Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis seemed to catch Donald Trump's attorneys off guard when she agreed to testify, and MSNBC's Joyce Vance said she's the latest woman to pierce the ex-president's veil of invincibility.
The Georgia prosecutor brushed aside her own attorneys and sat down on the witness stand, and she battled back against allegations of corruption by attorneys for the former president and his co-defendant Michael Roman, who Vance told "Morning Joe" did not seem prepared for Willis to testify.
"We saw a mixed bag yesterday," Vance said. "Donald Trump's lawyer Steve Sadow, when he questioned witnesses, was in a different vein than Michael Roman's lawyer. She was, as you pointed out, very surprised when Fani Willis took the witness stand. Prosecutors are usually supposed to have thick skin, they're supposed to be professional in a courtroom. Fani Willis came in hot, and the lawyers for Michael Roman weren't prepared to deal with that situation. In some ways, Willis' willingness to humanize herself and to jump out of her prosecutorial shoes a little bit and just to be a woman who had been wrongfully accused, I think showed some of the weaknesses in that defense team. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out."
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Willis gained some key strategic advantages for the racketeering trial, Vance said, if she's not disqualified from the case.
"There are a lot of different defense lawyers," she said. "In this case, when it goes to trial, there's some possibility they'll end up stepping on each other, that some of them will be weaker than others. As a prosecutor, that's something that you take into account as part of your strategic preparation for a case. Willis learned a lot yesterday about who she's up against."
The former president is fighting criminal charges in four jurisdictions, with two appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he's been ordered to pay $83.3 million in penalties for sexually abusing and defaming author E. Jean Carroll and is expected to learn as early as Friday what penalty will be imposed in the New York fraud case.
"The cumulative effect of the civil cases has to begin to wear on Donald Trump, and what's really happening is they're breaking down this myth that he's invincible in court," Vance said. "Whether it's through delay or bluster or his insistence that cases go his way, that, finally, Donald Trump is meeting the rule of law. It hasn't gone very well for him in the E. Jean Carroll case. It's very likely that New York attorney general Letitia James will walk away victorious in the civil fraud case."
"That sets Donald Trump up for the next act in his legal troubles," Vance added. "The four criminal cases, it looks likely that two of them may have a chance of going to trial before the election. This is Donald Trump vs. the rule of law in full force."
