Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is, for now, off the Trump election interference RICO case after the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that a conflict of interest disqualified her.
Willis’ office could still appeal the ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court. Per the order, the court denied a related attempt to dismiss the indictment against Trump and his 18 co-defendants.
But the decision is the latest significant blow to Willis’ sprawling RICO case against Trump, who will be inaugurated as president in one month.
Attorneys for Michael Roman moved to disqualify Willis in January with a simple allegation: Willis had had an affair with a prosecutor on the Trump case. She had brought the attorney, Nathan Wade, in from outside practice to work on the case, and they had allegedly used funds from the case to take lavish trips together, generating a conflict of interest.
The allegations were the subject of a dramatic, multi-day hearing during which Willis tried to parry accusations about the affair with complaints of her own about the process, and attorneys for Roman at times struggled to get their witnesses to substantiate the evidence they said they had. The trial judge, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, rebuked Willis several times during the hearing. Afterwards, he wrote that there was an “odor of mendacity” around the story that she and Wade had offered at the hearing.
McAfee gave Willis a choice: she could recuse from the case, or Wade could leave. They took the latter option, with Wade leaving and then giving multiple interviews to national news media.
The defendants appealed, and the Georgia appeals court ruled that McAfee made an error in the remedy he ordered after finding a “significant appearance of impropriety.” Instead, the appeals court said, McAfee’s remedy was improper, and that a “significant” appearance of impropriety should lead to Willis’ disqualification.
The appeals judges pointed out that Willis’ team did not appeal McAfee’s finding of an “appearance of impropriety.” Whether evidence presented at the hearing supported that finding, the appeals court said, was therefore not before it to review.
Read the ruling here.
I think I understand why they would attempt this but not sure why it would have legal bearing on the case; was there any attempt to link the affair to actual prosecutorial misconduct?
The standard is appearance of impropriety. And it sure appears improper to steer office money towards the secret boyfriend contractor whose job is to prosecute the defendants.
Not to mention that RICO was always a ridiculous overreach that was never going to get past SCOGA even if the jury voted to convict. Georgia has a very solid statute prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, but it is only a misdemeanor.
So in the end, Fani Willis fucked everything up through shitty prosecutorial judgment.
It depends on what you mean by “actual prosecutorial misconduct.” I recall no assertions of intentional destruction of evidence, coercion of witnesses etc. The problem was that she created a conflict of interest by having a personal relationship with a contract employee in a subordinate role, so GA tax dollars were, in effect, flowing to someone whom she had a personal interest in keeping on the payroll, and criminal defendants in GA - indeed, everywhere in the US - have a cognizable interest in conflict-free prosecution.
The conflict here struck me as arguably de minimis, but I don’t wear a robe.
I have not read the opinion yet, but it has always seemed to me that there’s a material difference between the D.A. getting busy with an ordinary employee of the department versus the D.A. getting busy with a contractor who is specifically getting paid to prosecute these particular defendants. The former is inchoate. The latter looks pretty skeevy.
The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
Sun Tzu