Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis must step aside from the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump or remove the special prosecutor with whom she had a romantic relationship before the case can proceed, the judge overseeing it has ruled.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said he did not conclude that Ms Willis’ relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade amounted to a conflict of interest. However, he said, it created an “appearance of impropriety” that infected the prosecution team.
“As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the district attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed,” the judge wrote.
“Put differently, an outsider could reasonably think that the district attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences. As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist.”
Ms Willis and Mr Wade testified at a hearing last month that they had engaged in a romantic relationship, but they rejected the idea that Ms Willis improperly benefited from it, as lawyers for Mr Trump and some of his co-defendants alleged.
Judge McAfee wrote that there was insufficient evidence that Ms Willis had a personal stake in the prosecution, but he said his finding “is by no means an indication that the court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner of the district attorney’s testimony during the evidentiary hearing”.
The judge said he believes that “Georgia law does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices – even repeatedly – and it is the trial court’s duty to confine itself to the relevant issues and applicable law properly brought before it”.
A lawyer for Mr Trump said the former president’s team respects the court’s decision but believes the judge “did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade”.
“We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place,” defence lawyer Steve Sadow said.
A lawyer for co-defendant Michael Roman asked Judge McAfee to dismiss the indictment and prevent Ms Willis and Mr Wade and their offices from continuing to prosecute the case.
The lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, alleged that Ms Willis paid Mr Wade large sums for his work and then improperly benefited from the prosecution of the case when Mr Wade used his earnings to pay for holidays for the two of them.
Ms Merchant said in a statement on Friday that while Mr Roman’s team maintains that the judge should have disqualified Ms Willis’s office entirely, the judge clearly agreed with the defence that there is a “risk to the future of this case” if Ms Willis “doesn’t quickly work to cure her conflict”.
Ms Willis had insisted that the relationship created no financial or personal conflict of interest that justified removing her office from the case.
She and Mr Wade both testified that their relationship began in the spring of 2022 and ended in the summer of 2023. They both said that Ms Willis either paid for things herself or used cash to reimburse Mr Wade for travel expenses.
The sprawling indictment charges Mr Trump and more than a dozen other defendants with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act, known as Rico.
The case uses a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers and other aides of a “criminal enterprise” to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Mr Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee for 2024, has denied doing anything wrong and pleaded not guilty.
Earlier this week, the judge dismissed some of the charges against Mr Trump.
The six challenged counts charged the defendants with soliciting public officers to violate their oaths. One count stemmed from a phone call Mr Trump made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, on January 2 2021, in which Mr Trump urged Mr Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” for him to win the election in the state.
Another of the dismissed counts accused Mr Trump of soliciting then-Georgia House speaker David Ralston to violate his oath of office by calling a special session of the legislature to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.
Judge McAfee said the counts did not allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of the violations.
