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A Georgia appeals court has disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from heading the state’s RICO prosecution against Donald Trump and several of his allies over their alleged attempts to interfere with Georgia’ 2020 election results.
The decision is another blow to Georgia’s efforts to try the president-elect for his role in the attempted manipulation of the vote. The prosecution was already in peril given the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling earlier this year, and controversy over an alleged improper relationship between Willis and former Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade.
In March, Georgia Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled that the allegations and evidence presented by Trump co-defendant Mike Roman in his request for Willis to be removed from the case was “legally insufficient to support a finding of an actual conflict of interest. However, the appearance of impropriety remains.” McAfee allowed Willis to remain on the case under the condition that Wade step down from his own involvement in the prosecution.
Roman — along with several co-defendants in the case, including Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Jeffrey Clark — appealed the decision.
On Thursday, the appellate court wrote in its ruling that “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 […] While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is 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.”
The court further added that while they believed Willis should be disqualified from the case, there was no evidence supporting the defendants’ request for an outright dismissal of the case against them.
Notably, Judge Ben Land dissented from his colleagues. “I am particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court to make and converted it to something else entirely,” he wrote. “Wwe have no authority to reverse the trial court’s denial of a motion to disqualify. None.”
Land noted that the appeals court had sided with McAfee’s finding that the defendants had failed to present sufficient evidence that Willis’ personal relationship with Wade presented a conflict of interest to the prosecution, or “that she had a personal stake in the conviction of any defendant.”
“Every day in courtrooms all over this state, trial judges solemnly and diligently fulfill their constitutional obligations and perform a vital and indispensable public service,” he wrote. “We should not lightly interfere with their work or weaken their discretion by imposing our will because we don’t like the result. Because I am convinced that is what the majority has done in this case, I respectfully dissent.”
The Georgia case is the last ongoing criminal prosecution against Trump in the aftermath of his November election victory. Last month, the Justice Department moved to dissolve its two cases against the president-elect — one focused on federal election interference, and the second on his alleged mishandling of classified documents. In New York, Trump’s sentencing over his conviction on charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels has been delayed indefinitely. Earlier this week,Judge Juan Merchan ruled that despite Trump’s election and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision this summer, the conviction stands.
