Fulton County district attorney Fani Wills will be allowed to continue prosecuting the Georgia election-fraud case against former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants if she cuts ties with the special prosecutor, her former lover, whom she hired to lead it, according to a ruling from Fulton County Superior Court judge Scott McAfee.
In order to cure an appearance of impropriety, McAfee is giving Willis the option to remove Wade from the case or step aside herself, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The ruling is a blow to the defense, who had called for both Willis and Wade to be dismissed from the case.
Questions about Willis’s ability to continue leading the election-fraud 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 Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade to be disqualified due to a conflict of interest tied to an unacknowledged romance between the two.
The motion alleged that Willis, “without legal authority,” chose to “appoint her romantic partner,” Wade, to lead the case. In the process, Willis paid Wade over $700,000 and he in return enriched Willis by taking her on expensive vacations and cruises while they were dating. Willis said she and Wade mostly split the costs of the trips, and that she paid him back for large expenses in cash.
Defense lawyers also said it was disqualifying for Willis to give a mid-January speech at Atlanta’s Big Bethel AME church, during which she accused them of “playing the race card,” because both she and Wade and black. Defense lawyers argued that the obvious intent of the speech was to “inject and infect” the Fulton County jury pool.
Willis officially responded to the allegations in early February, calling them “meritless,” though she also acknowledged her relationship with Wade in the court filing.
McAfee held three days of hearings over the motion last month. Both Willis and Wade testified that although they’d known each other since late 2019, their romance didn’t begin until early 2022, after Willis had already hired Wade to serve as special prosecutor. Defense lawyers accused them of lying about that on the stand and in court filings, contending that the relationship likely started years earlier.
A one-time friend of Willis’s testified that Willis’s and Wade’s relationship, including “hugging, kissing,” started soon after they met in 2019. Wade’s former law partner and divorce lawyer also told Merchant in text messages that Willis’s and Wade’s relationship “absolutely” started before they say. But on the witness stand the “star witness” said he was only “speculating.”
Defense lawyers also pointed to an analysis of Wade’s cellphone records that found that Wade and Willis had exchanged thousands of phone calls and texts in 2021, and that Wade may have spent the night at or near Willis’s condo months before they say their romance began.
Willis and Wade “put an irreparable stain on the case,” defense lawyers said.
Prosecutors argued that defense lawyers made “material misrepresentations” during the hearings, alleged that defense witnesses gave “inconsistent testimony,” and said that there is no reason to believe that the defendants’ due process rights have been “harmed in absolutely any way.” They said that McAfee needed to find an actual conflict of interest to disqualify Willis and Wade from the case, not just the perception of a conflict, as the defense argued.
On Wednesday, McAfee struck down six counts in the indictment against Trump and several other defendants in the case. The counts, which involved the alleged solicitation of Georgia elected officials to violate their oaths of office and to unlawfully appoint pro-Trump presidential electors, lack “sufficient detail” and “do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently,” McAfee wrote.
This is a breaking post and will be updated.