Former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade said Willis “dispelled any kickback scheme that would disqualify her.”
NEWSWEEK
Over the weekend, legal experts voiced their belief that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will not be disqualified from her election interference case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia.
Willis’ office has taken on the task of prosecuting Trump and 18 co-defendants after they were indicted in August 2023 for allegedly conspiring to overturn Joe Biden‘s 2020 election victory in Georgia. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has claimed the case is politically motivated as he is the GOP frontrunner in the 2024 presidential election.
In an attempt to disqualify Willis and her team and get his charges dropped, Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign staffer and one of the co-defendants in the case, brought forward allegations of a personal relationship between Willis and special prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade, in early January. Roman, meanwhile, has pleaded not guilty in the case.
Willis and Wade later confirmed that they had a relationship, but said neither of them financially benefited from the coupling, which ended in the summer of 2023. This week, the pair took the witness stand during a series of hearings led by Judge Scott McAfee to determine if the district attorney should be disqualified from the case.
Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney under the Barack Obama administration and MSNBC legal analyst, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday, “Fani Willis made a terrible decision to date Nathan Wade, and that may bring ethics issues for her, but her testimony dispelled any kickback scheme that would disqualify her. Nothing about this affects the fair trial rights of Trump and co-defendants.”
While Richard W. Painter, a law professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, wrote on X on Saturday that “the evidence does not meet Georgia’s legal standard for disqualifying Ms. Willis,” he added that “it would be best for the case that Willis voluntarily resign and that Wade also not continue to work on the case.”
Anna Bower, a courts correspondent at the legal news site Lawfare who has been covering the Fulton County case against Trump, told MSNBC’s Katie Phang on Saturday that “it is really important for people to understand what” Georgia’s legal standard to disqualify a prosecutor is, adding “it is if there is an actual conflict. It’s not enough to show an appearance of impropriety under Georgia law.”
“What the defense has to show here to meet their burden of disqualifying Fani Willis means that they have to show that her relationship with Nathan Wade caused or gave rise to a personal or financial interest that gave her a kind of interest or incentive in convicting Trump and others,” Bower said.
She continued: “What they needed to show here this week is at the very least either Wade and Willis comingled their assets or shared some type of income or they needed to show that these vacations that they took together that Wade allegedly paid for, it was something that was not reimbursed and that therefore Fani Willis benefited from those vacations financially and it kind of amounted to a kickback scheme of sorts. I do not think, however, that the defense ultimately met that burden.”
During her testimony, Willis said she would reimburse Wade in cash for any shared travel expenses, adding, “I don’t need anybody to foot my bills.”
Newsweek reached out to Willis’ office and Trump’s campaign via email for comment. It also reached out to Roman’s lawyer via online form for comment.
When Newsweek reached out to Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow on Sunday asking if he would like to provide a comment, he replied: “No thank you.”
Meanwhile, Georgia lawyer Doug Weinstein said that he was “disappointed” in Willis in an X post on Sunday.
“I respect her and her office, and putting the Trump trial at risk in this fashion, even if she did nothing wrong, demonstrates poor judgment. Regardless of how the judge rules, it is difficult to deny the appearance of impropriety,” he wrote.
