Embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said that her election interference case against former President Donald Trump will continue and that her office hasn’t been delayed by proceedings regarding her relationship with her former top prosecutor.
“I don’t feel like we have been slowed down at all,” Ms. Willis told CNN in an interview on March 23, her first comments since a judge ruled earlier this month that she doesn’t need to be removed from the case. “I think there are efforts to slow down the train, but the train is coming.”
In the case, President Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants face charges in relation to alleged attempts to illegally overturn the 2020 election in Fulton County. The 45th president has pleaded not guilty, saying that he is being wrongfully prosecuted in an attempt to harm his 2024 presidential chances.
Ms. Willis spoke just days after the same judge, Judge Scott McAfee, allowed attorneys for the former president and other co-defendants to appeal his ruling for a review. The judge ordered that either the district attorney or her former special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, needs to stop working on the case. Mr. Wade later resigned.
Defense lawyers had alleged that Ms. Willis engaged in a romantic relationship with Mr. Wade, which the two confirmed in a February court hearing, and that they financially benefitted from the arrangement. The two denied the latter allegations.
“I guess my greatest crime is that I had a relationship with a man, but that’s not something I find embarrassing in any way,” she said.
She also stressed she did not do “anything that’s illegal.”
Judge McAfee ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to back claims that Ms. Willis financially benefitted in the case but described her relationship as a “tremendous lapse in judgment.” And although some analysts have said that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade perjured themselves during statements they made in court last month, the judge did not respond to those claims.
“However, an odor of mendacity remains,” the judge wrote.
The pair also insisted they didn’t begin dating until after Mr. Wade became special prosecutor and that the relationship ended in the summer of 2023. They both said that Ms. Willis either paid for things herself or used cash to reimburse him for travel expenses.
However, a witness who used to be Ms. Willis’s landlord and friend testified that she saw them engaging in “hugging” and “kissing” as far back as 2019. Defense attorneys submitted an affidavit that analyzed Mr. Wade’s cellphone data showing that he had texted and called Ms. Willis thousands of times months before he was hired in November 2021. The data also allegedly showed that he visited the neighborhood where Ms. Willis had lived numerous times in the same time period.
Mr. Wade offered his resignation in a letter to Ms. Willis earlier in March, saying he was resigning “in the interest of democracy, in dedication to the American public and to move this case forward as quickly as possible.”
Attorneys for President Trump and the other defendants said in court that Mr. Wade’s resignation was not enough to correct the appearance of impropriety the judge found. Defense lawyers said that a failure to remove the district attorney could imperil any convictions and force a retrial if an appeals court later finds it was warranted.
“Whether District Attorney Willis and her Office are permitted to continue representing the State of Georgia in prosecuting the Defendants in this action is of the utmost importance to this case, and ensuring the appellate courts have the opportunity to weigh in on these matters pre-trial is paramount,” President Trump’s attorneys wrote in an appeal of Judge McAfee’s ruling last week.
After Ms. Willis’s comments to CNN on March 23, Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor who’s been following the case, criticized her remarks in a post on social media platform X.
“If I were Fani Willis, I would simply not talk to the media at all at this point just out of an abundance of caution,” Mr. Kreis wrote.
The case is separate from the 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in Washington’s federal court. That case is currently on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court weighs President Trump’s claims of presidential immunity, with oral arguments scheduled for next month.
