With the last Donald Trump criminal case on the line, Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, asked Georgia’s highest court on Wednesday to make the last call on whether the president-elect’s charges should be handed to a new prosecutor.
Georgia’s appeals court removed Willis from the case last month, citing the “appearance of impropriety” created by her relationship with former special prosecutor Nathan Wade. The district attorney’s filing with the Georgia supreme court argues that appearances are not good enough – and were not good enough for the trial court, which allowed Willis to continue the prosecution – and that the 2-1 appellate decision created a new standard for removing a prosecutor, something that should not be left to an appellate court, given the stakes.
“Either of these errors, standing alone, warrants review in a case of ‘great concern, gravity, [and] importance to the public’ such as this one”, the filing argues, citing previous decisions. “At the very least, if the standards for disqualification of public prosecutors or for review of a trial court’s ruling on disqualification are to change, this Court, and not the Court of Appeals, should be the authority to announce those changes.”
Trump, while president, is protected from state-level prosecutions. As it stands now, the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia will assign the case to a new prosecutor. That process is fraught: the politically sensitive nature of the charges means a district attorney elected by conservative voters outside of metro Atlanta may simply choose to drop the charges on the remaining 14 defendants rather than risk the backlash of their constituents and the vocal ire of a sitting president.
A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to help find enough votes to beat Biden. Four people have pleaded guilty. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty.
The Georgia case was one of four criminal cases brought last year against Trump. The justice department special counsel Jack Smith abandoned two federal prosecutions after Trump won the November election. The judge in Trump’s hush-money case in New York has scheduled a sentencing hearing for Friday, though Trump is trying to stop that.
Willis’s filing asks the Georgia high court to consider whether the lower appeals court was wrong to disqualify her “based solely upon an appearance of impropriety and absent a finding of an actual conflict of interest or forensic misconduct”. The state supreme court is also asked to weigh whether the court of appeals erred “in substituting the trial court’s discretion with its own” in this case.
“No Georgia court has ever disqualified a district attorney for the mere appearance of impropriety without the existence of an actual conflict of interest,” Willis’s filing says. “And no Georgia court has ever reversed a trial court’s order declining to disqualify a prosecutor based solely on an appearance of impropriety.”
