Fani Willis and the Fulton County district attorney’s office can remain in charge of the prosecution of Donald Trump and his Republican co-defendants so long as Willis’s former lover resigns, presiding Judge Scott McAfee ruled Friday.
Within hours of the decision, Nathan Wade—now Willis’s ex—exited the case. While McAfee declared that half-measure solved the problem of an “appearance of impropriety,” the court’s reasoning established that true justice requires the removal of Willis and the entire Fulton County D.A.’s office.
Judge McAfee’s 23-page opinion followed a two-month spectacle that began when defendant Michael Roman filed a motion to dismiss the charges brought against him by Willis and to have the Fulton County D.A.’s office disqualified from prosecuting the case. Willis had charged Roman, a Trump 2020 campaign official, along with former President Donald Trump and 17 other defendants in a sprawling 98-page indictment that included some 41 different counts.
While Roman’s motion sought dismissal of the charges, the thrust of the court filing concerned the propriety of the Fulton County D.A.’s office prosecuting the case. It cited evidence that Willis had benefitted financially from the prosecution by hiring her then-lover, Wade, to serve as a special assistant district attorney on the case and then taking expensive vacations with him. Roman, joined by a handful of co-defendants, argued reaping these financial benefits constituted a conflict of interest that under Georgia law required disqualifying Fulton County D.A.’s office from the case.
In Friday’s opinion, Judge McAfee concluded “the Defendants failed to meet
