The Georgia supreme court declined to consider Willis’s appeal
The Georgia supreme court declined to consider Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s appeal of her removal from her 2020 racketeering and election interference case against President Donald Trump in a move that permanently bars her from any future involvement in the matter.
The 4-3 decision from Georgia’s highest court solidifies a ruling from the Georgia court of appeals in December, which found that Willis could not continue to prosecute the case over the “significant appearance of impropriety” she created with her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, the man she hired to lead the case against Trump. Willis paid Wade more than $650,000 in taxpayer funds for his work on the case, earnings that he used to finance lavish vacations for the couple.
“The Georgia supreme court has correctly denied review of the Georgia court of appeals decision disqualifying DA Fani Willis and her office as prosecutors in the Fulton County RICO case,” Trump attorney Steven Sadow said in a statement Tuesday. “Willis’ misconduct during the investigation and prosecution of President Trump was egregious and she deserved nothing less than disqualification. This proper decision should bring an end to the wrongful political, lawfare persecutions of the president.”
Trump hailed the ruling as a “great decision” while speaking to reporters Tuesday.
“What Fani Willis did to innocent people, patriots that love our country, what she did to them by indicting them and destroying them, she should be put in jail,” Trump said.
The ruling is the latest setback for Willis, who won her second term in office in November. Her racketeering and murder case against rapper Young Thug, the longest criminal prosecution in Georgia state history, ended with a dud in October 2024 with Willis securing nothing more than time served and 15 years of probation against the rapper. Willis has also faced accusations of firing a whistleblower in her office who accused the district attorney’s senior staff of misappropriating federal grant funds.
The ruling Tuesday places the fate of Willis’s case, which is the last remaining criminal prosecution of Trump, in the hands of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, a nonpartisan state agency tasked with handing the case off to another prosecutor. Whoever takes over the case may continue where Willis left off or dismiss the case entirely.
Finding a replacement will be easier said than done, according to the council’s executive director Peter Skandalakis, who told CNN in December the search process “won’t be an easy lift.”
That’s because Willis’s case against Trump was a “monstrosity,” according to Phil Holloway, a former assistant district attorney in Georgia who told the Washington Free Beacon in December that her potential replacement would have to “redo everything [Willis] did and try to fix the problems that she created.”
The council “is not going to be able to find another DA” to take the case, Holloway predicted.
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