Fani Willis’ Fight to Keep Her Job Is Over

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ fight to remain on the prosecution in former President Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case is over.

After the end of closing arguments, Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case, said he would make a decision on disqualifying her within the next two weeks. Trump’s attorneys told the judge they had multiple new witness testimonies that had just come to light that morning, but McAfee refused to admit them because the defense hadn’t had a chance to examine the evidence.

McAfee signaled to Trump’s attorneys that he may not need any more evidence to make his decision on whether or not to disqualify Willis from the case. Trump and his co-defendants in the Fulton County case have pushed to have the district attorney and her office removed from the prosecution over misconduct allegations stemming from her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

“I’d like to hear more of how some of the legal arguments apply to what has already been presented, and it may already be possible for me to make a decision without those needing to be material to that decision,” McAfee said.

Willis and Wade’s relationship was first revealed in a January court filing from co-defendant Michael Roman’s attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who argued that their relationship was a conflict of interest that should lead to Willis’ removal from the case and for the charges against her client to be dropped. Willis and Wade have maintained that their relationship did not begin until after Wade’s appointment to the case.

Willis appeared in the courtroom Friday, arriving when the state began its final arguments. The last time she was in the courtroom, she defended her relationship on the stand.

On Friday, John Merchant, one of Roman’s attorney’s, argued that just “an appearance of a conflict of interest” between Willis and Wade was enough to disqualify her from the case.

“I want to make clear to the court that – the law in Georgia suggests and is very clear that we can demonstrate an appearance of a conflict of interest and that is sufficient,” Merchant told the court.

“The reason why the appearance of a conflict is so prescient here is because if this court allows this kind of behavior to go on and allows DAs across state by its order to engage in these kinds of activities, the entire public confidence in the system will be shot,” he added. “And the integrity of the system will be undermined.”

But Adam Abbate, an attorney for the Fulton County district attorney’s office, argued that there needed to be an “actual conflict of interest” in order for there to be grounds to remove Willis from the election interference case.

“Speculation, injecture, things of that sort, assumptions, are not enough for anything to arise to an actual conflict,” Abbate argued.