Georgia’s Geoff Duncan Must Be Disqualified for Anti-Trump Bias – The American Spectator

Is former Georgia GOP Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan an honest man?

The question arises as the Washington Times headlines its Duncan story this way:

Former Georgia official called to grand jury in Atlanta, as Trump probe gathers steam

The Times reports:

Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan says an Atlanta-based prosecutor called him to testify Tuesday before a grand jury probing former President Donald Trump’s actions following his 2020 election loss in the state.

It is the latest sign that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is nearing an indictment of Mr. Trump and his associates over alleged efforts to pressure state officials to alter the results, set up fake electors and potentially access county voting systems.

A criminal indictment from the grand jury would mark Mr. Trump’s fourth as he runs for the Republican presidential nomination. A special grand jury in Fulton County had been gathering evidence, but new witnesses are expected to appear before a regular grand jury, which has the power to approve or reject charges. The panel could act in the coming days.

Hmmmm.

Last week in this space, the hard fact of the corruption involved with the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis was the focus.

In which it was noted that Willis had already established for herself a record of corruption when a Fulton County Superior Court judge disqualified her from investigating alleged election interference by another Republican lieutenant governor candidate. Willis, it was revealed, was hosting a fundraiser for the Republican candidate’s Democrat opponent — while targeting the Democrat’s opponent for prosecution.

Hey. What’s a little corruption here and there in Georgia?

Now comes the news that the corrupt DA Willis has summoned Duncan to testify. Which is to say this is further evidence of the corruption involved in this latest attempt to Get Trump.

The unmentioned fact here is that Geoff Duncan is not some unbiased just-the-facts witness. Duncan is in fact a decidedly vocal GOP critic of former President Donald Trump. He has a distinct and much displayed personal and political bias against Trump.

In 2021, Duncan went to the lengths of spotlighting his Trump-hating by writing a book, GOP 2.0: How the 2020 Election Can Lead to a Better Way Forward for America’s Conservative Party, assailing the former president.

Over there in the Washington Examiner a couple years back, the ex–lieutenant governor is quoted as saying this: “I would just encourage people to take up the value of honesty.”

Fair enough. Yet the decidedly obvious problem here is that summoning Duncan is, to testify the honest fact, stacking the deck against Trump — deliberately and dishonestly. And Duncan is going along with this decidedly dishonest ploy.

Will Duncan look the jurors in their eyes and tell them up front that anything he says needs to be considered in light of the fact that he has a quite decidedly anti-Trump bias? That he has not only spoken out against the ex-president repeatedly but has in fact written an entire book detailing his Trump loathing? And since that Trump hatred of Duncan’s is a much on-the-record case, any and everything Duncan says against Trump in his testimony should be taken with a grain of salt precisely because it is tainted with his anti-Trump zealotry? Which in an honest world would instantly disqualify him from testifying to the jury.

And speaking of corruption in the Fulton County District Attorney’s office — here was the headline today from National Review:

Fulton County Court Publishes, Then Deletes, Indictment against Trump in 2020 Election Case

NR reported:

Prosecutors in Georgia on Monday seemingly accidentally published the charges they plan to bring against former president Donald Trump over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the Peach State.

A two-page docket was posted on the Fulton County court’s website that detailed charges against Trump, including racketeering, conspiracy and false statements, according to Reuters. However, the docket was quickly removed from the site on Monday.

In other words? Oops.

Or was this yet again another instance of blatant corruption from the Willis office? Trying to pretend all is on the up-and-up when in fact the fix is in when it comes to getting Trump?

If Duncan seriously believes what he said — that he “would just encourage people to take up the value of honesty” — then he needs to be honest himself. Now. And tell not only the jurors but the public that his anti-Trump bias needs to be considered when it comes to anything he says about the former president to the jury or anything he would say in public on the topic. And he should be disqualified instantly from testifying.

And while on the subject of his political views, Duncan’s book is a journey into what can only be considered historical ignorance about his own Republican Party.

Duncan speaks several times about President Ronald Reagan, holding my former boss up as an example. But, curiously, in his condemnations of Trump as some sort of extremist demagogue, he is curiously unaware that in the day, Establishment Republicans attacked, yes, Ronald Reagan. And attacked Reagan exactly along the same lines that Duncan is now attacking Trump. As I have long ago noted, my memories of those Reagan days include these samplings from some of the Establishment Republicans of the day. They were, as it were, the Geoff Duncans of that day:

• Republican Vice President Nelson Rockefeller dismissed Reagan as “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.”
• New York’s Republican Senator Jacob Javits [said] Reagan’s positions are “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.”
•  Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy said Reagan’s candidacy was “foolhardy” and would lead to a “crushing defeat” for the Republican Party. “It could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.”
•  Former Republican President Gerald Ford [said] “I hear more and more often that we don’t want, can’t afford to have a replay of 1964.” If the Republican Party nominates Ronald Reagan “it would be an impossible situation” because Reagan “is perceived as a most conservative Republican. A very conservative Republican can’t win in a national election.” Asked if that meant Ford thought Reagan can’t win, Ford replied to the New York Times: “That’s right.” The Times story went on to observe that Ford thought “Mr. Reagan would be a sure-loser in November” and that Reagan held “extreme and too-simple views.”

And that’s before you got to the media, which was saying things like these of Reagan:

• New York Times: Reagan’s candidacy is “patently ridiculous.”
• New York Times: “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President (Gerald Ford). It makes a lot of news, but it makes no sense.”
• New Republic: “Ronald Reagan to me is still the posturing, essentially mindless and totally unconvincing candy man that he’s been in my opinion ever since I watched his first try for the Republican nomination evaporate in Miami in 1968.”
• New Republic: “Reagan is Goldwater revisited…He is a divisive factor in the party.”
• Harper’s Magazine: “That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and an embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.”
• Chicago Daily News: “The trouble with Reagan, of course, is that his positions on the major issues are cunningly phrased nonsense — irrationality conceived and hair-raising in their potential mischief… Here comes Barry Goldwater again, only more so, and at this stage another such debacle could sink the GOP so deep it might never recover.”
• Time: “Republicans now must decide whether he represents a conservative wave of the future or is just another Barry Goldwater calling on the party to mount a hopeless crusade against the twentieth century.”
• Newsweek: Ronald Reagan is “a man whose mind and nerve and mediagenic style have never been tested in Presidential politics and may not be adequate to the trial.”
• National Review (a conservative magazine): “Reagan’s image remains inchoate.… At the outset of his campaign, his image is largely that of the role-playing actor — pleasant on stage, but ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights. Reagan does not yet project the presidential image. He is not seen as a serious man.”
• Manchester Union-Leader (a conservative New Hampshire paper): Reagan “lacks the charisma and conviction needed to win.”
• Pravda, the official newspaper…