Donald Trump’s legal may not have successfully argued to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis dismissed from the case she filed against him, but it’s obvious following Friday’s ruling from Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee that the former president certainly got some good news.
McAfee ruled that plaintiffs did not sufficiently convince him to remove her, but he admonished the DA and told her she must fire her special prosecutor and lover, Nathan Wade, or remove herself and her entire office from the case.
Also, McAfee specifically objected to a speech delivered by Willis at an Atlanta church in January of this year when she asserted that she and Wade were under scrutiny due to their race.
“In these public and televised comments, the District Attorney complained that a Fulton County Commissioner ‘and so many others’ questioned her decision to hire SADA Wade. When referring to her detractors throughout the speech, she frequently utilized the plural ‘they.’ The State argues the speech was not aimed at any of the Defendants in this case. Maybe so. But maybe not. Therein lies the danger of public comment by a prosecuting attorney,” McAfee wrote.
“More at issue, instead of attributing the criticism to a criminal accused’s general aversion to being convicted and facing a prison sentence, the District Attorney ascribed the effort as motivated by ‘playing the race card,'” McAfee wrote. “She went on to frequently refer to SADA Wade as the ‘black man’ while her other unchallenged SADAs were labeled ‘one white woman’ and ‘one white man.’ The effect of this speech was to cast racial aspersions at an indicted Defendant’s decision to file this pretrial motion.”
The judge determined that Willis’s mention of “so many others” during her church speech created ambiguity regarding whom she was accusing of racial motivations, potentially jeopardizing the case, Fox News reported.
Others complained that McAfee ignored outright perjury allegedly committed by both Willis and Wade after both claimed their relationship began after she hired him as a prosecutor, while plaintiffs presented evidence during the hearing that indicated they had been seeing each other for more than a year before then.
Some legal experts have since called on Willis to step away from the case due to the appearances of impropriety, including MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, who called the ruling an almost “fatal blow” to Willis as a prosecutor.
“The key is how to go forward because clearly Wade is off, but I think this is such a huge body blow, almost a fatal blow to Fani Willis,” he said. “I think the way forward is she has to voluntarily recuse herself. I don’t know that she has it in her, but I think she has to say I’m going to appoint a chief assistant who is going to oversee this case. She clearly has no credibility with this judge,” he said.
