Fani Willis Can Go After Trump in Georgia on One Condition, Judge Says

Georgia Judge Scott McAfee refused Friday to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from her election interference case against Donald Trump, and said the trial can proceed as soon as Willis cuts ties with her special prosecutor.

Willis has been accused of an improper relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who has billed her office—and thus county taxpayers—for more than $728,000 in legal fees. McAfee said Willis must resolve the appearance of impropriety by either recusing herself or removing Wade from the case.

“The Court finds that the Defendants failed to meet their burden of proving that the District Attorney acquired an actual conflict of interest in this case through her personal relationship and recurring travels with her lead prosecutor,” McAfee wrote in the ruling. “The other alleged grounds for disqualification, including forensic misconduct, are also denied. However, the established record now highlights a significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team—an appearance that must be removed through the State’s selection of one of two options.”

McAfee chastised Willis for what he described as a “tremendous lapse in judgment” and suggested he was open to issuing a gag order against her and her team, preventing her from discussing Trump’s case in public.

While the ruling is a win for Willis, it still partly benefits Trump. Trump’s strategy has been to delay every single one of his legal battles as long as possible, in the hopes that he is reelected in November and can use his newfound presidential powers to shield himself from prosecution. The arguments for and against Willis, and now the decision she must make, have dragged out proceedings in the Georgia case, possibly delaying Trump’s day in court.

Trump and several of his co-defendants in their Georgia election interference case accused Willis of an improper relationship with Wade. Trump’s team says that Willis and Wade began dating in 2019, while the couple says they didn’t start seeing each other until 2022, after Willis hired Wade for the Georgia case.

Trump’s lawyers argued the romantic relationship provides a legal basis to disqualify Willis and throw out her case against Trump entirely. Trump’s legal team alleged that Willis and Wade had an “improper intimate personal relationship,” and accused the couple of taking extravagant vacations that Wade paid for in part by billing Willis’s office.

Willis denied the allegations. She says the relationship began in 2022, after Wade joined the case, and that they each paid their own share of the vacation bill. But the most important thing to remember, Willis has stressed, is that Trump and his co-defendants are currently on trial for “trying to steal an election.”

McAfee sided with Willis, particularly after Team Trump’s case fell apart in late February. Lawyers Ashleigh Merchant and Steve Sadow questioned Terrence Bradley to try to establish a timeline of the couple’s relationship. Bradley is Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney, and was meant to be a key witness in the case against Willis.

On the stand, Bradley repeatedly stated that he didn’t know a thing, including when Wade and Willis actually began dating, how the relationship began, and the trips they took together. Bradley repeated that he had only been speculating so many times that many people on social media began to point out that he seemed more like an office gossip than a credible witness.

After a full day hearing arguments related to two motions by Donald Trump’s legal teams to dismiss his classified documents case, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has denied one motion without prejudice.

That ruling was in relation to Team Trump’s claim that it wasn’t clear at the time Trump took the sensitive material if the act was illegal or not, claiming there was “unconstitutional vagueness.”

The argument had little sway with the Trump-appointed judge.

“Although the Motion raises various arguments warranting serious consideration, the Court ultimately determines, following lengthy oral argument, that resolution of the overall question presented depends too greatly on contested instructional questions about still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases as charged,” Cannon wrote in a two-page order, further noting that the issue of constitutional vagueness would be better brought up with “jury-instruction briefing and/or other appropriate motions.”

Her ruling, however, leaves wiggle room for Trump’s attorneys to potentially reargue the position down the line.

Even though the motion is off the table for now, Trump still has several other attempts to dismiss the trial in the works. The rest of Thursday was spent arguing another such motion on the basis that the classified documents could be considered “personal materials” rather than presidential under the Presidential Records Act—a defense that special counsel Jack Smith’s office roundly rejected. 

Smith’s office also claimed that Trump’s “personal records” argument was suggestive that the GOP presidential nominee believes he’s beyond reproach and above the law. Cannon herself expressed skepticism at leveraging the statute to dismiss the case outright, though ultimately she determined that the issue would be better left for a jury to decide.

“It’s difficult to see how this gets you to the dismissal of an indictment,” the judge told Trump’s attorney Thursday afternoon.

But the trial, which was originally set to begin on May 20, still does not have a renewed court date.

Legal analysts have worried that a strategy of continual delays could be the Trump-appointed judge’s way of surreptitiously dismissing the trial altogether.

“She has yet to issue a scheduling order setting a trial date,” MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin said on Morning Joe on Thursday. “I’m not a betting person, probably would make a miserable one, but the fact she set oral arguments on two motions to dismiss makes me think maybe she thinks she can get rid of this case without setting a trial date. That is frightening, given the gravity of the charges here and the evidence that supports those charges.”

Matt Gaetz has been subpoenaed to sit for a deposition in a civil defamation lawsuit, by lawyers representing a woman whom the Florida representative is accused of having sex with when she was just 17.

Lawyers for the woman, who is identified in the lawsuit by the initials “A.B.,” served Gaetz the subpoena on Thursday, ABC News reported, citing anonymous sources. The Republican congressman is slated to sit for deposition on April 5, and he will likely be asked questions about his alleged sexual activity, including whether he paid a minor for sex.

The subpoena is part of a larger defamation and racketeering suit brought last year by Gaetz’s friend, former Florida state Representative Chris Dorworth, against A.B. and Joel Greenberg, another former Gaetz associate. Dorworth accused Greenberg and A.B. of conspiring to falsely accuse Dorworth of “child sex trafficking, sex with a minor, prostitution, obstruction of justice, and an illegal ghost candidate scheme,” the lawsuit said.

Gaetz is not a party in the lawsuit, but the filing mentions him and the allegations against him several times. A.B.’s lawyers have subpoenaed him to establish that the woman was not Greenberg’s “partner in crime,” as Dorworth alleges.

Greenberg was convicted of sex trafficking following a Justice Department investigation, and in 2022, he was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. But he cooperated with the department when it launched an offshoot investigation into Gaetz in March 2021. Greenberg alleged that Gaetz had paid him via Venmo for sex with a 17-year-old girl, which the congressman has denied.

The federal investigation ended in February 2023 with no charges, in part because the Justice Department had credibility issues with Greenberg and another key witness. But the House Ethics Committee opened a probe into Gaetz in July for alleged misconduct including sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.

And Gaetz’s testimony could also prove particularly damning in the House Ethics investigation, which already does not seem to be going all that well for him. In February, a potential witness came forward alleging that she had had sex with the lawmaker at a drug-fueled party in 2021, when she was older than 21 years of age. The woman said she was paid to attend the event and has texts to prove her claims.

Donald Trump and his attorneys took another stab at attempting to wholly dismiss one of his criminal trials on Thursday—except this time the judge heard them out.

Trump stayed surprisingly mum as his attorneys argued two motions before Judge Aileen Cannon at a Florida courthouse. In one, they claimed that it wasn’t clear at the time Trump took the sensitive material if the act was illegal or not. In the other, they argued that the classified documents could be considered “personal materials” rather than presidential under the Presidential Records Act.

The latter defense was roundly rejected by special counsel Jack Smith’s office, which pointed to a transcript of Trump’s own words in which the former president acknowledged the records definitely were not personal.

Cannon, meanwhile, described the argument as “forceful.”

“Your arguments might have some force, again, as it comes to a trial defense,” Cannon said, though she noted that the end result would effectively gut the statute and allow future presidents to designate obviously presidential documents as personal.

Altogether, Cannon appeared skeptical of the defense and its ability to dismiss the case outright, ultimately deciding that the issue would be better left for a jury to decide.

“It’s difficult to see how this gets you to the dismissal of an indictment,” the judge told Trump’s attorney Thursday afternoon.

It’s possible that Trump’s legal team knew these arguments wouldn’t work, but his legal strategy in every case against him has been to delay trial proceedings.

The day ended without an official decision on the matter. Cannon said she would consider the motions “under advisement” and would issue a ruling “promptly.” Some experts worry Cannon is dragging out the trial start date as much as possible.

Prosecutors in Donald Trump’s New York hush-money case signaled that they would be open to a 30-day adjournment, hinting at a possible postponement just 11 days before his first criminal trial was set to begin.

On Thursday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office cited an enormous caseload for its reasoning, including more than 100,000 pages’ worth of documents issued by the U.S. Attorney’s office, 31,000 of which were released the day before, with another truckload expected sometime next week.

“Based on our initial review of yesterday’s production, those records appear to contain materials related to the subject matter of this case, including materials that the People requested from the USAO more than a year ago and that the USAO previously declined to provide,” wrote Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a three-page notice.

“Nonetheless, and although the People are prepared to proceed to trial on March 25, we do not oppose an adjournment in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials,” he concluded.

Trump’s team, meanwhile, had originally asked for a 90-day delay upon the reception of the initial 73,000 pages on March 4. Ultimately the decision will be up to Judge Juan Manuel Merchan, who has ignored the former president’s previous delay tactics, citing the lack of concrete trial dates for any of Trump’s other criminal cases.

It is currently unclear when Merchan might rule.

Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He’s facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Cohen, who is anticipated to be a star witness in this trial, has no doubts that the former president will be found guilty in this case.

“I can tell you from everything I know about it, he’s going to be found guilty,” Cohen, the former Trump lawyer, said during The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit in October.