A fourth defendant piled on to the requests that a judge disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the prosecution she is leading against former President Donald Trump in Georgia, according to a court document filed Monday.
David Shafer, former Georgia GOP chairman, argued through his attorneys that Willis’s personal relationship with one of the special prosecutors she hired for the case should disqualify her.
“Her conduct in hiring [Nathan] Wade, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars to be paid to him, benefitting personally, and failing to disclose her conduct is a clear breach of her fiduciary responsibility as trustee to the citizens of Fulton County, Georgia,” Shafer’s attorneys wrote.
Shafer is among 19 co-defendants whom Willis charged last year with felony racketeering violations over allegations they illegally conspired to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
Willis hired three special prosecutors to assist with the case, including Wade, a private sector defense lawyer whose qualifications to handle the high-profile and complex prosecution of a former president have drawn enormous scrutiny.
Shafer’s motion comes after another co-defendant in the case, Michael Roman, filed a bombshell motion to dismiss the case and disqualify Willis from it last month. Roman cited evidence that Willis had since 2021 paid Wade, with whom she was in a romantic relationship, more than half a million dollars in taxpayer funds to help prosecute Trump. Roman accused Willis of failing to disclose a conflict of interest in the case and claimed that by vacationing with Wade, she may have committed honest services fraud.
Willis responded to the allegations in a court filing on Friday. She admitted publicly for the first time to having a personal relationship with Wade but argued it violated no ethics rules.
Judge Scott McAfee has scheduled a hearing on the matter for Feb. 15, but Willis asked in her response that McAfee cancel the hearing.
Roman’s attorney Ashleigh Merchant quickly responded on Friday, saying the hearing is necessary. She said Willis’s filing, which included a sworn affidavit by Wade, contained falsehoods.
Merchant indicated, for instance, that Willis’s relationship with Wade began before she hired him. Willis claimed it had not.
“You swore that you met Ms. Willis in October of 2019 at a Municipal Court training. Isn’t it true that you began more than just a friendship at that conference?” Merchant wrote in reference to Wade’s affidavit.
Merchant also attached receipts that showed Willis and Wade shared a hotel room in Aruba for a weekend in November 2022. Merchant said that and other pieces of evidence contradict Willis’s additional claim that she and Wade have never cohabitated.
“This is a criminal case, not a civil case. It cannot be decided on ex parte, self-serving affidavits,” Merchant wrote.
Roman’s response, obtained by the Washington Examiner, is not easily accessible to the public because Fulton County’s online court records are blocked by what officials have cited as a countywide system outage related to a cyberattack.
The outage has lasted for about a week, and it is unclear when the county’s online court records will become publicly accessible again.
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Willis’s office did not respond to a request for comment about Shafer’s motion or about the Fulton County website dysfunction.
In addition to Shafer and Roman, Trump and a fourth co-defendant, Robert Cheeley, filed similar motions to dismiss the case and disqualify Willis.
