(New York Post) Former President Donald Trump has blasted Fani Willis in a blistering legal filing, accusing her of a “calculated plan to prejudice” potential jurors against him and co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case.
Willis is battling to keep her job as district attorney of Fulton County overseeing the case against Trump amid a string of accusations about her relationship with the lead prosecutor in the case, Nathan Wade.
Following hearings last week, Willis made a legal filing Tuesday arguing she should remain on the case because her opponents failed to establish “an actual conflict of interest.”
However, this was quickly countered by lawyers for Trump, who claimed she had only addressed arguments about forensic misconduct.
The filing charged: “Our case implicates far more appalling and unforgivable types of forensic misconduct — deliberately stoking racial and religious prejudice against defense counsel and the defendants, testifying under oath untruthfully, and committing fraud upon the tribunal — in the prosecution of the defendants.”
Trump lawyer Steve Sadow has previously filed claiming Willis should be removed from the case following a church service where she gave a speech that appeared to claim the uncovering of her relationship with Wade was racially motivated.
The Trump filing accused her of “wantonly playing both the ‘race and religion card’” in her speech, which he claimed was “a calculated plan to prejudice defense counsel and the defendants in the minds of potential Fulton County jurors.”
The filing then accused Willis and Wade of “testifying falsely in a hearing before the Court on a material factual issue — whether their ‘personal relationship’ began before Wade was hired.”
WIllis and Wade have tesitified their relationship started in 2022 and said there was never a conflict of interest, while Trump and his co-defendants have called witnesses who gave evidence of them being romantic since 2019.
In the earlier filing, the state of Georgia argued on behalf of Willis that an elected district attorney cannot be disqualified without “a high standard of proof” illustrating that the DA either “has an actual conflict of interest or engaged in forensic misconduct.”
“The State maintains that the Defendants have not established an actual conflict of interest even by a preponderance of the evidence,” the state of Georgia said in the supplemental brief.
Willis further argued there is no precedent in Georgia under which an elected DA has been ousted solely on “an appearance of” a conflict of interest or impropriety.
“The Defendants cobble together flowery, righteous quotations from inapplicable cases that may sound enticing at first but that entirely misstate the law in Georgia,” the court doc states.
