Former President Donald Trump and seven co-defendants requested on Monday that a judge allow them to appeal the decision not to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from their election interference case in Georgia.
The co-defendants, who include Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, asked Judge Scott McAfee to grant them a “certificate of immediate review,” according to a court filing. If granted, the certificate would allow them to file an appeal to the decision McAfee made last week.
McAfee found, according to the highly anticipated order he issued on Friday, that Willis had created an appearance of a conflict of interest by, in part, failing to disclose a relationship she had with a special prosecutor she hired to work on the case. McAfee said Willis had shown a “tremendous lapse in judgment,” but the judge decided she could continue to prosecute the case if she removed the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, from it. Wade resigned hours later.
“The resignation of Mr. Wade is insufficient to cure the appearance of impropriety the Court has determined exists,” attorneys for the co-defendants wrote on Monday.
The attorneys added that the Georgia Court of Appeals “should speak definitively to this outcome-determinative issue now.”
McAfee made several damning observations in his order, including that an “odor of mendacity [remained]” in the case, that Willis and Wade may not have been truthful when they gave sworn testimony on when their relationship began, and that Willis delivered her testimony in an “unprofessional manner.”
Still, McAfee found that removing either Willis or Wade from the case was a “sufficiently remedial” option. Trump and his co-defendants did not prove Willis had any actual conflict of interest in prosecuting the case, McAfee said.
Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow said in a statement that McAfee’s order is “ripe for pretrial appellate review.”
Should McAfee grant the review, the state’s appellate court would then be faced with deciding whether to take up Trump’s and his co-defendants’ disqualification argument. Beyond disqualification of Willis and her office, they also argue the case should be dismissed in its entirety because of Willis’s and Wade’s actions.
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Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis said in a statement online that he was “skeptical” McAfee would approve the request.
“I am increasingly skeptical that Judge McAfee will grant the certificate for immediate review. He essentially applied the defendants’ preferred standard for disqualification and crafted a cure that the DA took within hours,” Kreis said. “I think there’s reason to believe he’s ready to move on.”
