Fani Willis
In a convoluted decision, a Georgia judge has allowed Fulton County DA Fani Willis – who had an apparent conflict of interest in her hiring of a special lawyer to assemble an organized crime case against President Trump – to stay on the case.
Her paramour, whom she hired for two-thirds of a million dollars and then accompanied on exotic vacations, had to go.
But a recognized legal expert says Willis still has to be removed, even as an appeal of the original case decision by Judge Scott McAfee is pending.
Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor-emeritus at Harvard, has written at the Gatestone Institute that McAfee's "split-the-difference opinion makes absolutely no sense legally or factually."
"It is obvious that Judge McAfee started his decision-making process by deciding the result he wanted: disqualifying special prosecutor Nathan Wade, but retaining Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her entire office. In order to reach that bizarre result, he had to rely on the testimony of Willis, which he knew was totally untruthful," Dershowitz wrote.
"Yes, he made an express finding that there are 'reasonable questions' about whether the district attorney and her hand-selected lead special assistant district attorney testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship. In general, he found that 'an odor of mendacity remains.' Yet, after making those devastating findings about the dishonesty of Willis, he said he believed her testimony rejecting financial gain. He found that it was 'not so incredible as to be inherently unbelievable.'"
But the famed lawyer pointed out, "Any reasonable person, however, watching her contrived testimony along with that of her former lover, could not reasonably conclude that they were telling the truth. It seems completely clear that she benefited financially from appointing Wade and then going on numerous trips, which records prove he paid for. Her testimony that she paid him back in cash was 'unbelievable' to any objective viewer."
The lawyer noted Georgia rules ban a district attorney from accepting any "financial benefits from anybody she hires. She knew that, and she also knew that someday she might be asked to prove that she paid her former lover back, yet she maintained no records of her alleged payments: no bank withdrawals, no photographs of the money she allegedly paid, not even notations in her calendar. No jury would believe that Willis in fact paid him back."
And, he noted, no reasonable jury would believe Willis "did not commit perjury when she swore that her sexual relationship with Wade began after she hired him rather than before."
He said evidence discounted that possibility.
And, he wondered, why has no criminal perjury investigation been opened.
"Judge McAfee expressly found that there was an appearance of conflict. There is also an obvious appearance of impropriety and injustice. That should be enough to disqualify a prosecutor. He also found that he had the power under Georgia law to disqualify Willis based on this appearance.
"Willis is the responsible elected official who created this problem. It was she who exercised horrendous judgment. It was she who benefited from hiring her lover and then taking trips that he paid for, and it was she who should have been disqualified," he said.
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