UPDATE:

By KATE BRUMBACK and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER/Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — A special prosecutor who had a romantic relationship with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis formally withdrew Friday from the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump after a judge ruled one of them had to leave for the case to move forward.

Attorney Nathan Wade’s resignation allows Willis to remain on the most sprawling of the four criminal cases against the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election.

But the long-term damage to the public perception of the prosecution remains unclear, particularly in light of Trump’s relentless barrage of attacks on the pair who pledged to hold Trump accountable but found their own actions under a public microscope.

Wade offered his resignation in a letter to Willis, saying he was doing so “in the interest of democracy, in dedication to the American public and to move this case forward as quickly as possible.”

Willis complimented Wade’s “professionalism and dignity” in a letter accepting his resignation, saying he has “endured threats against you and your family, as well as unjustified attacks in the media and in court on your reputation as a lawyer.”

The resignation came hours after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said Wade had to be removed or Willis must step aside from the case. McAfee did not find that Willis’ relationship with Wade amounted to a conflict of interest, but said the allegations created an “appearance of impropriety” that infected the prosecution team.

“As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the District Attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed,” the judge wrote.

“Put differently, an outsider could reasonably think that the District Attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences. As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist.”

Even though the judge gave Willis the option to stay on the case, the allegations threaten to damage her reputation and taint the public’s perception of the prosecution. Trump and his allies have seized on the allegations to impugn Willis’ credibility as the prosecutors seeking to hold the former president accountable have found themselves under fire.

An attorney for Trump said the former president’s team respects the court’s decision but believes the judge “did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade.”

“We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place,” defense attorney Steve Sadow said.

Defense attorneys could try to appeal the ruling, but they would need the judge’s permission to do so.

Willis hired Wade to lead the team to investigate and ultimately prosecute Trump and 18 others on charges that they illegally tried to overturn his narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia in 2020. The case uses a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers and other aides of a “criminal enterprise” to keep him in power.

Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee for 2024, has denied doing anything wrong and pleaded not guilty.

Willis and Wade testified at a hearing last month that they had engaged in a romantic relationship, but they rejected the idea that Willis improperly benefited from it, as lawyers for Trump and some of his co-defendants alleged. Willis and Wade insisted they didn’t begin dating until after he became special prosecutor, though another a former friend and employee of Willis’ testified that she saw the pair hugging and kissing before he was hired.

Willis and Wade said the relationship ended in the summer of 2023. They both said that Willis either paid for things herself or used cash to reimburse Wade for travel expenses.

McAfee wrote that there was insufficient evidence that Willis had a personal stake in the prosecution. And he said he was unable to “conclusively establish by a preponderance of the evidence” whether Willis and Wade began dating before or after he was hired as special prosecutor.

“However, an odor of mendacity remains,” the judge wrote. He said “reasonable questions” about whether Willis and Wade testified truthfully 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.”

Even so, he said, dismissal of the case was not the appropriate remedy to “adequately dissipate the financial cloud of impropriety and potential untruthfulness found here.”

McAfee found no showing that the due process rights of Trump and the other defendants had been violated or that the issues involved prejudiced them in any way. He also said the disqualification of a constitutional officer, like a district attorney, is not necessary when a less drastic option is sufficient.

The judge said he believes that “Georgia law does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices — even repeatedly — and it is the trial court’s duty to confine itself to the relevant issues and applicable law properly brought before it.”

An attorney for co-defendant Michael Roman was the first to ask McAfee to dismiss the indictment and prevent Willis and Wade and their offices from continuing to prosecute the case. The attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, alleged that Willis paid Wade large sums for his work and then improperly benefited from the prosecution of the case when Wade used his earnings to pay for vacations for the two of them.

Merchant said in a statement Friday that while Roman’s team maintains that the judge should have disqualified Willis’ office entirely, the judge clearly agreed with the defense that there is a “risk to the future of this case” if Willis “doesn’t quickly work to cure her conflict.”

The ruling comes days after the judge dismissed three of 13 counts against Trump in the indictment. The judge said prosecutors failed to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of the allegations related to soliciting public officers to violate their oaths. However, the bulk of the 41-count indictment remains intact, and the judge said prosecutors could seek a new indictment to try to reinstate the charges he dismissed.

One dismissed count stemmed from a phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump urged Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” for him to win the election in the state.

Of the 19 people originally charged in the indictment, four have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors. They include prominent Trump allies and attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro.

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Richer contributed from Boston. Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker in Washington contributed.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

SEE PREVIOUS COVERAGE:

Fani Willis and her office can stay on Trump Georgia 2020 election case if Nathan Wade steps aside, judge rules

Atlanta — A Fulton County judge ruled Friday that District Attorney Fani Willis and her office may remain on the 2020 election case involving former President Donald Trump and his allies if Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor who was in a romantic relationship with Willis, steps aside.

In a 23-page decision from Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, the court concluded that “the prosecution of this case cannot proceed until the state selects one of two options. The district attorney may choose to step aside, along with the whole of her office, and refer the prosecution to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council for reassignment. Alternatively, [special assistant district attorney] Wade can withdraw, allowing the district attorney, the defendants, and the public to move forward without his presence or remuneration distracting from and potentially compromising the merits of this case.”

The request to disqualify Willis and Wade stemmed from an allegation by Michael Roman, a longtime GOP operative and one of Trump’s co-defendants, that there was a romantic relationship between the pair and that Willis had improperly benefited from that relationship. Although Willis acknowledged she and Wade were romantically involved, she fiercely disputed the claims that the relationship began before she hired him in November 2021. The allegations set off days of fiery testimony which included Willis taking the stand in her own defense.

Fani Willis can stay on Trump Georgia case, but only if Wade steps aside, judge says. MGN

Though McAfee’s decision allows Willis and her office to continue prosecuting the case — albeit if Wade withdraws from the team — he chided Willis for what he said is a “tremendous lapse in judgment” and criticized the “unprofessional manner” of her testimony during an evidentiary hearing last month.

Still, he said Georgia law “does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices — even repeatedly — and it is the trial court’s duty to confine itself to the relevant issues and applicable law properly brought before it.” McAfee said other sources of authority, such as the State Bar of Georgia, the state Legislature, or Fulton County voters, “may offer feedback on any unanswered questions that linger.”

Trump attorney’s response

Steve Sadow, Trump’s attorney, pledged in a statement to use “all legal options available” to dismiss the case.

“While respecting the court’s decision, we believe that the court did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade, including the financial benefits, testifying untruthfully about when their personal relationship began, as well as Willis’ extrajudicial MLK ‘church speech,’ where she played the race card and falsely accused the defendants and their counsel of racism,” he said in response to McAfee’s decision.

McAfee ruling rebukes Willlis: “An odor of mendacity remains”

The judge found that evidence presented during earlier proceedings showed that “the district attorney’s prosecution is encumbered by an appearance of impropriety,” and said that even if Willis’ relationship with Wade began after his hiring in November 2021, she continued to supervise and pay him while maintaining a romantic relationship.

Willis, the judge said, also allowed the “regular exchange of money between them” without any means of verifying that they split the costs of getaways they took together.

“This lack of a confirmed financial split creates the possibility and appearance that the district attorney benefited — albeit non-materially — from a contract whose award lay solely within her purview and policing,” McAfee wrote.

He said that if the case were allowed to move forward uncharged, concerns of wrongdoing raised by Trump and his co-defendants would persist.

McAfee also rebuked Wade for what he said was a “patently unpersuasive explanation for the inaccurate interrogatories” the special prosecutor submitted in divorce proceedings, which the judge said indicated a willingness to “wrongly conceal” his relationship with Willis.

“An outsider could reasonably think that the district attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences. As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist,” McAfee wrote.

The judge found that while he was not able to “conclusively establish” when Wade and Willis’ relationship turned romantic, “an odor of mendacity remains.” Defense lawyers argued their relationship predated Wade’s hiring, and the timeline emerged as a key issue during evidentiary hearings last month.

“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,” McAfee wrote.

McAfee finds Trump, co-defendants did not prove conflict of interest

Still, the judge concluded that Trump and his co-defendants fell short of meeting the burden of proving Willis had an actual conflict of interest in the case through her relationship with Wade. He also denied Trump’s request to disqualify the district attorney from the case because of “forensic misconduct,” based on a speech Willis gave at a historically Black church in Atlanta after her relationship with Wade was brought into public view.

While McAfee said the effect of Willis’ speech was to “cast racial aspersions at” Roman’s decision to request she be removed, he could not find that her remarks crossed a line to deny Trump and his co-defendants a fair trial or require her disqualification.

Still, the judge said her speech was “legally improper” and “creates dangerous waters for the District Attorney to wade further into. McAfee suggested it may be time for a gag order preventing prosecutors from speaking publicly about the case.

The bid to disqualify Willis and Wade

McAfee’s order came just after he tossed out six counts included in the indictment returned in August, including three against Trump. He left the remainder of the charges intact and said Georgia prosecutors can seek a new indictment supplementing the six counts.

The effort to remove Willis and her office from the prosecution arose in January, when Roman filed a motion that claimed the district attorney had a personal relationship with Wade and financially benefited from it.

Roman’s attorneys alleged Willis and Wade became romantically involved before his hiring as a special prosecutor to work on the case involving Trump and said the pair took numerous trips together, which Wade paid for using income he received for his work in Fulton County. The defense attorneys argued the relationship created an impermissible conflict of interest and urged McAfee to disqualify Willis and her office from prosecuting the case, and dismiss the charges altogether.

Willis and Wade acknowledged in a court filing last month that they had a romantic relationship, but said it began in early 2022, months after Wade’s appointment.

Roman’s bid to kick Willis off the case was swiftly joined by Trump and seven others, and the allegations kicked off a series of extraordinary evidentiary hearings that featured testimony from both Willis and Wade.

During her roughly two hours on the witness stand, Willis forcefully defended herself from accusations she acted improperly and instead accused defense attorneys of intruding into her personal life and deflecting from the charges against their clients.

“You’re confused. You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020,” Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, Roman’s lawyer, during her Feb. 15 testimony. “I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”

The district attorney also provided intimate details about her relationship with Wade — which she said ended last August — and their travels and financial dealings.

The timeline of Willis and Wade’s relationship emerged as a key focus of the proceedings, as a former longtime friend of the district attorney’s testified that the two prosecutors began dating before Wade received his first contract to work on Trump’s case.

Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney who was billed as a “star witness,” took the witness stand on three separate occasions and was asked repeatedly about a text message he sent Merchant claiming Willis and Wade’s personal relationship began pre-dated Wade’s hiring. But Bradley said he was “speculating” about the timing and testified that he had no direct knowledge of when the relationship began.

Willis and Wade, meanwhile, repeatedly stated that while they met for the first time at a judicial conference in 2019, their interactions did not become romantic until early 2022. During the months they dated, the couple took two cruises and visited Aruba, Belize and Napa, California.

Defense attorneys zeroed in on their getaways to argue that Willis had received financial benefits from the relationship, since they said Wade paid for trips, hotel rooms and travel expenses using money he received through his contracts to be special prosecutor in the Trump case.

“If this court allows this kind of behavior to go on and allows D.A.s across the state by its order to engage in these kinds of activities, the entire public confidence in the system will be shot, and the integrity of the system will be undermined,” John Merchant, one of Roman’s attorneys, said during closing arguments in a March 1 hearing.

But both Willis and Wade stated that they had split the costs associated with their travels, and both also said Willis often reimbursed Wade in cash. Willis testified that her father encouraged her to keep cash on hand to cover several months of expenses, so she often had it available.

The district attorney’s father, John Clifford Floyd III, confirmed during his own testimony that he gave his daughter that financial advice and also answered questions about her romantic relationships. Also appearing during the evidentiary hearings was former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, who was Willis’ first choice for special prosecutor but declined the offer to work on the case.

Adam Abbate, who works in Willis’ office, argued earlier this month that there has been “absolutely no evidence that the district attorney has benefited at all” or would benefit in the future from the prosecution of the case against Trump.