Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Wednesday sought to quash subpoenas that would force her and members of her staff to testify as part of a hearing to find out whether she engaged in misconduct and should be barred from prosecuting former President Donald Trump‘s election interference case.
Willis wrote in a nine-page motion that “each of these subpoenas appear transparently to be an attempt to conduct discovery in a (rather belated) effort to support reckless accusations made in prior court filings,” adding that they should be “quashed.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Trump reiterated his calls for Willis to be barred from prosecuting the sweeping racketeering case levied against him and 18 other defendants. Trump’s co-defendant and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark became the sixth defendant to file a motion seeking to disqualify Willis, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The flow of calls for Willis to recuse from the case is due in part to co-defendant Mike Roman’s mid-January motion, in which he accused Willis of engaging in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the attorney she appointed to serve as special prosecutor to oversee the case.
Roman also alleged Wade was not qualified for the job and that by paying for vacation expenses, uncovered in credit card statements from the special prosecutor’s divorce case, he and Willis benefited financially from the case.
Willis issued her first response to the allegations in court filings last week, arguing that her conduct had not been improper, although she did not deny that she and Wade were involved in a relationship.
A coalition of legal ethics experts, including a former White House ethics lawyer under the George W. Bush administration, filed an amicus brief in the case on Monday, arguing that Willis’s actions do not reach the level of severity that warrants her removal.
“Disqualifying conflicts,” the group wrote, “occur when a prosecutor’s previous representation of a defendant gives the prosecutor forbidden access to confidential information about the defendant or a conflict otherwise directly impacts fairness and due process owed a defendant.”
In a Wednesday filing, Trump’s lawyers cited Willis’s comments during a Jan. 14 speech at Big Bethel AME Church, where Willis said she is qualified to lead the prosecution and that those questioning her abilities are “playing the race card.”
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“The DA’s provocative and inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments, made in a widely publicized speech at a historical Black church in Atlanta, and cloaked in repeated references to God, catalyzed the quintessential ‘appearance of impropriety’ regarding her prosecutorial judgement and conduct,” Trump lawyers Steven Sadow and Jennifer Little wrote in a response to Willis.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has set a hearing for Feb. 15 over the motions to disqualify Willis and dismiss the indictments. It is unclear how the judge will rule, though the ethics experts wrote in their brief that the bar is fairly high for a judge to order the removal of a sitting prosecutor.
