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A Georgia prosecutor and her office should be removed from a criminal case against Donald Trump over alleged interference in the 2020 election, an appeals court ruled on Thursday, the latest legal victory for the president-elect as he prepares to return to the White House.
The Georgia Court of Appeals agreed with Trump and other co-defendants — including former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff — that Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis had created a significant appearance of impropriety due to her personal relationship with Nathan Wade, an outside attorney hired to help the prosecution.
“While we recognise 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 wrote in its decision.
While the appeals court’s decision stopped short of ordering the indictment be dismissed, the decision deals a substantial blow to one of the most complex indictments brought against the now president-elect after he left the White House in 2020.
Willis in August 2023 brought the racketeering case against Trump and 18 others alleging a sweeping scheme to subvert Joe Biden’s election victory in the state in 2020.
Several defendants have already entered guilty pleas, including lawyer Sidney Powell, who alleged widespread voter fraud, and Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for Trump’s campaign.
But Trump and others have contested the charges, and last year homed in on Willis’s relationship with Wade, who was hired by the Fulton county district attorney’s office to help prosecute the case.
Michael Roman, a co-defendant and former Trump campaign official, asked the judge overseeing the case to disqualify Willis due to what he described as an “improper, clandestine personal relationship” with Wade, from which she allegedly benefited in the form of gifts and pricey vacations. During a heated public hearing earlier this year, Willis acknowledged having a relationship with Wade, but denied that it would require her to step aside.
“These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020,” Willis said during the hearing. “I’m not on trial no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”
The trial judge declined to disqualify Willis and her office or to dismiss the indictment, although, he wrote, “an odour of mendacity remains”.
Willis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Defendants who appealed against that order said that the trial court has been wrong and that the prosecution was tainted by what they alleged was a “significant appearance of impropriety”.
The appeals court agreed. Nevertheless, it declined to grant what it described as “the imposition of the extreme sanction of dismissal of the indictment”.
Georgia state officials would need to assign another prosecutor to take over the case — a process that could take significant time, further delaying any efforts to pursue the case while Trump retakes the presidency.
The Georgia case was one of four criminal indictments brought against Trump after he left office in 2020. Since then a series of rulings — and his election victory in November — have all but ended the immediate legal threats they once posed.
Two federal cases brought by US Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith have been dropped after Trump won the election, due to a DoJ policy that generally forbids prosecution of a sitting president.
A case brought by state prosecutors in Manhattan — over alleged “hush money” payments to an adult film actor — resulted in the historic first conviction of a former president earlier this year. However, sentencing has been indefinitely postponed after Trump’s election win.
Trump has also contended that a decision from the US Supreme Court finding broad immunity from criminal prosecution for the official acts of a president would argue against continuing the hush money case. A judge earlier this week denied his request to dismiss the case on those grounds, but an appeal is likely.