Willis must step aside on Trump case or remove prosecutor
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis must step aside from the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump or remove the special prosecutor with whom she had a romantic relationship before the case can proceed, the judge overseeing it ruled yesterday.
Judge Scott McAfee did not find that Ms Willis’ relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade amounted to a conflict of interest that should disqualify her from one of four criminal cases against the Republican former president.
However, the judge said, it created “appearance of impropriety” that infected the prosecution team, and he questioned the truthfulness of Ms Willis and Mr Wade’s testimony about the timing of their relationship.
“As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the district attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed,” the judge wrote.
“Put differently, an outsider could reasonably think that the district attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences. As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist.”
A spokesperson for Ms Willis did not immediately respond to a text message seeking comment yesterday.
An attorney for Mr Trump said they respect the court’s decision but believe the judge “did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade”.
“We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place,” defence attorney Steve Sadow said.
Ms Willis hired Mr Wade to lead the team to investigate and ultimately prosecute Mr Trump and 18 others accused of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn Mr Trump’s narrow loss to Joe Biden in Georgia in 2020. Ms Willis and Mr Wade testified at a hearing last month that they had engaged in a romantic relationship, but they rejected the idea that Ms Willis improperly benefited from it, as lawyers for the former president and some of his co-defendants alleged.
Judge McAfee wrote that there was insufficient evidence that Ms Willis had a personal stake in the prosecution. But he condemned what he described as a “tremendous” lapse in judgment and the “unprofessional manner of the district attorney’s testimony”.
The judge said he was unable to “conclusively establish by a preponderance of the evidence” whether Ms Willis and Mr Wade began dating before or after he was hired as special prosecutor.
“However, an odour of mendacity remains,” the judge wrote. He said “reasonable questions” about whether they testified truthfully about the timing of
Lawyers’ romantic relationship had an ‘appearance of impropriety’
their relationship “further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it”.
Even so, he said, dismissal of the case was not the appropriate remedy to “adequately dissipate the financial cloud of impropriety and potential untruthfulness found here”.
Judge McAfee found no showing that the due process rights of Mr Trump and the other defendants had been violated or that the issues involved prejudiced them in any way. He also said the disqualification of a constitutional officer, like a district attorney, is not necessary when a less drastic option is sufficient.
The judge said he believes that “Georgia
law does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices – even repeatedly – and it is the trial court’s duty to confine itself to the relevant issues and applicable law properly brought before it”.
An attorney for co-defendant Michael Roman asked Judge McAfee to dismiss the indictment and prevent Ms Willis and Mr Wade and their offices from continuing to prosecute the case.
The attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, alleged that Ms Willis paid Mr Wade large sums for his work and then improperly benefited from the prosecution of the case when Mr Wade used his earnings to pay for vacations for the two of them.
Ms Willis had insisted that the relationship created no financial or personal conflict of interest that justified removing her office from the case. She and Mr Wade testified that their relationship began in the spring of 2022 and ended in the summer of 2023. They both said that Ms Willis either paid for things herself or used cash to reimburse Mr Wade for travel expenses.
The sprawling indictment charges Mr Trump and more than a dozen other defendants with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as Rico.
The case accuses the former president, lawyers and other aides of a “criminal enterprise” to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election to Mr Biden.
‘Willis insisted that the relationship created no financial or personal conflict of interest’