Judge rules Fani Willis can stay on Trump’s Georgia election case

Fulton County Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade, Fulton County Superior Judge Scott McAfee and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Judge Scott McAfee is?allowing?Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to continue?on the election subversion case?against Donald Trump – but she was forced to lose special prosecutor Nathan Wade after an?embarrassing two?months that?put Willis and Wade on trial themselves over their romantic relationship.

It’s a technical legal win for Willis since she will have the option to continue, along with her full office, prosecuting Trump and 14 others. But?McAfee’s 23-page opinion?was a scathing rebuke of the district attorney’s?actions,?and it remains unclear if Trump will face trial before November on his actions after the 2020 presidential election.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Read the full takeaways from the ruling and previous proceedings

This post has been updated with Wade’s resignation.

Judge Juan Merchan at his office in New York County Criminal Court in October 2022.

The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan has agreed to delay the start of the trial, further upending the legal calendar for the former president and current GOP nominee.?

The trial had been scheduled to begin on March 25.

The news comes as a judge in Georgia ruled that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will be allowed to continue to prosecute an election interference case against Trump.

Former President Donald Trump responded to the resignation of prosecutor Nathan Wade in?a Truth Social post, calling it “BIG STUFF.”

Trump went on to claim that Wade was hired “to persecute TRUMP” and “for purposes of Election Interference.”

The clock will soon begin ticking for potential appeals to be filed over Judge Scott McAfee’s ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to continue overseeing Trump’s election interference case.

Both Willis and the defense attorneys who mounted the disqualification effort could – for different reasons – decide to pursue an appeal of the ruling.

Under Georgia law, either side must first ask McAfee to grant them permission to appeal his ruling and he must respond within the next 10 days. That window begins Saturday, putting the deadline at March 25.

Should the judge agree to grant what’s known as a “certificate of immediate review,” the party pursuing the appeal then has another 10 days to ask the Georgia Court of Appeals to take up their appeal. Once that request is in, the appeals court has 45 days to decide whether to take the case.

A decision from the Court of Appeals could be appealed further to the Supreme Court of Georgia, which also has discretion over which cases it hears.

Key context: Trump’s attorney has already signaled that he plans to pursue an appeal. The former president’s primary strategy in his criminal cases has been to delay trials past the November election. Already, he’s successfully pushed back the trial in the election subversion case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, DC.?

The post has been updated with more background on the appeal process.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis holds a press conference in the Fulton County Government Center after a grand jury voted to indict former US President Donald Trump and 18 others on August 14, 2023, in Atlanta.?

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis accepted Nathan Wade’s resignation in a letter released Friday afternoon and thanked the former special prosecutor for leading the probe into Donald Trump.

The post has been updated with more details from Willis’ statement.

Prosecutor Nathan Wade attends a hearing in the case of the State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump at the Fulton County Courthouse on February 27 in Atlanta.

Special prosecutor Nathan Wade has stepped down after a Fulton County judge rebuked him and District Attorney Fani Willis in a ruling that allowed Willis to remain on the 2020 election interference case if Wade was removed.

This is what he said in his letter of resignation:

Fulton County Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade speaks during a hearing on February 15 in Atlanta.

Nathan Wade, the embattled Georgia special prosecutor tasked with leading the case against Donald Trump and his allies, has stepped down in the wake of a scathing ruling from the Fulton County judge overseeing the case.

Attorney Ashleigh Merchant speaks during a hearing on February 15, in Atlanta.

The defense attorney who first raised allegations about impropriety by District Attorney Fani Willis and called for her to be disqualified called Friday’s ruling “a vindication” that the information presented by the defense was true — even though she believes the court should have removed Willis from the case.

Merchant represents Trump co-defendant Mike Roman, a former official in his 2020 campaign.?

“While we do not agree that the courts suggested cure is adequate in response to the egregious conduct by the district attorney, we look forward to the district attorney’s response to the demands by the court. We will continue to fight for our client,” Merchant said.

Remember: The judge ruled Willis?can continue to prosecute?the 2020 election interference case, but only if special prosecutor Nathan Wade is removed.

The judge said neither side conclusively demonstrated whether Willis’ romantic relationship with Wade started before or after his hiring — which was central to the debate over Merchant’s claims of a conflict of interest — but that Willis had exercised poor judgment regardless.

Defense attorneys seeking to derail the Georgia election subversion case made a range of arguments for disqualifying District Attorney Fani Willis. Here’s how Judge Scott McAfee addressed them.

On allegations of a financial conflict of interest: McAfee said Donald Trump and others failed to prove an?actual conflict of interest. “The Court finds that the Defendants failed to meet their burden of proving that the District Attorney acquired an actual conflict of interest in this case through her personal relationship and recurring travels with her lead prosecutor,” McAfee wrote.?

McAfee goes on to say there is an?appearance?of impropriety “that infects the current structure of the prosecution team — an appearance that must be removed through the State’s selection of one of two options.”

Those two options are either Willis steps down from the case or Nathan Wade withdraws.?

On other alleged grounds for disqualification: McAfee denied the other arguments for disqualifying Willis, including allegedly failing to follow financial disclosure requirements in Fulton County and alleged payment and hiring violations.

McAfee also denied efforts to disqualify Willis based on alleged “forensic misconduct” stemming from her response at an Atlanta-area church in January to criticism over her hiring Wade.

Judge Scott McAfee said in his ruling Friday it’s possible Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her lead prosecutor Nathan Wade testified “untruthfully” about when their relationship started.

The timing of the romance became a sticking point throughout the hearings on disqualifying Willis from the 2020 Georgia election interference case. Defense attorneys argued she hired Wade while they were romantically involved, despite the pair’s testimony that the relationship began months later.

McAfee said “neither side was able to conclusively establish by a preponderance of the evidence when the relationship evolved into a romantic one.”

“Reasonable questions” that remain about the timing “underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it,” the judge added.

McAfee also noted that, even if the relationship started after Willis hired Wade in November 2021, the “District Attorney chose to continue supervising and paying Wade while maintaining such a relationship.”

“As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the District Attorney,” McAfee said, “or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed.”

In this August 2023 photo, lawyer Brian Tevis leaves the Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse in Atlanta.

A defense attorney who previously represented Rudy Giuliani called Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee’s ruling today “well-reasoned,” noting the judge arrived at “probably the right result.”

In his ruling, McAfee noted that District Attorney Fani Willis can continue to prosecute the 2020 election interference case if special prosecutor Nathan Wade is removed. Tevis said he expects that to happen.

“The order says if the DA wants to stay in, Wade has to be out. I expect that’s what Willis will choose to do, because it would be a nightmare to transfer this case and have another office start a year behind without institutional knowledge of the case,” he said.

Former President Donald Trump and his co-defendants surfaced allegations of a?relationship between Willis and Wade, whom she hired in 2021 to join the prosecution team. Trump and his co-defendants wanted the judge to disqualify Willis’ team from the case – or throw out the charges – because of a possible conflict of interest.

But Tevis said he didn’t expect “McAfee to kick the entire office off the case.”

“In my mind, the evidence clearly established a pattern of poor decision-making, but did not clearly show a scheme to reap some financial incentive,” he said.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can?stay on and prosecute?the Georgia 2020 election interference racketeering case, a judge ruled Friday — but not without admonishing Willis for “making bad choices” in her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, and criticizing her fiery testimony last month as “unprofessional.”

Former US Attorney Michael J. Moore told CNN that Willis emerges from the ruling potentially facing headwinds in arguing before Judge Scott McAfee going forward.

“The judge’s order, while allowing the DA to remain on the case (provided she removes Wade), is in no way an exoneration of the DA’s conduct,” Moore said.

“No lawyer wants to have a judge find that their sworn statements made in court were unprofessional or not sufficiently credible for the court to take them at face value.?It is through that lens that the judge will view future representations made by the DA.”

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig agreed the district attorney did not escape unscathed.

“While the judge makes several scalding findings towards the DA — ‘tremendous lapse in judgment’ and ‘odor of mendacity,’ among others — he ultimately found the defendants did not produce clear enough proof of an actual, specific financial conflict of interest,” Honig said.

CNN’s Jason Morris and Dan Berman contributed reporting to this post.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testifies during a hearing on the Georgia election interference case on February 15 in Atlanta.

In his repeated rebukes of the district attorney’s actions, Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee said Fani Willis’s comments at an Atlanta-area church in January about the case were “legally improper” and warned of the potential for a future?gag?order against Willis.

McAfee, however, concluded the comments were not enough to dismiss the case.

During the speech earlier this year, Willis defended attacks on her lead prosecutor Nathan Wade, suggesting he was being targeted because he was a “Black man.” Willis said in court filings afterward that she was not referring to criticism from the defendants in her election subversion case, including Donald Trump, when she made those comments.

McAfee said the comments were far enough removed from a jury trial that it would not “establish a permanent taint of the jury pool” and said, “The Court cannot find that this speech crossed the line to the point where the Defendants have been denied the opportunity for a fundamentally fair trial or that it requires the District Attorney’s disqualification.”

On the potential for a?gag?order, the judge said, “the time may well have arrived for an order preventing the State from mentioning the case in any public forum to prevent prejudicial publicity, but that is not the motion presently before the Court.”

Attorney Steve Sadow, former President Donald Trump's lead attorney in the case, speaks in court at the Fulton County Courthouse on March 1 in Atlanta.

Steve Sadow, the lead defense counsel for former President Donald Trump in the Georgia 2020 election interference case, slammed Judge Scott McAfee’s decision to allow Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the case.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks at a press conference next to prosecutor Nathan Wade after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against former president Donald Trump and his allies in their attempt to overturn the state's 2020 election results, in Atlanta.

During testimony last month, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis?described the end of her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she hired to help prosecute the 2020 election interference case against former President Donald Trump.

Both Wade and Willis said the relationship ended in summer 2023. Willis implied that the physical component ended earlier in the summer, but that the two had a “tough conversation” that fully ended things afterward.

Willis seemed to signal that there was no love lost between her and Wade, with the district attorney revealing at one point that Wade had made sexist remarks during their relationship that appeared to sully her view of him.

“We would have brutal arguments about the fact that I am your equal,” she told the judge?about?her?conversations with Wade.

Judge Scott McAfee presides in court during a hearing in the case of the State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump at the Fulton County Courthouse on March 1, in Atlanta.?

Judge Scott McAfee said that while Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis kept no records of the payments she says she made to her lead prosecutor to reimburse him for vacation travel the two took together, her claim that she paid him back in cash “was not so incredible as to be inherently unbelievable.”

Willis, the judge noted, provided no ledger of her alleged payments to lead prosecutor Nathan Wade “and the District Attorney may well have received a net?benefit of several hundred dollars.”

Despite this, McAfee said “the Defendants have not presented sufficient evidence indicating that the expenses were not ‘roughly divided evenly.’”

Some background: Throughout her testimony, Willis said she paid Wade cash for trips they took together, saying her use of cash explained why there is no paper trail documenting reciprocal payments to Wade.

During her testimony, Willis?was peppered with questions about her claim that she reimbursed Wade in?cash?for trips to Aruba, the Bahamas and Belize, as well as for wine tastings, chocolates and caviar in Napa Valley.

Wade also testified that?Willis?paid?cash?for excursions on at least one vacation and paid him back for plane flights and other travel. “She paid for the excursions so the expenses sort of balanced out,” he said.

Fulton County Superior Judge Scott McAfee on February 15, in Atlanta.

Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee was highly critical of District Attorney Fani Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade’s relationship, describing it as being the result of “bad choices.”

The judge described Willis’ fiery testimony last month during one of the hearings over whether to disqualify her as “unprofessional.”

He then added: “This finding is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner of the District Attorney’s testimony during the evidentiary hearing,” McAfee wrote.

Fulton County Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade testifies on February 15, in Atlanta.

Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee said special prosecutor Nathan Wade should step down if District Attorney Fani Willis remains on the case in order to dispel the “cloud of impropriety” created by their romantic relationship.

“The Court therefore concludes that the prosecution of this case cannot proceed until the State selects one of two options,” McAfee wrote. “The District Attorney may choose to step aside, along with the whole of her office, and refer the prosecution to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council for reassignment. Alternatively, SADA Wade can withdraw, allowing the District Attorney, the Defendants, and the public to move forward without his presence or remuneration distracting from and potentially compromising the merits of this case.”

A Fulton County judge ruled District Attorney Fani Willis can stay on and prosecute the Georgia 2020 election interference racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and 14 of his co-defendants.

Judge Scott McAfee said, however, that Willis would have to remove special prosecutor Nathan Wade from the case in order for her and her office to remain.

We’re still going through McAfee’s ruling. Read his decision here:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis looks on during a hearing in the case of the State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump at the Fulton County Courthouse on March 1, in Atlanta.?

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can stay on and prosecute the Georgia 2020 election interference racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and 14 of his co-defendants, Judge Scott McAfee ruled Friday.

McAfee said, however, that Willis would have to remove special prosecutor Nathan Wade from the case in order for her and her office to remain.

CNN has reached out to the district attorney’s office.

Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a hearing in the case of State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump at the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta on February 15.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis reemerged in the spotlight last year after her office?charged 19 co-defendants, including Donald Trump, regarding efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

She campaigned on the premise of restoring integrity to the Fulton County district attorney’s office, was elected after ousting six-term incumbent Paul Howard and inherited a stack of backlogged cases. Within a month, her office was firing off letters to Georgia officials asking them to preserve documents related to attempts to influence the state’s 2020 election.

Besides leading the election subversion probe, Willis has also brought anti-corruption indictments against Grammy-winning rapper?Young Thug?and his associates. The district attorney has spoken fondly of RICO — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — and has used it in unorthodox ways to bring charges against school officials and musicians, including Young Thug.

From California by way of Washington, DC, Willis obtained her undergraduate degree from Howard University in 1992 and graduated from Emory School of Law in 1996,?according to her biography. Her name, Fani, is Swahili and means “prosperous,” and her father was a lawyer and Black Panther.

According to a?South Atlanta Magazine?profile, she worked in the private sector for five years before becoming assistant district attorney for Fulton County in 2001.

Read more?about Fulton County’s first female district attorney.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is sworn in to testify during a hearing in the case of the State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump at the Fulton County Courthouse on February 15 in Atlanta.

The Georgia election subversion case against?Donald Trump?and 14 of his allies took a stunning turn on February 15 when two top prosecutors testified under oath about their romantic relationship at a hearing?triggered by allegations?of self-dealing that have the potential to derail the entire effort.

The all-day hearing escalated steadily, culminating with?Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis?taking the witness stand for a combative brawl with defense attorneys that drew several rebukes from the judge.

Here are takeaways from the hearing that was at times jaw-dropping, awkward and strikingly personal:

Read more from Willis’ testimony.

Donald Trump is the first former president in US history to face criminal charges, and with his third presidential bid under way for 2024, the stakes are high for both him and the country.

The Georgia election subversion case is one of four criminal cases against Trump. An Atlanta-based grand jury on August 14, 2023, indicted Donald Trump and 18 others on state charges stemming from their alleged efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 electoral defeat. Four people have pleaded guilty.

The charges, brought in a sweeping investigation led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, cover some of the most overt efforts by the former president and his allies to meddle in the 2020 presidential election.

Unlike the election subversion charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, Willis’ case will be insulated if Trump is reelected in 2024; he will not be able to pardon himself or his allies of any state law convictions, nor will he be able to order the state-level prosecutors to withdraw the charges. Trump?pleaded not guilty?via court filing, waiving an in-court appearance as allowed by Georgia law.

On March 13, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismissed six of the 41 counts from the indictment, including three that applied to Trump.

The partial dismissal does not mean that the entire indictment has been dismissed. McAfee’s?partial dismissal?left most of the sprawling racketeering indictment intact.