District Attorney Fani Willis, in her first public comments since avoiding being disqualified in the Georgia election fraud prosecution of Donald Trump, said she is ready to bring the former president and 14 co-defendants to trial well before the Nov. 5 election.
“The train is coming,” Willis said in a weekend interview with CNN.
Prominent Georgia defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, who first disclosed Willis’ romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade back in a bombshell Jan. 8 court filing, says not so fast.
“We’re ready,” Merchant said Monday in response to Willis’ comments at a charity Easter egg hunt Saturday in Atlanta.
Where the Trump election case stands now
In their Jan. 8 court motion, Roman and Merchant alleged that Willis created a professional conflict of interest by hiring the private lawyer Wade to oversee the sweeping election case and having an affair with him. They also alleged Willis had committed financial misconduct by going on vacations with Wade using some of the more than $650,000 he earned overseeing the case.
Both Willis and Wade denied those allegations and said they committed no wrongdoing. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled March 15 that Willis could stay in charge of the election fraud case but only if Wade stepped down. He did so hours later.
Days later, McAfee allowed Trump and at least eight other co-defendants to take an emergency appeal of his ruling to the Georgia state Court of Appeals. The defense lawyers, including Merchant and Steven Sadow for Trump, not only want Willis and her entire office thrown off the case, but the charges dismissed altogether, as some of them petitioned in their initial court motions back in January. In her exclusive interview with CNN on Saturday, Willis acknowledged that the election racketeering case against Trump and the others was clouded by more than two months of legal wrangling over the motion to disqualify her. That included explosive − and unproven − allegations by Roman’s defense team and others that Willis and Wade began their affair long before she hired him to oversee the case in November 2021 and then lied about it under oath in order to preserve the case and their lead roles in it.
McAfee held nearly three full days of evidentiary hearings the issues before issuing his much-awaited ruling that defense lawyers had failed to prove that Willis had a conflict of interest. But the Republican-appointed judge sharply criticized Willis, saying she had created the “significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team” by having a romantic relationship with Wade. McAfee also said Willis and Wade had severely damaged their credibility while on the witness stand, and that “an odor of mendacity remains” due to “reasonable questions” over whether they had “testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship.”
