The situation surrounding Fani Willis is becoming more volatile. The left-wing district attorney, who is currently trying to take down Donald Trump with RICO charges, admitted in a court filing on Friday to having an affair with one of the prosecutors she contracted to work the case.
READ: Fani Willis Is in Full Panic Mode
That is the first official admission from Willis (and Wade), and it came as part of a 176-page filing that argued the affair did not prejudice the case.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) admitted she had a personal relationship with an outside prosecutor she appointed to manage the election interference case against former president Donald Trump and his allies but denied claims that the relationship had tainted the proceedings.
In a 176-page court filing on Friday, Willis called the claims against her “meritless” and “salacious.” She asked a judge to reject motions from Trump and other co-defendants that seek to disqualify her and her office from the case and to do so without a hearing. Willis denied claims of misconduct and said there was no evidence that the relationship between her and special prosecutor Nathan Wade had prejudiced the case.
Willis’s response came more than three weeks after Mike Roman, one of Trump’s remaining 14 co-defendants in the criminal case and a former high-ranking campaign aide during the 2020 election, alleged in a court filing that Willis was engaged in a “personal, romantic relationship” with Wade, whose firm has been paid more than $653,000 by the district attorney’s office since he was tapped as an outside prosecutor on the case in November 2021.
The judge overseeing Willis' prosecution has already ordered a mid-February hearing to see all the evidence of possible misconduct. Records from Wade's divorce and witness testimony are expected to be presented. Whether any of that moves the judge to find Willis unfit to continue is a big unknown. I would assume it's more likely another prosecutor will take her place if she's disqualified.
With that said, the damage is already done. As the Post article notes, many of her allies already fear her bad decision-making and scandals have "imperiled" the case against Trump. Unless she disappears, and it doesn't look like she will do that willingly, the public narrative will continue to center around her misconduct. Her sheer hubris and shamelessness may have scuttled her chances of getting a conviction.
This is why you don't try to take down a former president if you don't have your house in order. Eventually, everything comes to light, and with what we now know, Willis was incredibly ill-prepared to pursue this case. Not only is the legal theory specious, but she has now become a distraction, and any prosecutor who has become a distraction is dead weight on a case.
Willis is a political actor who has no respect for her position. Her actions, including firing a whistleblower who reported possible illegal conduct, show that clearly. Her desperate attempts to shift blame and obfuscate from her scandals aren't going to work. She wanted the spotlight, and now she's going to get it good and bright.
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