We Need To Talk About Fani

Ignoring this won't make it go away.

Two things can be true at once.

It can be true that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis of Georgia is the victim of hideous racist harassment. And it can also be true that she screwed up big time if she really did hire her romantic partner using public money.

And both of those truths matter.

On January 8, Trump’s co-defendant Michael Roman, a campaign official who helped coordinate the fake electors scheme, filed a motion to dismiss his case in Fulton County District Court and to disqualify the Fulton County District Attorney’s office.

Two of the claims in this document are, quite frankly, stupid. Roman alleges that special prosecutor Nathan Wade, an outside attorney hired to run the election interference investigation, “never filed his oath of office prior to beginning work on this case, so he was never duly authorized under Georgia Law to serve in his role as Special Prosecutor.” Trump campaign lawyer Ken Chesebro tried that one back in August before he plead out, and Judge Scott McAfee flatly rejected it.

Roman also mischaracterizes Georgia statute to suggest that DA Willis needed approval from the Board of Commissioners to hire Wade. Neither of these arguments is going anywhere — they’re like two ticks more credible than arguing that the flag in the courtroom has the wrong fringe or whatever.

The third allegation is that DA Willis has been in a relationship with Wade for years, and inappropriately hired him despite his lack of experience with felony prosecutions, much less complex RICO cases.

Roman’s motion is thin on sourcing for this claim, but strongly implies that the story came from Wade’s sealed divorce filings and/or his estranged wife, Joycelyn Wade. Multiple news outlets have sued to get those filings unsealed, but in the meantime Joycelyn Wade has noticed DA Willis to be deposed in the divorce proceedings on January 23. In response Willis moved for a protective order to block the deposition noting that the parties have been legally separated for two years, each of them agrees that the marriage cannot be saved, they both agreed to seal the divorce proceedings, and that the notice of deposition appears to be coordinated with Roman’s legal team.

“This sequence of events, coupled with the absence of any relevant basis for deposing District Attorney Willis in an uncontested no-fault divorce where the parties have been separated for over two years, suggests that Defendant Joycelyn Wade is using the legal process to harass and embarrass District Attorney Willis, and in doing so, is obstructing and interfering with an ongoing criminal prosecutions.”

And those things may well be true! But it’s also true that Wade’s legal career to date, while perfectly respectable, has largely involved misdemeanor and low-level civil disputes. In contrast, the other two other outside lawyers DA Willis hired to work on this case, John Floyd and Anna Green Cross, have extensive criminal prosecution backgrounds.

As the AJC reports:

Floyd, a prominent expert on racketeering laws, has been consulting with Willis’ office on the Trump and Young Slime Life RICO cases for almost three years. Cross, known for her experience arguing high-profile cases, including the Dunwoody day care and Jamil Al-Amin murder cases, has been deployed twice by Willis to argue during two key courtroom moments in the Trump case.

According to the AJC, Floyd is paid $100 less an hour than Wade. And while Cross and Floyd billed the county $43,000 and $73,000 respectively for their work on the RICO case, Wade billed almost $700,000 at the same time he and Willis were taking vacations together.

It’s not a great look.

Also not a great a look was Willis’s appearance at Big Bethel AME, a historically important Black church in Atlanta, on Martin Luther King weekend when she appeared to admit the relationship, while casting her critics as racist. Referring repeatedly to herself as a “flawed, hard headed and imperfect child” of God, she used the rhetorical device of a letter to the Almighty to attack her critics.

Why does Commissioner Thorn and so many others question my decision in a special counsel? Lord, your flawed, hardheaded and imperfect child.

I’m a little confused. I appointed three special counsel, as is my right to do. Paid them all the same hourly rate. They only attack one. I hired one white woman, a good personal friend and great lawyer. A superstar, I tell you. I hired one white man, brilliant, my friend and a great lawyer. And I hired one Black man. Another superstar, a great friend and a great lawyer. Oh, Lord, they’re going to be mad when I call them out on this nonsense.

First thing they say. Oh, she going to play the race card now? But no. God, isn’t it them who’s playing the race card when they only question one? Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years.

Two. Things. Can. Be. True. At. Once.

It is simultaneously horrifying that Willis got swatted on Christmas and is subjected to racist abuse and weekly death threats, and wildly irresponsible for her to hire her boyfriend for such a high profile job. Allegedly.

And for all the happy talk about this being just a minor speed bump, if the allegations are true, it’s going to be a serious problem.

Roman’s motion to dismiss is probably DOA, since there’s no precedent for dismissal in similar circumstances. But it could easily lead to the disqualification of the entire Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, transferring the case to some other prosecutor in a state with a lot of Republican DAs. Judge McAfee has scheduled a hearing on the motion for February 15, instructing the state to file a response by February 2.

“Even if everything goes as smoothly as humanly possible, it is difficult to imagine trying the former president before the November election,” former public defender Andrew Fleischman writes at the Daily Beast. “And it’s also possible the case may go to someone who will choose to dismiss it.”

And on top of all that, the allegations have fueled the Republican push to use newly enacted legislation to undermine the Fulton County DA and this case in particular — a push which had run aground but is now gaining steam.

Living in a world of nuance sucks. Paying a massive political price for personal missteps sucks. Having to believe two things at once sucks.

It all sucks. But there it is.

[AJC / Daily Beast / WaPo]

Liz Dye writes the Substack Law and Chaos and appears on Opening Arguments podcast.

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