By Jan Wolfe, Cameron McWhirter and Mariah Timms
ATLANTA -- Fani Willis, the Democratic Georgia prosecutor who indicted former President Donald Trump on election-interference-related charges, can remain on the case if she dismisses the deputy with whom she had a romantic relationship, a judge said on Friday.
The now-ended romantic relationship with Willis's chief legal adviser Nathan Wade -- whom her office paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for legal services since 2021 -- created an "appearance of impropriety," Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said in a filing.
It marked a partial win for defense lawyers who raised conflict-of-interest concerns, but stopped short of giving them the outright victory they had hoped for: getting Willis, and the case itself, dismissed.
A spokesman for Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The romantic relationship between Willis and Wade became public in January when Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, filed a motion seeking disqualification of Willis on grounds she and Wade benefited financially from his contract to work on the case. The filing alleged the pair took cruises and other vacations together, something Willis and Wade later confirmed but said didn't amount to a conflict because they generally divided the costs roughly evenly. Roman alleged their relationship could have influenced prosecutorial decisions.
Lawyers including those for Trump and former Georgia Republican Party Chair David Shafer later joined the motion to dismiss the case and disqualify Willis.
"[T]he established record now highlights a significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team," McAfee wrote.
Defense lawyers wanted McAfee to use an appearance of impropriety alone as grounds to dismiss Willis. But McAfee, in his decision, applied a different standard, one that was harder for defense lawyers to meet: that there was an actual conflict of interest.
McAfee concluded the defense didn't present sufficient evidence to prove that Willis has benefited financially from the case and her relationship with Wade. And he ruled that Wade's removal would clear the appearance of impropriety.
But, the judge added: "This finding is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment."
Steve Sadow, Trump's lead counsel in the Georgia case, said Friday his legal team would use all legal options available to get the case dismissed.
It wasn't immediately clear if Roman would seek to appeal McAfee's decision.
While Friday's ruling represented a reprieve from the immediate threat of disqualification for Willis, "her troubles are far from over," said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State College of Law professor who has been following the case.
"Even if DA Willis wisely takes the option offered to her by Judge McAfee of avoiding her own disqualification by ending Nathan Wade's involvement with the Trump prosecution," Cunningham said, "the risk of her removal and resulting disqualification of her entire office still looms."
Any appeal would further delay setting a trial date in the case.
Some Willis allies had suggested for weeks Wade should step away from the case, calling his continued involvement a distraction.
"I'm confident that he will do so, so that the DA may remain and this case can get to trial as quickly as possible this summer," said Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Obama administration.
McAfee focused part of his ruling on a hearing about the disqualification motion during which -- in surprise moves -- Wade and Willis took the stand for hours of combative testimony. Willis and Wade had sought to defend their relationship against sharp questioning from defense lawyers. McAfee concluded in his ruling that the hearing raised "reasonable questions about whether the District Attorney and her hand-selected lead [Wade] testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship."
Of their testimony, McAfee wrote, "an odor of mendacity remains."
McAfee also criticized Willis for delivering a speech at a Black church, where she attacked criticism of Wade's qualifications as being racially motivated. That speech was given before she responded in court to the Roman filing.
McAfee called her public statements "legally improper."
"The time may well have arrived for an order preventing the State from mentioning the case in any public forum," he wrote.
In August 2023, Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted on racketeering charges alleging they engaged in a criminal conspiracy to subvert the 2020 presidential election. All defendants pleaded not guilty; four have since taken plea deals.
--Alex Leary contributed to this article.
Write to Jan Wolfe at jan.wolfe@wsj.com, Cameron McWhirter at Cameron.McWhirter@wsj.com and Mariah Timms at mariah.timms@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 15, 2024 11:11 ET (15:11 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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