Georgia Judge Scott McAfee has given a strong indication that he is planning to disqualify Fulton County’s Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis from her politically motivated case against President Donald Trump.
During a Friday hearing, closing arguments were delivered by the defense lawyers and prosecution team to determine whether or not Willis and Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade should be disqualified from the criminal racketeering case they are leading against Trump and more than a dozen of his associates.
At the end of the hearing, presiding Judge McAfee declared that he would render a final decision on the matter in about two weeks, NBC News reported.
However, the timeframe suggests McAfee is planning to disqualify Willis from the case.
Legal experts have pointed out that, if McAfee was planning to allow Willis to stay in the case, his decision would come much sooner.
Willis and Wade stand accused of improperly benefiting financially from the case and of conflicts of interest over a previously undisclosed romantic relationship between the pair that defense lawyers asserted has tainted the case with an overt appearance of impropriety.
USA Today reported that, following the hours-long hearing on Friday, Judge McAfee indicated that he would need to spend some time looking over various factual disputes and legal issues before announcing his decision on whether or not to disqualify DA Willis and Wade from the case.
“There are several legal issues to sort through, several factual determinations that I have to make, and those aren’t ones I can make at this moment,” McAfee said.
“So, I will be taking the time to make sure that I give this case the full consideration it’s due.
“I hope to have an answer for everyone within the next two weeks.”
Judge Scott McAfee signs off in his own words.
You don’t need two weeks if you are keeping her. You need two weeks if you are disqualifying her, and need to write a detailed opinion.
I hear ‘give me time to disqualify her.’pic.twitter.com/gF7MdLpr13
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 2, 2024
If Willis were to be disqualified from the case, per NBC News, so too would her entire office.
In this event, a new district attorney and a team of prosecutors would need to be brought in to take over the sprawling case.
The case accuses President Trump and others of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
Though it seems unlikely that the underlying criminal charges would also be dismissed along with a disqualification of Willis and Wade, given the complexity of the case, that new prosecutorial team would almost need to go back to the beginning and start over from scratch, if not obtain new indictments from a grand jury, if the case was deemed sufficiently tainted.
As such, the case would almost certainly fail to advance before the 2024 election, as the Democrats had hoped.
USA Today covered the Friday hearing and noted that the various defense attorneys went first in making their closing arguments for why DA Willis and Wade ought to be disqualified and removed from the case.
That included reiterating their arguments that Willis and Wade had lied about when their romantic relationship began.
The get-Trump prosecutors are accused of starting their affair prior to Wade being hired in late 2021.
Willis is accused of improperly benefiting financially from Wade using the taxpayer funds he was paid to finance multiple luxury vacations around and outside of the U.S.
All of that and more created an “appearance of impropriety” and “conflicts of interest,” lesser examples of which had resulted in other attorneys being disqualified from other cases in the state.
A state prosecutor, meanwhile, attacked the defense attorneys repeatedly and denounced the accusations as being “absurd” and “desperate,” and further argued that the supposed evidence was based on “lies” from the attorneys and the witnesses who were called in to testify.
While it has yet to be confirmed whether Judge McAfee will decide to disqualify DA Willis and Wade, Newsweek reported that a pair of legal analysts, neither of whom would be considered friendly to President Trump, suggested that disqualification was certainly a possibility.
If they stay on the case, any remaining “credibility” would be severely tainted due to the overt appearance of impropriety on the part of the prosecutors, the experts note.
CBS News legal analyst Rikki Klieman suggested that Willis’ behavior, in terms of her now-admitted relationship with Wade, was “stunningly reckless,” even if not necessarily illegal.
Meanwhile, leftist former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN that Willis displayed “poor judgment.”
Honig added that the judge would have to make a “really close call” on whether or not she should remain on the case.
