It’s likely the end of the road for the most incompetent of the Democrats’ lawfare salvos against the now president-elect.

As our James Lynch reports, a state appeals court in Georgia has disqualified Fulton County’s elected Democratic district attorney Fani Willis and her office from the 2020 election-interference prosecution she brought against Donald Trump and 18 other defendants.

Though it will be appealed, the ruling by the divided three-judge panel (all Republican appointees) likely dooms the case.

With respect to Trump, now the president-elect, the case was going nowhere, at least during the next four years — and probably ever. As we have seen in the case brought against Trump by Manhattan’s elected Democratic DA Alvin Bragg, the federal Constitution’s supremacy clause will prevent state criminal proceedings against a sitting president during his term in office.

Moreover, Willis’s case, unlike Bragg’s case, centered on actions Trump took as president, most if not all of which he contends were official. As we’ve now observed many times, under the Supreme Court’s July 1 immunity ruling (Trump v. United States, stemming from one of the two federal prosecutions the Biden-Harris Justice Department brought against Trump), presidents and former presidents have presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken as chief executive; in addition, prosecutors are barred from using official presidential acts as evidence in criminal trials.

Willis’s disqualification should come as no surprise. As I explained back in March, it was not rational for Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding in the trial court, to allow Willis and her office to remain on the case while disqualifying Nathan Wade, the prosecutor Willis recruited to investigate and prosecute Trump and his co-defendants.

As James’s report details, Wade’s recusal was the fallout of the romantic affair he and Willis had. The defense credibly alleged that Willis retained Wade and paid him lavishly, and that they took luxury vacations together — implying that Willis was profiting personally from the prosecution. She indicted the case as an absurdly complex racketeering conspiracy against 19 defendants — including several government officials, along with the former (and now incoming) president — ensuring that the prosecution would ensue for years. (To compare: Willis just lost a racketeering trial that took two years — part of a 28-defendant racketeering case she brought in 2022.)

There were additional allegations that Willis did not comply with county law in hiring Wade. And there were significant questions about when, in relation to the prosecution’s timeline, the romance began — questions that were not satisfactorily answered during hearings that Judge McAfee conducted on the disqualification. Describing the prosecutors’ testimony, McAfee opined that it left “an odor of mendacity” in his courtroom.

Notably, Willis had already been disqualified from prosecuting one suspect in the case, Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones — a Republican Trump supporter. While Jones was under investigation and serving as a state senator, Willis committed an ethical no-no by participating in a fundraiser for his Democratic opponent in the lieutenant governor’s race (which Jones won).

Nevertheless, when the Wade controversy arose, McAfee booted him but allowed Willis to stay on the case. It seemed obvious to many of us that if one of them had to go, they both had to go — and that Willis’s office, whose prosecutors staunchly defended their boss’s conduct, should also be disqualified. But the judge dubiously split the baby.

McAfee had been a well regarded senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County prior to Willis’s tenure. He subsequently became a federal prosecutor in Atlanta, and in 2021 he was appointed the state’s inspector general by Georgia’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp. In 2022, Kemp appointed McAfee to the Fulton County Superior Court to fill the unexpired term of a retiring state judge. At the time of the Willis-Wade controversy, then, McAfee was facing a May 2024 election for a full four-year term as a state judge. Also on the ballot was Willis, whose political base is in Atlanta.

In the election, about two months after McAfee’s ruling, he was elected and Willis was reelected.

I have not yet seen the full Court of Appeals opinion. According to NBC News, the 2–1 panel majority concluded that McAfee’s decision failed to erase the appearance of impropriety attendant to Willis’s participation in the case. The NBC report quotes the appellate court’s decision as follows:

The remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring…. While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.

Under Georgia law, disqualification of the DA and her office would call for the case to be transferred to another prosecutor’s office in the state. Were that to happen, it is unlikely that another prosecutor would proceed, at least as Willis has charged the case. As I’ve explained a number of times (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here), the sprawling racketeering charge is wrongheaded. Experienced prosecutors who were trying to make a triable case rather than a partisan splash would not have indicted it that way.

As if that weren’t problematic enough, the Supreme Court’s afore-described immunity ruling would make pursuing the case against Trump extraordinarily difficult — even if he hadn’t just been elected president and thus effectively insulated himself from further criminal prosecution for the next four years.

There have been four guilty pleas in the case. As I’ve detailed, none of those defendants pled guilty to the racketeering allegation. Instead, all the guilty pleas involved comparatively trivial offenses that would result in no prison time. This is quite a comedown for an indictment that was announced with great fanfare as a prosecutorial response to a plot that left American democracy hanging by a thread.

The New York Times reports that Trump spokesman Steven Chung reacted to the Georgia Court of Appeals decision with this statement:

In granting President Trump an overwhelming mandate, the American people have demanded an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all the witch hunts against him.

I do hope the president-elect interprets the election as a public call for an end of weaponization of the justice system against partisan opponents, no matter which party, and which president, happens to be in power. For now, though, the Georgia chapter of lawfare appears to have collapsed.