Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis issued a response Friday to allegations of impropriety during her prosecution of former President Donald Trump in Georgia, admitting to engaging in an affair with another prosecutor on the case but calling on a state judge to dismiss the motions against her without a hearing.
After weeks of silence, Willis did not deny having a personal relationship with Nathan Wade, a married man who is getting a divorce from his wife of 26 years. But Willis said their relationship did not cross the legal threshold for her to be disqualified from the Georgia election interference case.
“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this Court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” Willis stated in the filing.
Wade wrote in an affidavit attached to the filing that he developed a “personal relationship” with Willis in 2022 after he was hired to prosecute the racketeering case.
Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant wrote about the allegations in a Jan. 8 complaint to Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case. McAfee had already ordered Willis to respond to the allegations by Feb. 2 in court filings and has scheduled a Feb. 15 hearing to consider the complaint. Additionally, Merchant filed a lawsuit against Willis on Wednesday that seeks to subpoena her, Wade, and others in the district attorney’s office.
But Willis is hoping now that McAfee will completely cancel the Feb. 15 hearing based on the “meritless” allegations of a conflict of interest. The district attorney laid out several bullet points attempting to discredit Roman’s claims.
Mike Roman, one of 18 allies of Trump indicted by a Fulton County grand jury for allegedly conspiring to subvert the county’s election results, dropped a bombshell complaint last month alleging Willis and her hired special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, engaged in an “improper, clandestine” relationship that raised questions about whether the pair misused thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds.
Willis said that Roman’s motion, which has since been joined by Trump an another defendant, has “no merit and…should be summarily denied without an evidentiary hearing,” she wrote in the court filing, which marked the first time she’s directly addressed the allegations since Roman’s mid-January complaint.
“District Attorney Willis has no financial conflict of interest that constitutes a legal basis for disqualification; District Attorney Willis has no personal conflict of interest that justifies her disqualification personally or that of the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office; the attacks on Special Prosecutor Wade’s qualifications are factually inaccurate, unsupported, and malicious, in addition to providing no basis whatsoever to dismiss the indictment or disqualify Special Prosecutor Wade; District Attorney Willis has made no public statements that warrant disqualification or judicial inquiry; and criticism of the process utilized to appoint and compensate the special prosecutors in this case demonstrates basic misunderstandings of rudimentary county and state regulations, and provides no legal basis for dismissal of the indictment or disqualification of any member of the prosecution,” Willis argued, according to a copy of the filing obtained by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
This is a developing story and will be updated.