Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis acknowledged in a court filing on Friday that she had a personal relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade, but said that the “salacious” allegations against her do not provide the court with any basis to have her disqualified from the 2020 election-fraud case in Georgia against former president Donald Trump and 18 other defendants.

In the filing, obtained by by the Washington Post, Willis said the allegations that she hired her under-qualified romantic partner to lead the prosecution of the case “are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain,” but she added that “none provide this Court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek.”

Willis said she has no personal or financial conflict of interest that “constitutes a legal basis for disqualification,” and she has “made no public statements that warrant disqualification or judicial inquiry.”

Willis was responding to a motion filed last month by Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for former Trump White House aide Michael Roman, who is a co-defendant in the Georgia case. The motion alleges that Willis, “without legal authority” chose to “appoint her romantic partner,” Nathan Wade, to lead the case against Roman and others. It claims that Willis paid Wade a “large sum of money that was originally allooted to clear the backlog of cases in Fulton County following the Covid pandemic.” It also claims that Willis and Wade traveled to California, Florida, and the Caribbean together, and that Wade purchased cruise tickets for the two of them.

This is a developing story.