Fani Willis immediately appeals removal from Trump RICO case
Left: Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, June 22, 2024 (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP). Right: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis arrives during a hearing on the Georgia election interference case, Friday, March, 1, 2024, in Atlanta (AP Photo/Alex Slitz, Pool).
The Georgia Court of Appeals on Thursday morning ruled that the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office and DA Fani Willis must be removed from the state’s felony prosecution of Donald Trump in a bombshell order that could mark the end of the final criminal case against the president-elect. Willis wasted no time in immediately notifying the appellate court that her office intended to petition the state Supreme Court to review the disqualification.
“You are hereby notified that it is the intention of the State of Georgia, appellee, to petition the Supreme Court of Georgia for a writ of certiorari to review Division 2 of this Honorable Court’s December 19, 2024 decision in Appellants’ favor in the above-styled cases regarding disqualification,” her office wrote only hours after the ruling was issued.
Trump and his 18 co-defendants had been angling to have Willis and her office removed from the case since January — initially over allegations that her romantic relationship with now-former special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest due to pecuniary motives.
A three-judge panel on the appeals court agreed in a 2-1 ruling, holding that the trial court erred in allowing Willis and her office to remain on the case after concluding that her relationship with Wade resulted in the “significant appearance of impropriety.”
“After carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office,” Judge Trenton Brown wrote in the majority opinion that was joined by Judge Todd Markle.
The case out of Fulton County centers on accusations that Trump and 18 others conspired to overturn his 2020 election loss in the Peach State. The indictment alleges actions such as then-President Trump beseeching then-Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes so that Trump would carry the battleground state and also trying to get Republican state lawmakers to appoint a different slate of college electors that would vote in Trump’s favor.
After the relationship between Willis and Wade came to light, several of the defendants filed court documents seeking to have Wade, Willis, and her office disqualified from the case.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee in March partially granted the request, ordering that either Wade or Willis had to be removed, but not both, despite finding that a reasonable person could think Willis was “not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences.”
The defendants were granted an immediate appeal of McAfee’s ruling and the appellate panel agreed that the trial court’s solution to the problem was inadequate and “did not cure the already existing appearance of impropriety and the ‘odor of mendacity.””
“The remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring,” the appellate court wrote. “While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, 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 appellate court noted that prosecutors failed to file a cross-appeal seeking to reverse McAfee’s finding of the appearance of impropriety, so the panel did not address whether there was sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
Willis and her office were “wholly disqualified” from the case but the panel ultimately rejected a request from the defendants seeking to have the indictment dismissed.
“While this is the rare case in which DA Willis and her office must be disqualified due to a significant appearance of impropriety, we cannot conclude that the record also supports the imposition of the extreme sanction of dismissal of the indictment under the appropriate standard,” the panel concluded.
Willis’ disqualification comes one day after her office filed court documents imploring the appeals court to reject Trump’s request to dismiss his indictment based on lack of jurisdiction and presidential immunity.
