A Fulton County judge will hear closing arguments Friday afternoon during a three-day evidentiary hearing to determine whether District Attorney Fannie Willis should be prosecuted for her romantic relationship with a deputy handling the case. Disqualified from handling election interference against Donald Trump.
The hearing was a far cry from the racketeering case against the former U.S. president and 14 remaining co-defendants in their attempt to overturn Georgia’s election.
The matter began in January, when Michael Roman, one of the defendants in the case and a Republican operative, filed a motion claiming that Willis was charged because of his romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the top prosecutor in the case. and obtain financial benefits from the case. Trump and several other defendants later joined the plea.
Willis and Wade both admitted to being in a relationship, but both said it began after he was hired on Nov. 1, 2021. They both testified about their vacations together and revealed personal details of a relationship they said began in 2022, after he was hired, and ended last summer.
A star witness who was supposed to undermine their claims ultimately failed to provide meaningful evidence.
On the face of it, the central question is whether Willis has a conflict of interest because of his relationship with Wade. But in hours of testimony, lawyers for Roman, Trump and the other defendants offered no concrete evidence that she had done so.
Willis testified that she paid cash for all the trips Wade took — a claim that raised suspicion among defense attorneys but no evidence to prove otherwise.
“This was a disqualification hearing that quickly turned into a daytime soap opera,” said J Tom Morgan, the former district attorney in DeKalb County, Fulton County’s neighbor. “Do they prove there was a conflict of interest where this all started, absolutely not.”
It’s unclear what criteria Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the case, will use to determine whether Willis should be disqualified. Georgia law allows for the disqualification of a prosecutor if there is an actual conflict of interest. Experts say that state law already stipulates this high threshold, but the defendant in this case did not do so.
But McPhee said defense attorneys may not need to prove an actual conflict, just an apparent conflict. “I think it’s clear that if there’s evidence of an actual conflict or the appearance of a conflict, there could be disqualification,” he told a recent hearing.
Another Fulton County judge, Robert C.I. McBurney, who oversaw the case early on, removed Willis from investigating one after Willis showed up at a fundraiser for his political opponents. Qualifications of false electors. He said such an appearance would raise questions about her motives at every step of the case and be enough to disqualify her.
Disqualification would overturn the case and delay it until after the 2024 election. The Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys Council, a state agency, has sole discretion to reassign a case to another prosecutor and did not specify how long that might take.
But even if Willis and Wade are not disqualified, defense attorneys will use the hearings to undermine both prosecutors’ judgment and credibility in the public eye.
By revealing things that they themselves failed to reveal, they gave the impression that the two were trying to hide something.
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While this may not be legally defensible, defense attorneys also showed text messages from one of Nathan Wade’s co-workers in which he said the incident “definitely” occurred before he was hired. It started (witness Terrence Bradley later confirmed he was just guessing). They also called a former friend of Willis’s to testify, who said she was convinced the relationship began before Wade was hired. They also sought to produce cellphone evidence to support Wade’s claim that he had never spent a night at Willis’ apartment before their relationship began.
“I was standing in the grocery store, and I guess the two women in front of me weren’t really paying attention to the case or the politics,” Morgan said. “But they started talking about the text messages… which was more interesting. People who hadn’t been paying attention suddenly started paying attention.”
Morgan also said the timing or existence of the relationship between Willis and Wade was not really relevant to whether there was a conflict of interest. But during the hearing, the two prosecutors became entangled in the story that the romantic relationship began after Wade was hired.
Any evidence brought into question would undermine its credibility and could lead to charges of perjury. Willis herself has said with certainty that the relationship must have begun after Wade was hired, but she also admitted that it’s difficult to say exactly when the relationship began.
“It’s not like when you were in elementary school and you sent a little letter saying, will you be my girlfriend? And then you checked,” she said at one point during the hearing.
Most importantly, Trump’s team succeeded in muddying the case and diverting attention from his efforts to undermine democracy. Willis emphasized this point during his testimony on the first day of the hearing.
“You’re confused. You thought I was on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal the 2020 election. No matter how hard you try to get me to stand trial, I’m not going to stand trial,” she said.
