Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis must feel like one of those Top 40 radio stations of old: The hits just keep a-coming!
On Thursday, the Georgia Court of Appeals ordered Willis removed from the case against President-elect Donald Trump, although it did not dismiss the criminal charges against him.
This comes weeks after rapper Young Thug, the alleged leader of a murderous Atlanta gang, walked out of jail on probation following nearly two years of criminal jurisprudence.
The appellate decision means that Willis’ two sprawling, high-profile gang racketeering cases — one allegedly conducted by rappers, the other by Republicans — lay smoldering on the sidewalk outside the Fulton County Courthouse.
She is appealing the case to the state Supreme Court. But even if the case stands, Willis can’t go after Trump until 2029, when he leaves office.
In the latest hit, the appeals court ruled that Fulton trial Judge Scott McAfee didn’t go far enough when he tried to play Judge Solomon earlier this year. In March, McAfee crafted an order that kept Willis in the case but led to the ejection of her former boyfriend, Nathan Wade, who she had hired earlier as her special prosecutor.
Wade was paid $720,000 over his two years piloting the case. And, even though it reeked of being a “friends and family” hire, his prosecution team did get indictments, so he apparently was no slouch.
McAfee ruled that Willis had a “lapse in judgment” in hiring Wade and there was “a significant appearance of impropriety.”
The young judge even went literary, trotting out legendary Southern playwright Tennessee Williams to note there was an “odor of mendacity” to Willis’ actions.
But, he determined Willis had no conflict of interest in prosecuting Trump.
McAfee said the elected DA was exercising her ”broad discretion” to go after who she wanted and that there was no “scheme” to prosecute Trump and his crew, as defense attorneys had alleged. Nor was there enough evidence to say Willis was paying Wade so she could go on fancy vacations, again, as defense attorneys alleged.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
So the judge held his nose and allowed Willis to remain on the case.
It seems appeals judges Trenton Brown and Todd Markle picked up on the “odor of mendacity” as they came to their conclusion. They even dug into their well-worn Webster’s dictionary (or, at least, clicked on the online version) so they could footnote the word “mendacity” and explain it means “untruthfulness” or “tendency to lie.”
They obviously were interested in McAfee’s verbiage because half of their 19-page opinion was cut and pasted from the earlier musings of the robe-wearing denizen of the lower court.
The two judges (there was a third, and I’ll get to him in a bit) ruled that although “an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.”
In essence, they noted that if McAfee smelled some mendacity in the courtroom, then Willis must have done something bad and we must act.
But, looking back on the earlier hearing, McAfee didn’t quite know who was uttering the mendacity, nor how deep it went. Was there lots of it? Or just the normal amount?
No doubt, some mendacity seeps into most court cases.
This Appeals Court ruling was what they call in boxing a “split decision.” And their colleague, Judge Benjamin Land, was not smelling what his brethren whiffed.
His decision said, in essence, “C’mon, fellas, the trial judge heard all the evidence, did his best to ascertain the truth and scratch out a ruling. He’s the trial judge, not us, and he has discretion to fix the problem. If you want to be trial judges, go back to the county courts where you came from and slog through all those awfully boring cases.”
What Land actually did say was: “I am particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court (his italics) to make and converted it to something else entirely.”
Also, he said: “It is not our job to second-guess trial judges or to substitute our judgement for theirs.”
(Well, second-guessing may not be their job, but higher courts do seem to relish it. Just ask their favorite punching bag, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney.)
Credit: Combined photos
Credit: Combined photos
Land added that “apparently for the first time in the history of our state, that the mere existence of an appearance (again, his italics) of impropriety, in and of itself, is sufficient to reverse the trial court’s refusal to disqualify the district attorney and her entire office.”
Yes, Willis and Wade had an affair. Was it going on before she hired him? She says no, but there’s evidence to say it did.
The idea that she hired him to get kickbacks in the form of vacations from her boyfriend on the county dime is a stretch.
It just seems she wanted her good friend/boyfriend in on the case as someone she could trust. And if she was throwing him a line of steady income, all the better.
Her actions were almost certainly not illegal but her critics say it was corrupt. Albeit with a small “c.”
Webster’s calls that “blowing it.”
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