The Briefing Room
General Category => Trump Legal Investigations => Fulton County Indictment => Topic started by: mystery-ak on February 20, 2024, 04:21:11 pm
-
All You Need To Know About Motions To Disqualify DA Fani Willis
Margot Cleveland
A Fulton County judge held an evidentiary hearing on Thursday and Friday on Donald Trump and his co-defendants’ motion to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis’ office from prosecuting the criminal case against them.
Here’s your lawsplainer to understand the significance of last week’s sideshow.
The Indictment
In August 2023, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants in a 98-page indictment. That indictment included a total of 41 different counts, but it was the state-law “RICO” racketeering count that proved the centerpiece of the indictment.
Throughout some 70 pages, the indictment alleged all 19 defendants, “unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in, directly and indirectly, such enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity,” the purpose of which was “to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”
Both the RICO count and the 40 other miscellaneous criminal charges suffer from numerous legal and factual problems, as I detailed here. But that is not what last week’s hearing concerned. Last week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held an evidentiary hearing on the pending motions to disqualify the district attorney’s office, which defendant Michael Roman originally filed.
Roman, who was a Trump 2020 campaign official, alleged multiple bases to dismiss the indictment against him, but the one that garnered the most attention concerned his claims that Willis had been involved in a sexual relationship with Nathan Wade, the man she hired to help lead the prosecution of Trump and the Trump-connected defendants. That relationship, Roman maintained, created a conflict of interest for Willis because she benefited from the hundreds of thousands of dollars Wade earned as a special prosecutor in the case.
After Roman’s attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, filed the motion to disqualify Willis in early January, at least eight other defendants in the RICO criminal case filed similar motions, which all presented two main arguments: that the DA’s office is disqualified either for having “a conflict of interest” or for “forensic misconduct.”
more
https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/20/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-motions-to-disqualify-get-trump-prosecutor-fani-willis/
-
According to the motions, Wade received approximately $1,000,000 for his work on the Trump RICO case, compared to Willis, who earned just a tad over $198,000 in annual salary.
This is the point that needs to be driven home. How does a lawyer who has never taken a step outside of traffic court justify a $1 million payout on a RICO case? And how does said lawyer justify billing the taxpayers of Fulton County for meetings he coordinated with Biden's White House counsel?