to the call consenting to the recording. Fuchs neither asked for nor received consent to record.
The book also dabbles in conspiracy theories, which critics say is not surprising given that 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," Mollie Hemingway noted in a March 7 report on the book.
Isikoff and Klaidman admit in their acknowledgments that Fuchs was one of the main sources for the book.
"While they reward her with effusive praise throughout, she comes off very poorly," Hemingway noted. "For example, she offers a frankly unhinged conspiracy theory that President Trump was planning to lose the 2020 election as early as May of 2020 and was therefore floating a plan with Washington Post reporters to win the election in Georgia through the legislature. She describes how she 'invented a new policy' to block public view of an election audit. She indicates such little knowledge of election laws and processes that she seems to think Georgia requires voters to use Social Security numbers to vote."
Described in the book as a “street-smart deputy” of Raffensperger, Fuchs was providing regular leaks to The Washington Post, including fabricated quotes about a phone call President Trump had with someone in the Georgia elections office that the newspaper later had to retract
Fuchs not held responsible for the lie until March 2021, months after the fabricated quotes were used to impeach President Trump.
The book states that the embarrassment of being found out taught Fuchs the importance of recording phone calls such as the early January 2021 phone call that forms the basis of Willis’s investigation of Trump.
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.
The book states:
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 book also describes a close working relationship and “secret collaboration” between the Liz Cheney-led Jan. 6 Select Committee and Willis’s prosecutorial team.
Hemingway noted: "Fuchs should have been a major part of the televised show trial Cheney put on, further convincing Republicans that Fuchs had illegally taped the call and Cheney was helping cover that up. (Incidentally, the book portrays Cheney as the real leader of the Jan. 6 committee, that she viewed it as a 'platform for her to resuscitate her political career' and would 'provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.')"
Trump and his co-defendants in the Georgia case could now argue that the entire investigation is corrupted by the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine.
“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.’ The doctrine was established in 1920 by the decision in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, and the phrase ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ was coined by Justice Frankfurter in his 1939 opinion in Nardone v. United States. The rule typically bars even testimonial evidence resulting from excludable evidence, such as a confession.”
With Willis "repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of a phone call that was illegally recorded, defendants might pursue legal recourse," Hemingway added. "It’s the latest challenge for Willis, even if the political ally judge reviewing whether she can continue prosecuting Georgia Republicans rules in her favor."
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