Stuck between a 20-ton rock and a Georgia hard place, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee attempted to split the baby in his ruling about District Attorney Fani Willis’s conduct of the election-related charges against President Donald Trump and others. McAfee will allow Willis to continue her unprecedented prosecution of Trump — but only if Willis fires Nathan Wade, the subordinate special prosecutor with whom she had an affair.

Rendering the ruling weirder and perhaps more flagrantly political are the countless concessions that Willis is incompetent and indeed corrupt that McAfee makes throughout his decision. McAfee admits that the Trump prosecution is “encumbered by an appearance of impropriety” not just because of the power imbalance between Wade and Willis, but also because Willis “chose to continue supervising and paying Wade” after she hired him and she “further allowed the regular and loose exchange of money between them without any exact or verifiable measure of reconciliation.”

At one point, McAfee outright insists that Willis and Wade lied about when their relationship began. Although McAfee says that “neither side was able to conclusively establish by a preponderance of evidence when the relationship evolved into a romantic one,” he damningly notes that “an odor of mendacity remains.”

The whole decision is riddled with contradictions such as these. Though McAfee clearly condemns Willis’s attempt “to cast racial aspersions at [Trump’s] decision to file this pretrial motion” (in other words, race-baiting), McAfee ends up throwing his hands in the air, saying that “the case is too far removed from jury selection to establish a permanent taint of the jury pool.”

Imagine the voir dire here: It is the autumn of 2024 in perhaps the most crucial swing state in the country, and we are made to believe that every adult in Fulton County won’t have been tainted by Willis’s theatrics. It is indeed preposterous.

“Without sufficient evidence that the District Attorney acquired a personal stake in the prosecution, or that her financial arrangements had any impact on the case, the Defendants’ claims of an actual conflict must be denied,” McAfee concludes. “This finding is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgement or the unprofessional manner of the District Attorner’s testimony during the evidentiary hearing.”

If Wade does not completely exit the case, McAfee at least demands that Willis and her office relinquish the prosecution. But in a legal proceeding so unprecedented, why take the chance? Especially when McAfee himself seems so uncomfortable with Willis’s conduct?

“Georgia law does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices — even repeatedly — and it is the trial court’s duty to confine itself to the relevant issues and applicable law properly brought before it,” McAfee says.

Alas, McAfee seems to be writing for a wider audience (a national one) that cares little about the “relevant issues” and all too much about the defendant on the other side of the equation.