A former Georgia prosecutor said Thursday that Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis’ relationship with Nathan Wade wasn’t the only reason she was disqualified from pursuing the prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump.
A Georgia appeals court threw Willis off the case in a 2-1 ruling released Thursday morning, saying the trial court failed to “address the appearance of impropriety” stemming from the relationship with Wade. Former prosecutor Phil Holloway told Fox News host Harris Faulkner that “forensic misconduct” by Willis also contributed to her disqualification.
“This is the one that has the elected district attorney taking lots of taxpayer money, funneling it to her admitted paramour and then benefiting from that financial arrangement, by virtue of all the romantic trips and the getaways and all those things,” Holloway told Faulkner. “So, if it is not a direct kickback it certainly has the smell of potentially a kickback and her testimony, of course, they said had the ‘odor of mendacity,’ which means that nobody believed her testimony when she tried to explain this.”
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“But it is more than the conflict of interest with Nathan Wade,” Holloway continued. “This is also about what we call forensic misconduct. There is out of court statements where Miss Willis goes into the well of a local church here in Fulton County, Georgia, which is full of potential voters and full of potential jurors, by the way, I might add, and maligns and impugns the various defendants out in a very public way. Prosecutors aren’t allowed to do that. They’re not allowed to try their case, so to speak, on the courthouse steps nor in the well of a church.”
The appellate court cancelled oral arguments on whether Willis should be disqualified from prosecuting Trump on an indictment she secured against the then former-president in August 2023 over his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Willis denied wrongdoing in a Jan. 14 address at Big Bethel AME Church, accusing her critics of “playing the race card” while falsely claiming she paid the outside prosecutors the same rate. Wade reportedly earned $250 an hour while working on the case against Trump, compared to $200 an hour for John Floyd, a RICO expert, as of May 2023, according to billing records obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Holloway said her speech at the church factored into the court’s ruling.
“I predicted this outcome,” Holloway told Faulkner. “She can appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. I have got news for her: The Georgia Supreme Court is not going to take this case. It’s discretionary, they don’t have to do it and they won’t. They’re going to affirm the court of appeals and this case is going to be effectively over.”
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