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In the wake of the embarrassing romantic debacle that nearly got Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis disqualified from overseeing the Trump-related election case in Georgia, Trump and other co-defendants in the president’s case are again seeking a motion to disqualify the DA.
Last week, Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Willis could remain on the case as either herself or her ex-lover, Nathan Wade, exited the case. According to The New York Times, Wade did indeed resign the same day that the judge’s decision was issued, but not without intense scrutiny.
Judge McAfee’s ruling highlighted an “odor of mendacity” that lingered in the case and pointed out that the questions about Willis’s appointment of Wade as a prosecutor in the case against Trump were odd.
McAfee wrote:
Yet reasonable questions about whether the District Attorney and her hand-selected lead SADA testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it.
According to the Daily Mail, the new motion aimed at disqualifying Willis utilizes Judge McAfee’s Friday ruling as the basis for their argument, highlighting the “odor of mendacity” and “potential dishonesty” cited in Wade and Willis’s testimonies.
Via the outlet, lawyers for the 45th president and other co-defendants made the following argument:
“In its Order, the Court found that District Attorney Willis’ actions had created an appearance of impropriety and an ‘odor of mendacity’ that lingers in this case, as well as of the continuing possibility that ‘an outsider could reasonably think that District Attorney Willis is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences.’”
The phrases quoted about the defendants’ attorneys are directly taken from McAfee’s own ruling. It is interesting to note that his ruling also conceded that Willis had shown a “tremendous lapse in judgment” and that she had engaged in an “unprofessional manner” during his combative witness testimony last month.