A Fulton county judge began hearing closing arguments on Friday afternoon in a three-day evidentiary hearing to determine whether the district attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from handling the election interference against Donald Trump because of her romantic relationship with a deputy handling the case.
The hearing has offered a dramatic deviation from the racketeering case against the former US president and 14 remaining co-defendants for trying to overturn the election in Georgia.
The matter kicked off in January when Michael Roman, a Republican operative and one of the defendants in the case, filed a motion claiming Willis financially benefitted from the case because of a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a top prosecutor in the case. Trump and several other defendants later joined the request.
Willis and Wade both admitted to a romantic relationship, but both said it only began after he was hired on 1 November 2021. They both testified about vacations they had taken together and revealed personal details about a romantic relationship that they say only began in 2022, after he was hired, and ended last summer.
A star witness who was supposed to undercut their claims ultimately failed to produce meaningful evidence.
On the surface, the question at the heart of the matter was whether Willis had a conflict of interest because of her relationship with Wade. But over several hours of testimony, lawyers for Roman, Trump and the other defendants did not produce any concrete evidence showing that she did.
Willis testified that she repaid Wade in cash for any travel they had taken together – a claim that drew skepticism from defense lawyers, but no evidence to prove otherwise.
“This was a disqualification hearing that quickly denigrated into a daytime soap opera,” said J Tom Morgan, a former district attorney in DeKalb county, a Fulton county neighbor. “Have they proven a conflict of interest, where this all started, absolutely not.”
Lawyers may use Friday’s hearing to try and introduce additional evidence, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, including cellphone records that defense lawyers say undercut Wade’s claims that he never spent the night at Willis’s condo.
It’s not exactly clear what the standard Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the case, will use to determine whether Willis should be disqualified. Georgia law allows for a prosecutor to be disqualified if there is an actual conflict of interest. Experts say state law has long established this high bar to clear and the defendants in the case have not done so.
But McAfee has suggested that defense lawyers may not need to prove an actual conflict, but merely the appearance of one. “I think it’s clear that disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” he said at a recent hearing.
Robert CI McBurney, a different Fulton county judge who was overseeing the case at an earlier stage, disqualified Willis from investigating a fake elector after she appeared at a fundraiser for his political rival. That appearance, he said, would lead to questions about her motives in every step of the case, which was enough to disqualify her.
A disqualification would upend the case and delay it past the 2024 election. The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, a state agency, would have the sole discretion to reassign the case to another prosecutor, and there’s no timeline for how long that could take.
But even if Willis and Wade aren’t disqualified, defense attorneys have used the hearings to damage the two prosecutors’ judgment and credibility in the public’s eye.
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By bringing to light something they failed to disclose on their own, they’ve seeded the impression that the two were trying to conceal something.
While it may not stand up legally, defense lawyers have also showed text messages from an associate of Nathan Wade’s in which he says the affair “absolutely” began before he was hired (the witness, Terrence Bradley, later testified he was only speculating). They also put a former friend of Willis on the stand that said she was certain the relationship began before Wade was hired. And they have also sought to introduce cellphone evidence that could undermine Wade’s claims he never spent the night at Willis’s condo before the relationship began.
“I was standing in the grocery store and I would guess that the two women in front of me have not really paid much attention to this case or the politics,” Morgan said. “But they start talking about the text messages … it’s more interesting. People who haven’t paid any attention to this all of a sudden are paying attention to it.”
Morgan also said the timing or existence of a relationship between Willis and Wade wasn’t really relevant to whether there was a conflict of interest. But during the hearing, the two prosecutors had boxed themselves in to a story that the romantic relationship only began after Wade was hired.
Any evidence that comes to light questioning that undermines their credibility and could lead to accusations of perjury. Willis herself has said with certainty that the relationship definitely did not begin until after Wade was hired, but also acknowledged that it was difficult to say exactly when a romantic relationship begins.
“It’s not like when you’re in grade school and you send a little letter saying, will you be my girlfriend? and you check it,” she said during one point in the hearing.
More than anything, Trump’s team has succeeded in muddying the waters of the case and taking the attention off his efforts to undermine democracy. Willis underscores that when she testified during the first day of the hearing.
“You’re confused. You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial,” she said.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
