The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has been disqualified from prosecuting Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in light of her relationship with her top deputy on the case, the Georgia state court of appeals ruled on Thursday.
The 2-1 decision to remove Willis – and overturn the ruling by the presiding judge that allowed her to remain on the case as long as the deputy, Nathan Wade, resigned – likely signals the death knell for the final criminal case still active against Trump.
“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 31-page opinion.
“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.
“While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety is generally 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.”
Hours after the decision, the district attorney’s office filed a notice announcing its intention to appeal the ruling to the Georgia supreme court. But Trump’s return to the White House will cause proceedings to be paused for the duration of his presidency, suggesting the case may not continue in its current form.
Trump was charged alongside more than a dozen associates last year with racketeering over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As part of their bid to dismiss the case, Trump and his co-defendants alleged Willis’s relationship meant she should be recused from the case.
The initial effort to have Willis disqualified failed after the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee decided, following days of contentious evidentiary hearings, that Trump and his co-defendants did not prove an actual conflict of interest.
McAfee nonetheless ruled that Willis’s relationship with Wade gave the appearance of a conflict, which needed to be addressed. For Willis to continue bringing the case, he ordered, Wade needed to resign from the district attorney’s office. Wade resigned later that evening.
Willis vehemently denied wrongdoing when she testified at the evidentiary hearings last February, rebutting accusations that her relationship with Wade affected the charges and scope of the case and insisting that there was no conflict of interest.
The district attorney testified that her relationship with Wade started months after she hired him to work on the case as a special prosecutor and ended in summer of 2023, around the time that a grand jury in Atlanta returned the racketeering indictment against Trump.
Willis also sought to undercut allegations that she had engaged in a sort of kickback scheme through Wade’s hiring in which she benefited from his earnings, as alleged by defense lawyers for a co-defendant of Trump, Michael Roman. She testified that she reimbursed any expenses he incurred.
The allegations first surfaced last January in a motion filed by Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, who complained about a potential conflict of interest arising from what she described as “self-dealing” between Willis and Wade as a result of their then unconfirmed romantic relationship.
Roman’s filing, in essence, accused Willis of engaging in a quasi-kickback scheme, in which Wade paid for joint vacations to Florida and California using earnings of more than $650,000 from working on the Trump case. The filing also alleged the relationship had started before he was hired.
