Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has no legal conflict of interest and can continue to prosecute Donald Trump and his co-defendants in her sweeping RICO and election interference case, a judge ruled Friday, with one condition.
Georgia Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled Willis must cure an “appearance of impropriety” related to her romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors on the Trump case, PBS reports.
“In sum,” McAfee wrote, as The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell notes, Willis “has not in any way acted in conformance with the theory that she arranged a financial scheme to enrich herself (or endear herself to Wade) by extending the duration of this prosecution or engaging in excessive litigation.”
Legal experts, praising the decision, say Willis is likely to remove that prosecutor, Special Assistant District Attorney Wade Davis, to satisfy McAfee’s ruling. If she does not, she and her entire office must step aside from prosecuting the case.
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MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin called it “an easy choice and a victory for Willis, but not without a rebuke of Willis’s ‘lapse of judgment.’”
“Judge McAfee just gave Fani Willis the best ruling he could. Wade is going to go,” said professor of law and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis.
“This was the obvious solution all along,” wrote attorney George Conway. “If the DA had acknowledged the facts more quickly and then said that, to eliminate any issue, Wade is stepping aside, everyone would have been spared a lot of trouble—including and especially the DA—and a lot of time would not have been wasted in satellite circus litigation about the affair.”
Professor of law, MSNBC legal contributor, and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance says Judge McAfee “adopted the approach” she, CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, and Richard Painter “advocated for when this news first broke, permitting Willis to remain on the case, only if Nathan Wade steps aside to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”
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She points to this deep dive at Just Security, published back in January.
Lawfare’s Anna Bower notes Judge McAfee called out the “significant appearance of impropriety”
The record, Judge McAfee writes, establishes that there is a “significant appearance of impropriety” that infects the current structure of the prosecution team–an appearance that “must be removed” by one of two options: Either Willis steps aside, or Wade withdraws from the case. pic.twitter.com/8KPnCnb6eU
— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) March 15, 2024
National security attorney Brad Moss offered this conclusion: “I am trying to imagine something scarier right now than being prosecuted by an angry Fani Willis.”