Georgia judge scolds Willis in scathing Trump decision

Georgia Judge Scott McAfee has provided a pathway for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) to move forward with criminally prosecuting former President Trump, but he also gave her a scolding reprimand over a romance with a top prosecutor.

McAfee said Trump’s election interference case can proceed with Willis at the helm so long as her once-romantic partner, special prosecutor Nathan Wade, steps aside.

But his 23-page decision went on to criticize the district attorney at multiple turns — both over the romance itself and her public comments — saying Willis created an appearance of a conflict.

“Our highest courts consistently remind us that prosecutors are held to a unique and exacting professional standard in light of their public responsibility — and their power,” McAfee wrote. “Every newly minted prosecutor should be instilled with the notion that she seeks justice over convictions and that she may strike hard blows but never foul ones.”

The district attorney’s office did not return a request for comment.

All the parties involved ultimately acknowledged a romance existed, but Trump’s defense sparred with Willis and Wade over their insistence that it began only after they started working together. The judge said he couldn’t conclusively establish when the relationship started.

Willis also claimed she split vacation expenses roughly evenly by reimbursing Wade with cash. With few avenues to verify or contradict the claim, McAfee said the defense hadn’t met its burden to disprove her testimony.

Fulton County Superior Judge Scott McAfee presides in court, Friday, March, 1, 2024, in Atlanta. The hearing is to determine whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be removed from the case because of a relationship with Nathan Wade, special prosecutor she hired in the election interference case against former President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Alex Slitz, Pool)

But while the judge didn’t outright call anyone a liar, he did note “reasonable questions” that Willis and Wade weren’t truthful when they testified under penalty of perjury.

“However, an odor of mendacity remains,” McAfee wrote. “The Court is not under an obligation to ferret out every instance of potential dishonesty from each witness or defendant ever presented in open court. Such an expectation would mean an end to the efficient disposition of criminal and civil proceedings.”

“Yet reasonable questions about whether the District Attorney and her hand-selected lead SADA testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it.”

And even if all of Willis and Wade’s claims were true, McAfee said it still created an appearance of a conflict.

“Even if the romantic relationship began after SADA Wade’s initial contract in November 2021, the District Attorney chose to continue supervising and paying Wade while maintaining such a relationship,” McAfee wrote.

“She further allowed the regular and loose exchange of money between them without any exact or verifiable measure of reconciliation,” he continued. “This lack of a confirmed financial split creates the possibility and appearance that the District Attorney benefited — albeit non-materially — from a contract whose award lay solely within her purview and policing.”

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McAfee’s ruling also went beyond the romance itself to take aim at public comments Willis has made about the controversy and the case against Trump’s 2020 election interference efforts in Georgia more broadly.

The judge criticized Willis’s “unorthodox decision” to give interviews to authors working on a book about her Trump prosecution, and he also slammed her speech at a January church service commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Before Willis’s office responded to the romance revelation in court papers, that speech marked her first public comments about the controversy. She implied race played a role in the criticism of her and Wade, who are both Black, saying people had not criticized two other special prosecutors hired for the case, who are both white.

Prosecutors later claimed the comment wasn’t aimed at any defendant, but the speech nonetheless led Trump and others to officially sign on to the disqualification push.

“The effect of this speech was to cast racial aspersions at an indicted Defendant’s decision to file this pretrial motion,” McAfee ruled.

The judge, however, did caution that the comments did not cross the line to the point where Willis must be disqualified or Trump is being denied a fair trial.

“But it was still legally improper. Providing this type of public comment creates dangerous waters for the District Attorney to wade further into,” the judge wrote.

“The time may well have arrived for an order preventing the State from mentioning the case in any public forum to prevent prejudicial pretrial publicity, but that is not the motion presently before the Court,” McAfee noted.