Former President Donald Trump submitted a request for an oral arguments hearing at the Georgia Court of Appeals before a three-judge panel decides whether to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from his 2020 election subversion case in Georgia.
“We believe oral argument will assist the court by highlighting and clarifying the reasons why the case should be dismissed and Fulton County DA Willis should be disqualified for her misconduct,” said Steve Sadow, lead defense counsel for Trump in Fulton County.
The request is significant given that most appeals court cases are decided solely on lawyers’ written legal briefs, not oral arguments before the three-judge panel.
Last week, the Georgia Court of Appeals scheduled in early October a tentative date to weigh the effort from Trump and seven other co-defendants to disqualify Willis from the case, which alleges that Trump and his allies made a sweeping attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
The appeals court’s decision was a major victory for the former president, as he has been trying to delay his three remaining criminal cases ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Now, it’s become increasingly unlikely for Willis’s case to move to a trial before the Nov. 5 election rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.
The state’s appeals court typically only grants requests for oral arguments around 32% to 41% of the time, according to statistics from the court.
Trump is among the nine of 15 remaining defendants who are appealing a March 15 order by Judge Scott McAfee of the Fulton County Superior Court that kept Willis on the case. McAfee found that while Willis’s romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a former special prosecutor on the case, did not create a disqualifying conflict of interest, the “odor of mendacity” the relationship caused amounted to an appearance conflict that required either her or Wade to resign.
Trump’s appeal concerns Willis’s alleged “forensic misconduct” that his attorneys believe should disqualify her from the case, according to the filing from Sadow, lawyer Jennifer Little, and Matthew Winchester, a recently added member of the former president’s legal team. McAfee previously relied on the standard from the 1988 case Williams v. State but suggested there was a lack of guidance on its application, particularly on whether prejudice must be shown and how to gauge it.
Trump’s team has pointed to Willis’s extrajudicial comments, which include a speech she made at a historically black church on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. Willis spoke at the church about race and her relationship with God, which the defense argues could prejudice the jury and violate professional conduct rules.
“In this speech, DA Willis injected race and her communications with God into the case (and the prospective jury pool) and stoked racial animus against the defendants and their counsel by, among other statements, asking God why the defendants challenged her conduct in hiring a black man but not his White counterparts, and why the judgment of a black female Democrat was not as good as white male Republicans,” Sadow wrote.
The case to remove Willis has already been thoroughly litigated in public view, as tens of thousands of viewers have tuned into live hearings broadcasted on YouTube and television. During those hearings in February and early March, Willis and Wade vehemently denied that they improperly gained from their relationship and role in the high-profile Trump case.
Trump’s team also argues that Wade’s removal from the case “did nothing to cure nor mitigate the harm to the defendants from DA Willis’s extrajudicial speech,” noting that “this error” could cause the upheaval of multiple jury trials if the appeals court does not reconsider McAfee’s previous decision.
The removal hearing at the appeals court was initially set for Oct. 4, but Christina Cooley Smith, deputy court administrator for the appeals court, said Tuesday that the date will be rescheduled if oral arguments are requested and the judges choose to grant them due to a previous timing conflict.
The court is obligated to issue a ruling by March 2025, though it may act sooner.
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Meanwhile, Willis could attempt to ask the court to expedite the hearing over her removal. She could also seek to bring the case against the other six remaining defendants who did not join the appeal to remove her, though it’s unclear at this point whether she will attempt to try that group first.
Read Trump’s full request to the appeals court:
filing-2 by Kaelan Deese on Scribd
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