Judge Rules Fani Willis Can Stay on Trump Case, Her Ex-Boyfriend Exits

Fani Willis under fire. Photo: Alex Slitz-Pool/Getty Images

After a long detour triggered by revelations of a past romantic relationship between Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and lead prosecutor Nathan Wade, the judge in the Donald Trump racketeering case involving efforts to flip the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia issued a sort of split-the-baby ruling. After weeks of testimony and deliberations, Superior Court of Fulton County judge Scott McAfee found no clearly established conflict of interest that would disqualify Willis from prosecuting the case. But he did rebuke her for a “tremendous lapse in judgment” in entering into a romantic relationship with Wade and for “unprofessional conduct” in her fiery testimony in the hearing on the motion to disqualify her. Because her actions created an “appearance of impropriety,” McAfee ordered her to drop Wade from the case or recuse herself. A few hours later Wade did indeed withdraw from the prosecutorial team and will presumably return to private practice.

Willis will now be able to move toward a trial (even though McAfee earlier this week dismissed six of the charges against Trump and his cronies, he left the central racketeering charges in place). The trial’s further delay was the chief prize the defendants won via their failed attempt to disqualify Willis and Wade and perhaps kill the case entirely.

McAfee predictably determined that the defendants never proved the money that changed hands between Willis and Wade during multiple vacations they took together represented some sort of financial inducement to prosecute the case or that the couple were lying under oath about when their romantic relationship began. But the judge did say the shared vacations created an “odor of mendacity” and that the Willis-Wade relationship itself, no matter when it began or ended, distracted from the case and undermined public confidence in the criminal-justice system. McAfee also went out of his way to reprimand Willis for her attacks on the defendants and their attorneys in the disqualification hearing and for her remarks from the pulpit of an Atlanta church in January dismissing criticism of her and of Wade as racially motivated.

It has escaped no one’s attention that both Willis and McAfee will face the voters of Fulton County on May 12, Willis in a Democratic primary election with the general election pending in November and McAfee in a nonpartisan election with a runoff if neither he nor his two challengers win a majority of the vote. The 34-year-old judge (a former employee of Willis’s in the DA’s office) was appointed to the bench by Republican governor Brian Kemp, and thanks to the Trump case, his Federalist Society and College Republicans background has been widely publicized. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, Willis is in better shape politically than McAfee. But for the moment, he’s the authority figure, and he has given her critics some rich material while refusing to give Trump & Co. her dismissal. If the trial itself (which the prosecution wanted to begin in August, but it’s now very unlikely to get underway before Trump’s own public judgment in November) is half as dramatic as the preliminary skirmishing, it will draw a lot of eyeballs.