The tables turned so quickly on Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis Thursday that even she seemed not to have adjusted to her new role in the courtroom as Judge Scott McAfee heard arguments about whether she and her team should be disqualified from prosecuting the Donald Trump election conspiracy case.
“You’re confused. You think I’m on trial,” Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer who brought the original complaint accusing the DA of having a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. “These (defendants) are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”
Willis may not technically be on trial, but her credibility is, as is her judgment, after she launched the most high-profile prosecution in Georgia history, against a former president no less, and then became romantically involved with the still-married man she hired to lead the case.
In her decision Thursday to take the stand in her own defense, even before McAfee ruled that she had to, Willis took herself from being the accuser to the unfamiliar role of being the accused.
The about-face was hard to absorb for anyone who has seen Willis in action in Fulton County up to this point. After defeating her own boss for election in 2020, she burst onto the scene in Atlanta as a clear-eyed murder prosecutor. She quickly clashed with the Fulton County Commission, not because she wanted to prosecute fewer violent crimes in the county, but because she said she wanted to prosecute more.
Republican lawmakers in the state Capitol liked what they heard and quickly found common ground with Willis and her zeal to put gang bangers and kid killers behind bars.
“I want people to know we’re killing ourselves and that failure is not an option,” Willis told me in an interview in her office less than a year into the job. “I want people to know that I continue to continue to work hard, make my people miss weekends and work long hours, that this is my entire life and I’m committed to them.”
That was in September of 2021. By then, Willis had opened what she called a narrow investigation into former President Donald Trump for possible election interference. But she had not yet hired Wade to be a special prosecutor on the case, nor, by her telling Thursday, had they started their romantic relationship.
Why Willis and Wade would start that relationship, even as they pursued the famously ruthless former president and dug deeper into the case that was watched by millions may be one of life’s great mysteries.
The details that emerged on Thursday only made Willis’ private conduct more confounding. There was a trip to Belize with Wade. Wine pairings in Napa Valley. A cruise to the Caribbean. Lunches and dinners out. Who has that kind of time, let alone if you’re prosecuting a former president in the trial of the century?
As Merchant and the other defense attorneys pushed Willis for more information, she occasionally became angry and indignant. She batted away questions with the short temper of the prosecutor she usually is, not the defendant she became.
“Don’t be cute with me,” Willis snapped at Merchant at one point.
Later, she became so incensed with Merchant that McAfee declared Willis a hostile witness. “I’m not a hostile witness,” she shot back. “Ms. Merchant’s interests are contrary to democracy, your honor, not to mine.”
It wasn’t all fireworks in the courtroom Thursday. Nathan Wade, who has essentially been accused of being an unqualified stooge, was professional, calm and collected. He answered only what was asked and undercut much of what Merchant insinuated about him with precision and detail.
In fact, it was such smooth sailing after Wade’s testimony that McAfee seemed disinclined to let the defense attorneys call Willis to the stand. But that’s when she burst into the courtroom in a scene dramatic enough for the sequel to A Few Good Men. “I’m ready to go,” she declared.
It has to be said that Merchant and the other defense attorneys didn’t cloak themselves in glory, either. Merchant often seemed disorganized and had to find her place in her notes. She and the other lawyers had to repeatedly be told to move on to new territory. They never backed up their most serious suspicions with facts.
At one point attorney Craig Gillen dramatically unveiled a book titled, “Find Me the Votes,” to address Willis’ financial status. But he seemed not to realize that the subtitle of the book he was waving for the cameras was, in part, “A Rogue President and the Plot to Steal an American Election.”
But just like the book’s title, that rogue president and his plot to steal an American election were an afterthought of the hearings this week, not the focus. And that’s the real crime of it all.
As angry as Willis was this week, plenty of Georgia voters will likely be upset after watching the courtroom spectacle, too. But Willis was mad at the wrong people, since she has only herself to blame for opening the door that Trump’s lawyers are kicking in on her, her reputation, and her case against the president now. As a talented prosecutor herself, she should know that on that count at least, she’s guilty.
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