While today’s hearing could determine whether Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s conduct merits disqualification from the high-profile Georgia Trump case, her decision to engage in a secret relationship with her special prosecutor — and to subsequently accuse her critics of racism — has placed the case in deep jeopardy and is, at the very least, professionally inappropriate, according to legal experts who spoke to National Review.

The lawyers and political experts disagreed on whether the allegations, if true, would warrant the disqualification of Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade from the high-profile case involving former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants. But they agreed that Willis, through her actions and decisions, has harmed her case.

And if Willis or Wade is found to have lied about their relationship in court filings, they could be so “poisoned” with Fulton County superior court judge Scott McAfee that they would almost certainly have to recuse themselves, Emory University law professor John Acevedo said.

Acevedo, a Georgia-based expert on prosecutorial misconduct, is critical of Willis’s recent handling of the case, particularly her efforts to keep her relationship with Wade under wraps, calling it an “own goal” and saying it has been a “huge distraction.”

“She had to know it was going to all come out,” he said of the clandestine coupling.

Charles Silver, a University of Texas law professor and ethics expert, recently joined an amicus brief with 16 other lawyers contending that the allegations against Willis “do not even come close” to mandating disqualification. But in an email to National Review, he agreed that Willis’s decisions have not been helpful in the case against Trump and others.

“Willis should have known that the defendants would attack her personally using any mud they could find to sling,” he wrote. “Regrettably, she gave them some.”

Cully Stimson, a former prosecutor and Heritage Foundation legal expert who has called for Willis to recuse herself, said she is no victim. “She created all these problems herself,” he said.

McAfee has scheduled a hearing starting on Thursday to address the motions by the defendants. In a hearing on Monday, the judge said that “it’s possible that the facts alleged by the defendant could result in disqualification.” If Willis is disqualified, finding another prosecutor willing to take on the complicated, politically charged case could be difficult.

Questions about Willis’s ability to continue leading the case first arose in early January, when Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for former Trump White House aide and co-defendant Michael Roman, filed a motion calling for both Willis and Wade to be disqualified.

The motion alleges that Willis, “without legal authority,” chose to “appoint her romantic partner,” Wade, to lead the case, and that she paid Wade a “large sum of money that was originally allotted to clear the backlog of cases in Fulton County following the Covid pandemic.” Wade then took Willis on expensive vacations and cruises, enriching Willis.

The motion alleges that Willis never had the necessary permission from Fulton commissioners to hire Wade, who is underqualified for the case, and that Wade’s oath of office was not filed, possibly to hide that he was “appointed without legal authority.”

Willis responded during a Martin Luther King Jr. weekend speech at Atlanta’s Big Bethel AME church, where she defended Wade as a “superstar” and accused her critics of “playing the race card” because she and Wade are both black.

Some election-fraud defendants have argued that “the obvious intent” of Willis’s remarks was to “inject and infect” the Fulton County jury pool.

It wasn’t until early February that Willis finally acknowledged her relationship with Wade. She called the allegations against her “salacious” but “meritless.”

In an affidavit attached to the filing, Wade said that while he and Willis have been “professional associates and friends” since 2019 and that he served on her transition team, it wasn’t until 2022 — after Willis had hired him — that the two “developed a personal relationship.”

But in a motion on Friday, Merchant wrote that Wade’s former law partner and divorce lawyer “has non-privileged, personal knowledge” that the relationship started before Wade was hired.

The amicus brief filed last week by the ethics and legal experts contends that the relationship between Willis and Wade is not in and of itself disqualifying, and that Georgia law does not even automatically disqualify spouses from representing adverse clients.

Disqualifying conflicts of interest occur when a prosecutor has “forbidden access to confidential information about the defendant or a conflict otherwise directly impacts fairness and due process.” According to the brief, “that kind of conflict is not at issue here.”

Referring to the claim that Willis failed to get the needed permission to hire Wade, the brief says “there is nothing to these allegations,” and that under Georgia law district attorneys have authority to retain special assistant district attorneys in specific cases that is “independent of specific statutory authorization.” And any disputes between Willis and county commissioners over the appropriate use of money and Wade’s hiring aren’t disqualifying because “prosecutorial disqualification focuses on fairness to the defendant, not third parties.”

The brief says that Willis’s public comments at church are also not disqualifying “because they were not directed at a particular defendant” and did not address “the guilt of any defendant or indeed, the merits of the case at all.”

Silver, the libertarian-leaning University of Texas professor who signed onto the brief, said that even if all the allegations are true, “they do not establish that the trial has been tainted or will be tainted if it proceeds under the control of the current team of prosecutors.”

“If Willis used her office to enrich herself or her boyfriend, that is a matter for the relevant Georgia authorities to consider,” he wrote. “The same goes if she hired Wade despite lacking the authority to do so. But neither of these allegations nor the fact of a romantic relationship has any bearing on the trial or demonstrates harm to any defendant.”

Acevedo, the Emory law professor, called the case “awkward.” It is unusual, he said, for defendants to argue that the prosecutor is not competent — they should be “happy” about that. And the allegations about Willis and Wade having a conflict “does not fit the pattern of conflicts of interest that we worry about in law most of the time,” he said.

He also believes the allegations so far don’t rise to the level of disqualification of Willis nor Wade, but “there’s definitely been impropriety on the part of Willis, and she’s definitely not acted in a manner that we’d want our DAs to act,” he said, adding, “I think the defendants are trying to fan it into something much larger than it is.”

Acevedo also added a caveat: If Willis “lied to the court, even indirectly, by submitting an affidavit that she knew to be false, I don’t see how she continues in this case.”

Stimson, with the Heritage Foundation, said it would be very problematic if Wade lied in his affidavit. “That calls into question his ability to be truthful in an official proceeding,” he said.

Stimson argued that Willis should recuse herself for the good of the case. Even if none of the allegations alone is disqualifying, the “cumulative impact” of every “chink in the armor” will likely lead the public to question her judgment and impartiality, Stimson said.

“I think justice demands that she’s disqualified,” he said.

Prosecutors are held to a higher standard than any other lawyers, said Stimson, who called the “panoply” of allegations against Willis “an appeal lawyer’s dream.”

“All the players in criminal cases are fungible. People tend to forget that,” he said. “It’s the case that matters, not the players bringing the case, or the judge hearing the case.”

But for Willis, he said, “it’s all about her.”

“I have never seen a prosecutor dig in her heels to this extent to hold onto a case where if she had half a brain and an ounce of integrity, she would have gone, ‘Fine, I’m stepping back for the good of the case,’” Stimson said. “Every single day, DA offices recuse themselves off of cases. It’s no big deal. They’ve got more cases coming down the pike.”

Stimson specifically raised concerns about Willis’s comments at church, which he called “highly problematic.” Prosecutors, he said, are supposed to let their indictments speak for themselves.

“For you to go to church and under the guise of giving a sermon, or whatever the hell that was, call people racists and comment on a case, that is just entirely inappropriate,” he said.

Acevedo also called Willis’s comments in church problematic, but he said she wasn’t smearing the defendants. The speech “was targeted more against the defense attorneys,” he said.

It would be more problematic if she kept doing it, he said, “but one speech one time in church . . . probably doesn’t rise to the level” of disqualification.

The amicus brief contends that the jury-selection process is the appropriate venue to address concerns about the impact of Willis’s comments on the jury pool.

“It is easy for the defendants to assert that her remarks poisoned the jury pool,” Silver said. “If there is a risk of that happening, then the judge can deal with it during the selection process.”

Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political science professor, said that Willis may argue that she hired Wade only after her attempts to bring other lawyers aboard failed. Reports indicate that Willis initially tried to get Roy Barnes, the state’s former governor and a highly respected lawyer, to serve as her senior counsel, but he declined.

“Had she hired him, given that he was a Democratic governor, that would seem to set all kinds of claims of this is just a partisan witch hunt,” Bullock said.

While news reports say Willis has paid Wade more than $700,000 for his work so far, in his affidavit, Wade wrote that he is essentially working at a discounted rate. Willis could only pay $250 an hour, when a previous governmental entity paid $550 an hour, he wrote.

Rather than Willis enriching Wade, as the defense has claimed, Wade is claiming that “he’s making a bit of a sacrifice,” Bullock said.

“It’s not like he had nothing else to do,” Bullock said of Wade. “He had a well-established reputation. He’s probably turning aside private clients who would pay him substantially more.”

Bullock said he expects McAfee to reprimand Willis, but he doesn’t expect that he’ll declare the case invalid or disqualify Willis or Wade. He said he believes the motions to disqualify Willis are mostly an “effort to delay things until after the [presidential] election.”

Polling in Georgia, he said, shows that “a conviction of Donald Trump is the one thing that could seriously weaken the support he has. Obviously, indictments don’t hurt him. A conviction would. So, delay, delay, delay.”

Because it’s a state case and not federal, Trump, if reelected in November, couldn’t pardon himself in the Georgia case or order the Department of Justice to dismiss the charges. But he could effectively block it, Bullock said.

Even if Willis were to get a conviction after Trump was reelected, Bullock said, it “boggles the mind to think sheriff’s deputies from Fulton County would show up at the gates of the White House and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this warrant for the arrest of the inhabitant here. Let us in.”

Stimson said political considerations and election calendars “should have nothing to do with the administration of justice,” which is often slow and deliberate.

“To artificially speed up the time frame [of a criminal case] based on a political calendar I think is totally inappropriate for any prosecutor,” he said.

Willis was elected Fulton County’s district attorney in 2020, defeating a longtime incumbent who was facing a series of ethics violations and allegations of misappropriating funds and sexual impropriety. After winning election, Willis promised to be a “beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation,” according to an August 2020 report from the Atlanta Voice. She also said that the people of Fulton County “deserve a DA that won’t have sex with their employees or put money in these pockets.”

While the effort to disqualify Willis and Wade may be a long shot, Acevedo said, there’s a chance it could succeed, and it’s “perfectly legitimate” to try.

“It may not work. I don’t think it is going to work. But that said, I don’t think it was wrong of them to try it in any way shape or form,” he said. “If you’re a criminal defense attorney, your job is zealous advocacy for your client.”

“I would want my attorney to do it as well.”