OAN Staff James Meyers
9:47 AM – Thursday, December 19, 2024
The Georgia Court of Appeals has disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her entire office from her 2020 election interference case against President-elect Donald Trump.
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In a surprise ruling on Thursday, a three-judge panel from the second division of Georgia’s appellate court denied a request to throw out the entire case but granted a motion to get rid of Willis, and her team who led the indictment against Trump, and 18 other co-defendants last year.
In a 12-page order, Judge Trenton Brown stated that Trump and eight of his co-defendants had “numerous grounds” to appeal the case after a lower court “imposed an improper remedy” despite concluding that Willis’ prosecution had a “significant appearance of impropriety.”
The ruling also cited Willi’s decision to hire and pay her former-lover Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor, taking him on lavish trips and allowing him to continuously bill her office for his work on the Trump case.
“While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety is generally 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,” Brown and the other appellate jurists claimed.
Wade ended up leaving that role in March after an Atlanta judge determined that Willis could only continue overseeing the prosecution if he stepped down. However, Wade and Willis claimed that their love fling happened before he was hired to manage the case.
Despite their claims at the time, witnesses came forward saying their timeline didn’t add up. Wade ended up separating from his wife of 26 years the same day he was announced as special prosecutor in 2021, causing concerns about when the timeline of their romance actually began.
Wade was accused of giving out $654,000 he pulled in for his work on the racketeering case for lavish gifts and getaways with Willis, his boss at the time. That raised eyes about the extent to which Willis benefited financially from the person she hired with taxpayer dollars.
The two traveled together to Miami and North Carolina, but Willis said that they switched off paying for those vacations.
Trump and others being prosecuted in the 2020 Georgia election tampering case pushed ahead with a petition to knock Willis off the case as well.
“In granting President Trump an overwhelming mandate, the American People have demanded an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all the Witch Hunts against him. We look forward to uniting our country as President Trump Makes America Great Again,” Trump’s communication director Steve Cheung said in a statement after the ruling.
In November, special counsel Jack Smith withdrew his four-count 2020 election supervision indictment against Trump and also ended efforts to revive the 40-count Mar-a-Lago document case.
Trump was facing 10 counts in the Fulton County cases and pleaded not guilty.
However, Trump is not completely done with the case as a whole.
“We cannot conclude that the record also supports the imposition of the extreme sanction of dismissal of the indictment,” the court concluded in its ruling.
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