With salacious testimony finished, legal arguments to begin over Fani Willis’ future in Trump case
ATLANTA– After several days of extraordinary testimony, the judge in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump will hear arguments Friday on whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be removed from the prosecution over a romantic relationship.
Lawyers for Trump and other defendants in the election case argue that Willis’ romance with a special prosecutor she hired creates a conflict of interest. They say Willis paid outside attorney Nathan Wade large amounts of money for his work and then unfairly profited from it when he paid for the two of them for vacations.
Willis and Wade have acknowledged the relationship, which they say ended last summer, but have argued it does not create any conflict and has no bearing on the case. The couple said they didn’t start dating until the spring of 2022, after Wade was hired, and split travel expenses.
Since the relationship was revealed in early January, the topic dominating the court’s time and the public’s attention has not been the crimes Trump and his allies claim they committed as they tried to overturn the election, but rather the intimate details of Willis and Wade’s relationship.
The hearings have sometimes veered into surreal territory: Atlanta’s mayor watches from the gallery as a former Georgia governor testifies, Willis’ father talks about keeping money in the house and details of romantic getaways.
Willis’ removal would throw into doubt the most expansive of the four criminal cases against Trump as the former president seeks a return to the White House. But it would not necessarily mean that the charges against him and fourteen others would be dropped.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee heard details about Willis and Wade’s personal lives and conflicting stories about when they started dating, but it remains unclear whether he will find that the relationship created a conflict of interest that merits remove the prosecutors from the case.
During a hearing before testimony, McAfee noted that under the law, “disqualification may occur if evidence is presented showing an actual conflict, or the appearance thereof.” He said he wanted testimony to investigate “whether a relationship existed, whether that relationship was romantic or non-romantic in nature, when it originated and whether it continues.”
Those questions were only relevant “in conjunction with the question of the existence and extent of any personal benefit arising from the relationship,” McAfee said.
Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis, who has closely followed the case, said much will depend on the standard McAfee uses: an actual conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict.
“The standard that I believe applies is a de facto conflict of interest, where the evidence produced demonstrates that Fani Willis benefited from the investigation and charging decisions she made against the 2020 election interference suspects,” he said.
Because Willis and Wade said the relationship ended before they filed charges in the election interference case, it is difficult to argue that the rights of Trump and his co-defendants were violated, Kreis said. But if McAfee applies an “appearance of conflict” standard, it could spell trouble for Willis and Wade “because the shadow has been cast over the whole case,” he said.
If Willis and her office are disqualified, an impartial board supporting Georgia prosecutors would be tasked with finding a new attorney to take over. That person could either move forward with some or all of the charges against Trump and others, or drop the case altogether.
Even if a new lawyer were to follow the path laid out by Willis, the inevitable delay seems likely to reduce the chances of the case being tried before the presidential election in November, when Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee.
A Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others in August on charges related to efforts to keep the Republican incumbent in power even though he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. Four people have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors, while Trump and 14 others have pleaded not guilty.
The relationship between Willis and Wade was first revealed in a motion filed by an attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, seeking to have the charges dismissed and block Willis and Wade and their offices from pursuing the case to continue further.
The motion claims Willis and Wade were already dating when she hired him as a special prosecutor for the election case in November 2021. Lawyers for Roman, Trump and several other defendants in the election case repeatedly tried to prove that the plaintiffs were at last month’s hearing. not being honest about when their relationship started.
Robin Yeartie, Willis’ former friend and co-worker, testified that she saw the couple hugging and kissing long before Willis hired Wade. But Wade’s former attorney and former divorce attorney, Terrence Bradley, who was expected to be a key witness for attorneys seeking to disqualify Willis, was at times evasive during testimony, saying he had “no direct knowledge of when the relationship began.”
Trump’s lawyers have submitted an analysis of location data from Wade’s cell phone that they say supports the claim that Willis and Wade started dating before he was hired. According to an investigator’s statement, Wade’s phone was located in the neighborhood south of Atlanta, where Willis lived at least 35 times in the first 11 months of 2021. Wade had stated that he had visited Willis’ apartment less than ten times before he was hired.