Messy distractions in the Trump case in Georgia cause perception problems

At some point in the coming weeks or months, the criminal case in Georgia against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies will likely focus again on the defendants and whether they conspired to overturn Trump's 2020 election defeat there .

But the case's extraordinary detour, delving into the intimate details of a romantic relationship between the two lead prosecutors and forcing them to fight allegations of impropriety, may have fundamentally changed the case. Now it is unclear whether the case will even remain before Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, as lawyers for Mr. Trump and other defendants seek to disqualify her entire office.

Even if the presiding judge allows Ms. Willis to stay the case, she will likely face heavy criticism from now on, including from a new state commission that can fire prosecutors and from the Georgia Senate, which has opened an investigation.

The controversy has also provided new fodder for Mr. Trump and his allies, who are adept at exploiting their opponents' vulnerabilities. Mr. Trump was launching incendiary attacks on Ms. Willis even before her relationship with Nathan J. Wade, the lawyer she hired to help handle the election interference case, came to light.

If anything, Ms. Willis' decision not to disclose her relationship with Mr. Wade from the start has provided a messy distraction from an extremely high-stakes prosecution. Even if the revelations do not taint the jury pool in Fulton County, where Democrats far outnumber Republicans and Ms. Willis has many admirers, her world-famous case could face a lasting perception problem. And if the case is taken away from her, even more serious problems could follow.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee suggested Friday that he likely won't rule next week on whether the relationship created a disqualifying conflict of interest. But state officials are already considering what might happen if Ms. Willis, who has given no indication that she will voluntarily step aside, has to hand the case over to another prosecutor in the state.

“You have to find an agency that has the resources to handle these types of cases, and there are less than a handful,” Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Georgia Board of Attorneys, said in an interview. “You can't go to a national district attorney's office that only has seven or eight prosecutors and say, 'Can you take this case?'”

The Trump case is a sprawling racketeering prosecution involving 15 defendants and a slew of assistant district attorneys who have been at it for several years. One of the country's top racketeering experts works on Ms. Willis' team and helped build the case.

Ms. Willis herself has years of experience in prosecuting racketeering cases and has so far extracted guilty pleas from four of the initial 19 defendants. Before the conflict of interest allegations emerged, she had hoped to appear in court in August, a prospect that now seems less likely than ever.

Mr. Skandalakis would be responsible for reassigning the case, if it comes to that. One consideration, he said, would be “how far” from Fulton County a new prosecutor would be. That likely means the case would be transferred to an Atlanta-area prosecutor. A new prosecutor could essentially do whatever he or she wants with the case, and even decide to drop all charges.

Flynn D. Broady Jr., the district attorney for Cobb County, next to Atlanta, and a Democrat like Ms. Willis, said that if he were asked to take over the Trump case, “I would review the file to make an informed decision.” about further steps with the prosecution.

Underlining the risks to Ms Willis, Judge McAfee has said even the appearance of a conflict could lead to disqualification. The fact that he allowed a witness hearing on the allegations against her made it clear that he was taking the matter seriously.

The core of the defense team's argument is that the romantic relationship between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade presented an untenable conflict of interest because it gave the two prosecutors a financial incentive to pursue the case. Ms. Willis' office has paid Mr. Wade more than $650,000 since his appointment in November 2021.

Both Ms Willis and Mr Wade have denied that they benefited financially from his recruitment. They have said their relationship started in early 2022, after she hired him, and ended last summer. But this week a former friend of Ms Willis testified in court that the relationship had begun much earlier. (The witness, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, had worked in Ms. Willis' office, but they stopped talking after Ms. Bryant-Yeartie resigned in 2022 to avoid being fired.)

The hearing certainly provided a spectacle, not least when Ms Willis spent several hours in the witness box on Thursday.

There were angry salvos among lawyers, peppered with accusations of lies and perjury, and details of the former couple's trips to holiday destinations like Belize, where they may or may not have visited a tattoo parlor. There was Ms. Willis's pointed assessment of their breakup. Her office even called her 79-year-old father to the witness stand to corroborate his daughter's claims that she had reimbursed Mr. Wade for thousands of dollars in cash for their travels; he said storing large amounts of cash was “a black business.”

Ms. Willis at one point during the melodramatic hearing tried to remind attendees of her case against Mr. Trump, which at times has seemed like a distant memory since the conflict-of-interest allegations. “These people are on trial because they tried to steal the election in 2020!” she exclaimed at one point. 'I'm not on trial. No matter how hard you try to bring me to justice.”

There is already precedent in the Trump case for disqualification. In July 2022, a judge barred Ms. Willis from developing a case against Burt Jones, a fake Trump voter in Georgia 2020, because Ms. Willis had organized a fundraiser for one of Mr. Jones' political rivals.

A year and a half later, a replacement prosecutor has not yet been appointed to investigate a possible case against Mr. Jones, now the lieutenant governor of Georgia.

But Mr Skandalakis noted that, unlike at the time, charges have been filed. “That makes it different,” he says.

A weakened or deposed Fani Willis is a victory for Trump. A half-dozen swing states are now conducting criminal investigations into the 2020 plot to keep the former president in power, but Ms. Willis remains the only one of those prosecutors to have filed charges against Mr. Trump himself.

Sherry Boston, the district attorney for DeKalb County, in suburban Atlanta, declined to comment on whether she would consider taking the case if Ms. Willis is disqualified. Patsy Austin-Gatson, the district attorney for Gwinnett County, also outside Atlanta, said in an email: “We obviously have no bias as to whether our office would consider taking the case.”

Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a former White House ethics lawyer, said he believed the evidence so far did not meet Georgia's legal standard for disqualifying Ms. Willis.

Still, he said he thought it would be “best for the case that Willis voluntarily resign and that Wade also not continue working on the case.”

It won't be easy to find another prosecutor willing to take over her case, especially given the looming threats that have caused Ms. Willis to leave her home and require constant security.

At the hearing this week, Roy Barnes, a former governor of Georgia, recounted what he told Ms. Willis when she asked him early on to help lead Trump's prosecution.

““I lived with bodyguards for four years, and I didn't like it,” he said. “I shouldn't have to live with bodyguards for the rest of my life.”