Fani Willis Disqualified from Trump Georgia Case, Setting up for Chaos

Georgia’s Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis Thursday from prosecuting the 2020 election interference case against Donald Trump and his co-defendants over a conflict of interest. 

Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants filed an application with Georgia’s appeals court in March, asking it to reconsider Judge Scott McAfee decision to allow Willis to continue to prosecute the case after she was accused of having an improper relationship with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. McAfee had allowed her to stay on the grounds that she cut ties with Wade.

“After carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office,” Judge E. Trention Brown wrote in the appeals court majority opinion. 

“The remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.”

“While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” Brown wrote. 

The court affirmed, however, that the indictment against Trump should not be dismissed. 

“The appellants contend that the trial court erred in denying their motions to dismiss the indictment. The State responds that the appellants have failed to show that the trial court erred in finding that the appellants had not shown ‘that [their] due process rights have been violated or that the issues involved prejudiced [them] in any way,’” Brown wrote. 

He noted that dismissing the indictment would be an “extreme sanction” and should only be used for “unlawful government conduct.”

The Fulton County district attorney’s office indicted Trump, alongside 18 others, in 2023 on felony charges in a large-scale racketeering case for attempting to interfere in Georgia’s state election. It’s unclear what exactly Willis’s disqualification will mean for the case.

Trump’s lawyers had argued in a legal filing two weeks ago that the case ought to be tossed “well before” he was sworn in as president, and that both the state and district court “lack jurisdiction to entertain any further criminal process against President Trump as the continued indictment and prosecution of President Trump by the State of Georgia are unconstitutional.”

Fulton County Chief Senior Assistant District Attorney F. McDonald Wakeford hit back at the lawyers’ request, arguing that the “Appellant does not specify or articulate how the appeal—or indeed, any other aspect of this case—will constitutionally impede or interfere with his duties once he assumes office,” implying that the case would proceed regardless of Trump’s return to the White House.  

This story has been updated.

While Republicans are quickly falling in line over Elon Musk’s missives, Democrats are pointing out that the unelected billionaire bureaucrat may have actually eclipsed Donald Trump.

The president-elect didn’t deliver his opinion on the proposed continuing resolution until the end of the day Wednesday, when he demanded via his vassal JD Vance that Republicans raise the debt ceiling. Meanwhile Musk had already been ranting about it for hours online, threatening to unseat any Republicans who supported it.

During an appearance Wednesday night on MSNBC’s The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, Representative Dan Goldman pointed out that the president-elect was clearly no longer calling the shots.

“It’s not Donald Trump asking for this, it’s very clearly President Elon Musk asking for this. The fact that Donald Trump has been completely AWOL during these negotiations to the point where only after Elon Musk publicly tweets about his displeasure about this budget deal, all of a sudden, Donald Trump, chief of staff to Elon Musk, comes trotting in and blows up the deal,” Goldman said.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders also called out the unelected billionaire for trying to steer the government into a shutdown.

“The US Congress this week came to an agreement to fund our government. Elon Musk, who became $200 BILLION richer since Trump was elected, objected,” Sanders wrote on X. “Are Republicans beholden to the American people? Or President Musk? This is oligarchy at work.”

Wisconsin Representative Gwen Moore asked her X followers, “Remind me who elected Elon Musk.”

Representative Don Beyer shared a screenshot of Musk agreeing with a post calling for the government to be shut down until Trump’s inauguration. “The richest man in the world says he wants to shut down the government, forcing millions of American workers—including our troops—to go without pay through the holidays,” wrote the Virginia Democrat. “Republicans are following his orders. This is insane.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has come under heavy pressure to scrap the lengthy bill, and has been reportedly considering a “clean” bill that would not include many of the provisions that Democrats had fought for, such as $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers and $100 billion for disaster relief.

Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern posted a selfie Johnson had previously taken with a smiling Musk and Trump.

“Johnson negotiated w/ Democrats to keep the government open, then went back on his word (abandoning help for farmers & disaster victims) because, apparently, out of touch billionaire Elon Musk now calls the shots,” McGovern wrote. “At least we know who’s in charge. Grow a spine, Mr. Speaker!”

“President Musk” was predictably trending on X Thursday morning, which would maybe be impressive if Musk didn’t own the website that declared it.

It’s well documented that Trump, ever the showman, doesn’t much care to share the spotlight with members of his inner circle, so it’s possible that Musk may receive pushback for his promotion from billionaire bureaucrat czar of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to unelected president of the United States—how’s that for democracy?

On Wednesday, the conservative House Freedom Caucus introduced the Disaster Offset and Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Act, which sees the government’s budget slashed by over $100 billion—but conspicuously leaves military spending alone, which happens to be where Musk gets a hefty portion of his government contracts.

It looks like House Speaker Mike Johnson might be at risk of losing his job.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie said Wednesday that he would not vote for Johnson in the upcoming House speaker election in January, according to Punchbowl News’s Melanie Zanona.

Johnson came under fire Tuesday after introducing a 1,547-page continuing resolution to keep the government open until March. The behemoth bill, which includes $100 billion for disaster relief and opens the door to a pay bump for members of Congress, invited a firestorm from the small-government people, including technocrat billionaire Elon Musk and a slate of sycophantic Republicans.

That latter group includes Massie. The Kentucky Republican has seemingly become preoccupied by the potential goings-on of the Department of Government Efficiency, which plans to slash government spending in the trillions (while leaving the military budget completely untouched).

“DOGE is like the U.S. Constitution. It’ll be great … if you can get my fellow lawmakers to follow it,” Massie wrote in a post on X last week. When DOGE co-czar Vivek Ramaswamy said he’d “welcome” Massie’s help, the representative replied, “Count me in!”

Depending on how Johnson proceeds, and how willing Republican lawmakers are to jump off the bridge that is a government shutdown, the House speaker could find that he has trouble shoring up support to keep his gavel in the new year.

If the Republicans fail to select a House speaker in a timely manner, that could mean trouble for anyone actually interested in certifying the results of the presidential election on January 6, which the chamber is legally required to do—resulting in a constitutional crisis.

Johnson’s leadership team began discussing a second plan Wednesday, a “clean” bill that would cut many of the provisions of the massive stopgap measure, including funding for disaster relief, according to Politico.

With a Friday deadline to fund the government looming and Republican lawmakers at loggerheads over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed stopgap spending bill, the conservative House Freedom Caucus is touting a plan to slash federal spending that conveniently leaves the bloated Pentagon budget untouched.

On Wednesday night, the House Freedom Caucus lampooned Johnson’s bill in a post on X, calling it a “Cramnibus” and enumerating demands that include a vote on the Disaster Offset and Government Efficiency Act, or DOGE Act: a piece of legislation introduced Tuesday evening by Republican Representative Chip Roy of Texas.

The DOGE Act would cut nondefense discretionary spending—which, per the Congressional Budget Office, “funds an array of federal activities in areas such as education, transportation, income security, veterans’ health care, and homeland security”—by roughly $114 billion, from just over $710 to $597 billion.

Stephen Semler, a policy analyst and co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, posted that the proposed DOGE Act would shrink these necessary programs, but curiously “reduces Pentagon spending by $0.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Roy appeared on Fox to criticize Johnson’s spending bill, which he said was too expensive.

“How is that a signal to the world that we’ve pulled our financial thing together as a country? It’s not,” Roy said, before promoting the DOGE Act as the solution. “We’ve offered all sorts of opportunities,” he added. “For example, we have a bill that I filed yesterday—it’s called the DOGE Act—that would cut nondefense spending by 13 percent to pre-Covid levels. That’s $113 billion. That would pay for all of this. We just wanted to get a vote on that.”

Responding to the DOGE Act, the antiwar organization Code Pink wrote on X, “Republicans are suddenly interested in ‘government efficiency,’ but they refuse to touch the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon is the ONLY government agency that has never passed an audit and can’t account for TRILLIONS in public resources.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to be getting cyberbullied by “efficiency” czar Elon Musk, over his continuing resolution.

Johnson’s resolution, which was released Tuesday, grants $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers, $100 billion for disaster relief, and enough money to keep the government open until March. It also opens the door for pay raises for members of Congress, among a slate of other things buried in the 1,547-page bill.

But not everyone is happy, especially Musk, the unelected billionaire who wants to slash government funding for pretty much everything except the military through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote in a post on X Wednesday.

The right-wing technocrat’s threat is no joke, as his deep pockets and misinformation efforts were essential to Donald Trump’s victory in November. “Stop the steal of your tax dollars! Call your elected representatives now. They are trying to railroad this thing through today!” a miffed Musk posted on X an hour later.

Musk’s threats didn’t stop coming Wednesday, as he descended into a deluge of hysterics over what some internet trolls dubbed the “omnibus” bill, and Republicans have already begun cheering Musk on.

“In five years in Congress, I’ve been awaiting a fundamental change in the dynamic. It has arrived,” wrote North Carolina Representative Dan Bishop in a post on X. Bishop lost a bid to become his state’s attorney general but was rewarded for loyalty when Trump nominated him for a position in the Office of Management and Budget.

“By now, they should know that I mean what I say,” Musk replied.

From his slew of pissed-off posts, it seems that Musk is mostly mystified by the bill’s length and the fact that it may allow a pay bump for members of Congress.

“This is insane! This is NOT democracy! How can your elected representatives be asked to pass a spending bill where they had no input and not even enough time to read it!!??” Musk wrote in another post. Musk, the unelected bureaucrat, sure has a lot of opinions about what democracy is.

Did Musk have an alternative? No, of course not. His answer to the government funding running out is just to wait until Trump can arrive to save the day.

“No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero,” Musk wrote, as if Trump’s very presence in the White House would magically fund the essential services the government offers.

Musk shared a post from one account called Wall Street Mav, which advocated to “just close down the govt until January 20th. Defund everything. We will be fine for 33 days.”

“YES,” Musk wrote in response. And so the wannabe co-president openly advocated for a government shutdown. Of course, it makes sense. Why struggle to cut government funding when you could simply advocate that the government stop funding itself?

During an interview with Newsmax Wednesday morning, Johnson had gushed over his direct line with Musk and co-efficiency czar Vivek Ramaswamy and indicated that they were all on the same page about the measure.

“I was on a text chain last night with Elon and Vivek about DOGE, cause I’m super excited about that, and I said, ‘Guys, these are the necessary things.’ They don’t like spending either, they said, ‘We know this is not you personally, Mr. Speaker,’ and we got to get through this,” Johnson said.

“Everybody understands the necessity,” he said. Do they? Because Musk seems to be doing his best to tank the stopgap measure via a major social media meltdown.

Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency might not hinder the proceedings surrounding his Georgia election interference charges, according to an attorney for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

In documents filed to the court on Wednesday, Willis’s office urged an appeals court to reject the president-elect’s request to throw out the case in light of the Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity. But the filing also suggested that state prosecution isn’t necessarily beholden to federal statute. The lawyer argued that Trump’s legal representation had failed to demonstrate why state prosecution should be subject to a Justice Department mandate preventing the prosecution of sitting presidents, reported ABC News.

“Appellant does not specify or articulate how the appeal—or indeed, any other aspect of this case—will constitutionally impede or interfere with his duties once he assumes office,” Fulton County Chief Senior Assistant District Attorney F. McDonald Wakeford wrote.

“The notice makes mention of these concepts without actually examining them or applying them to the present circumstances,” Wakeford continued in the filing. “In other words, Appellant has not done the work but would very much like for this Court to do so.”

Willis’s office believes they have wiggle room to proceed, due to a lack of legal precedent related to court proceedings against sitting presidents.

“Given these vague statements, to simply invoke the phrase ‘federalism and comity concerns,’ without more, offers nothing of substance,” the filing said.

Trump and 18 of his allies face racketeering charges in Georgia for their participation in the fake elector conspiracy, including ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and former white House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Four individuals have already pleaded guilty, including the architect of the scheme Kenneth Chesebro, though he has since attempted to withdraw his plea.

Planned Parenthood’s public funding is, once again, on the line.

The Supreme Court Wednesday agreed to hear South Carolina’s case against the reproductive health nonprofit. Prosecutors argue that Planned Parenthood’s locations in Charleston and Columbia should not be able to participate in the state Medicaid program.

Those locations currently service hundreds of patients covered by Medicaid and offer many more services than just abortion care, including physicals, cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control access, reported Reuters. The organization does not use the public funds for abortions but rather for family planning, according to the Associated Press. The case is scheduled to be argued in the spring.

“Pro-life states like South Carolina should be free to determine that Planned Parenthood and other entities that peddle abortion are not qualified to receive taxpayer funding through Medicaid,” John Bursch, an attorney with the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the state, told the Associated Press.

This is the latest abortion-related case picked up by SCOTUS since the court overturned nationwide abortion access provided by Roe v. Wade in 2022. It could also be another win for conservative-leaning states who want to see Planned Parenthood stripped of all government money.

It’s the third time that South Carolina’s defunding case has reached the Supreme Court. The state initially moved to cut off Planned Parenthood from funding in 2018. In 2020, the nation’s highest judiciary rejected the state’s appeal. Three years later, the justices intervened in a lower court’s ruling, ordering it to reconsider the case after a relevant ruling had been issued by the nine-judge bench.

South Carolina has one of the most prohibitive abortion policies in the nation, restricting access after just six weeks, before most individuals know they’re pregnant and just one week before drug store pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy hormones in their earliest, and least reliable, window.

Planned Parenthood has said it gets less than $100,000 in South Carolina, and that Medicaid does not pay for abortions except in emergency events that compromise a pregnant person’s life or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

The Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it will hear arguments regarding a law that could ban TikTok.

The high court, granting certiorari in the case TikTok v. Garland Wednesday, will soon decide on the constitutionality of the bipartisan Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, or PAFACA, which President Joe Biden signed into law in April.

PAFACA, intended “to protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications,” would require the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, to sell the application to an American-owned company by January 19 or else be effectively banned in the U.S.

ByteDance alleges that the law is a violation of the First Amendment, denying its users a popular forum for expressive activity. Thirty-three percent of American adults use the app, per a January report from the Pew Research Center.

Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have come out against the law, on the grounds that “it would violate the First Amendment rights of Americans … who rely on TikTok for information, communication, advocacy, and entertainment” and “would grant the President broad new powers to ban other social media platforms based on their country of origin.”

A federal appeals court upheld the ban earlier this month. Now, SCOTUS says it will hear arguments in the case on January 10: nine days before the app is set to be sold or banned per PAFACA, and 10 days before President Trump—who has has vaguely promised to “save TikTok” while his incoming administration is “deeply divided” on the ban—takes office. The Supreme Court did not block the law upon agreeing to hear the case, suggesting it could issue a ruling before the January 19 deadline, which could possibly help Trump take credit if the law is in fact overturned.

Either way, the decision is guaranteed to have significant implications for social media regulation and how freedom of expression is balanced with national security concerns.

Disney, which owns ABC News, agreed to pay a $16 million settlement to Donald Trump to avoid a messy lawsuit that the company believed would have potentially damaged the Disney brand, ABC News, and potentially undermined First Amendment rights, The New York Times reported Wednesday. 

Earlier this year, Trump launched a defamation lawsuit against ABC News over George Stephanopoulos’s use of the phrase “liable for rape” while discussing Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict, which technically found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape. 

It’s worth noting that even the presiding judge in the case thought the distinction between the two terms was semantic and wrote that the decision did not mean Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

Looking down the barrel of a major lawsuit, Disney decided to settle, and did so for three main reasons, according to the Times.

The first is that Disney had already engaged in culture-war lawsuits against Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over Disney World, which resulted in criticism from Republican lawmakers and activists and boycotts from Trump supporters—undermining the family-friendly ubiquity of the $205 billion Disney brand name.  

Disney was also concerned that as president, Trump would go after ABC News’s license. In September, Trump said that the network ought to lose its license after he was brutally fact-checked during a presidential debate. The Federal Communications Commission chair rejected this request, but Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Brendan Carr, doesn’t have quite the same hang-ups.

There was also some concern at Disney that the case would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which has a tendency to side with Trump, a move that could place one important precedent in jeopardy: 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan. 

That ruling determined that when a public figure hopes to prove a member of the press committed libel against them, it’s not enough to show that the press made a false statement. They must also prove that the defendant did so with knowledge of or reckless disregard for the statement’s falsity. 

Had Trump’s defamation case been tossed to the highest court in the land, it could have seen this essential protection for journalists undone. On the other hand, the settlement showed the president-elect exactly how he can silence the press during his second administration.

After CNN reported Wednesday that the House Ethics Committee has secretly voted to release its report on its multiyear investigation into former Representative Matt Gaetz after all, the former Florida representative immediately lost it.

“House Ethics will reportedly post a report online that I have no opportunity to debate or rebut as a former member of the body,” Gaetz fulminated in a lengthy post on X emphasizing that he has not faced criminal charges for his conduct.

“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated—even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court—which is why no such claim was ever made in court,” Gaetz wrote. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

According to CNN, the Ethics Committee secretly voted earlier this month to release the report after the House’s final votes this year—though “it is unclear if the committee will once again change course now that it has voted.”

According to the committee, the report contains its findings regarding allegations that Gaetz had “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.”

It previously appeared that Gaetz would successfully dodge the likely embarrassing revelation. In November, two days before the Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing the report, the former Florida lawmaker resigned from the House of Representatives, following the announcement of his since-thwarted nomination to be President-elect Trump’s attorney general.

Then, in a party-line vote last month, Republicans blocked the report’s release. The reversal reported Wednesday means some Republicans on the panel defected from party lines, siding with the Democrats in voting to let the report see the light of day.