Alex Slitz/AP, Pool
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been disqualified from the Georgia case against Donald Trump. The ruling, issued Thursday morning by a panel of the state’s appellate court, deals what could be a fatal blow to the one remaining bid to hold the incoming president criminally liable for trying to steal the 2020 election.
Willis began the year as a Democratic superstar who had already secured several guilty pleas against Trump’s co-defendants in the sprawling Georgia RICO case—all while being bombarded with racist and misogynistic threats and abuse.
But her legal efforts were derailed when lawyers for one of the remaining defendants, Trump aide Mike Roman, uncovered a romantic relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, the outside attorney she’d hired to manage the case. Among other allegations, the defendants alleged that Willis had a financial conflict of interest.
After days of publicly televised, salacious hearings, trial Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Willis could continue leading the prosecution so long as Wade agreed to step down, which he quickly did. McAfee’s opinion was, nonetheless, scathing, raising serious concerns about Willis’ and Wade’s conduct. As I wrote at the time:
McAfee rejected the defendants’ argument that the DA’s romantic relationship…amounted to an “actual conflict of interest” under which Willis had supposedly benefited financially. Even so, McAfee found that there was still a “significant appearance of impropriety”…He wrote that while the defense had failed to prove that Wade and Willis had been romantically involved before Wade’s hiring, “the District Attorney chose to continue supervising and paying Wade while maintaining such a relationship.” McAfee opined that Wade’s “patently unpersuasive explanation” for inaccurate statements he had made in his own divorce case “indicates a willingness on his part to wrongly conceal his relationship with the District Attorney.” All this could leave Georgians to “reasonably think that the District Attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences” were Wade to continue on the prosecution team, the judge found.
“An odor of mendacity remains,” wrote McAfee, prompting “reasonable questions” about whether Willis and Wade “testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship.”
McAfee’s order, the judge wrote, “is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner” of Willis’ testimony during a hearing on the matter. Georgia law, he explained, simply did not “permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices—even repeatedly.” The judge went on to say that televised remarks Willis had recently made about the case were “legally improper,” and he threatened to bar prosecutors from further discussing the case in public.
But the appeals court on Thursday disagreed—not with McAfee’s criticism of Willis, but with his legal conclusion that she could continue prosecuting Trump and the other defendants. “This is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” the court’s majority wrote in a 2-1 decision. Under Georgia law, this means the entire Fulton County DA’s office will be removed from the case.
While the court declined to dismiss the indictment altogether, in practice, the case seems unlikely to move forward unless the ruling is overturned on subsequent appeal.
As the judges noted, this isn’t the first time Willis has been disqualified from overseeing a matter related to the plot to steal the 2020 election. While she was still investigating the case, she hosted a 2022 political fundraiser for a candidate running for lieutenant governor against Republican Burt Jones, whom she subsequently named as a target of the investigation. A different judge, Robert McBurney, disqualified Willis from investigating or prosecuting Jones. “It’s a ‘What are you thinking’ moment,” McBurney said at the time, according to CNN. “The optics are horrific.”
In September 2024, the Georgia prosecutor who leads a state panel responsible for reassigning the case announced that Jones would not be charged. The Trump prosecution appears destined for a similar fate.