Former president Donald Trump will not travel to Georgia for a hearing Thursday, but will attend a hearing in New York.
The Georgia hearing is on allegations that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) engaged in an improper personal relationship with the lead prosecutor on the election interference case, Trump’s lawyer announced Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
“President Trump will be attending court in New York on Thursday,” Steve Sadow said in an email to reporters.
As early as Monday, Trump was considering attending the hearing and skipping a separate appearance in the New York case, according to two individuals who were familiar with the plan and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss it.
In the New York case, Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.
It’s not known why plans changed — nor why Trump wanted to attend the Georgia hearing. Attending the Georgia hearing raised questions about how it could cause a chaotic scene in downtown Atlanta and in the courtroom of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case. At the hearing, Willis will likely face having her personal life and professional integrity scrutinized and questioned.
Interesting enough, courtrooms have become campaign stops for Trump as he runs for the Republican presidential nomination all the while facing 91 felony charges across four cases.
McAfee ruled Monday that the hearing would continue over Willis’s objections because an actual conflict or appearance of one is grounds for disqualifying Willis from the case. McAfee said the hearing would focus on whether Willis benefited financially from hiring Nathan Wade, when their romantic relationship began and whether it continues.
McAfee’s decision came more than a month after Mike Roman, one of the former president’s co-defendants who worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign, claimed in a court filing that Willis and Wade had been involved in an “improper, clandestine personal relationship” that has financially benefited them both.
Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, claimed Willis may have broken the law by hiring Wade and then allowing him to pay for “vacations across the world” with her that were unrelated to their work on the case. Roman’s filing, which offered no proof, called for the prosecutors to be disqualified and for the charges against him to be dismissed.
