In a shocking 2-1 ruling Thursday, a three-judge panel from the second division of the Peach State’s appellate court denied a request to throw out the case entirely but granted a motion to kick off Willis, 53, and her team who led the indictment against Trump, 78, and 18 co-defendants last year.
Judge Trenton Brown said in the 12-page order that Trump and eight of his co-defendants had “numerous grounds” to appeal the case after a lower court “imposed an improper remedy” despite concluding that Willis’ prosecution had a “significant appearance of impropriety.”
The ruling cites Willis’ decision to hire and extravagantly pay her now-ex-lover Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor, taking him on lavish trips and allowing him to excessively bill her office for his work on the Trump case.
“While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety is generally not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” Brown and the other appellate jurists contended.
The judges underscored that booting Willis from the case would help resolve the “odor of mendacity.”
Wade left that role in March after an Atlanta judge determined that one or the other them had to step down. Both Wade and Willis publicly maintained that their fling took place prior to him being hired to manage the case.
Witnesses, however, had come forward with claims disputing their timeline. Wade had split from his wife of 26 years the same day he was announced as special prosecutor in 2021, raising questions about the timeline of when their romance began.
Wade was accused of shelling out some $654,000 he raked in for his work on the sprawling racketeering case for lavish gifts and getaways with Willis, his boss at the time. That raised questions about the extent to which Willis benefited financially from the person she hired with taxpayer dollars.
The pair had traveled together to Miami and North Carolina, but Willis claimed they had switched who paid for those vacations.
Trump and a handful of others being prosecuted in the sweeping 2020 Georgia election tampering case forged ahead with a petition to knock Willis off the case as well.
“In granting President Trump an overwhelming mandate, the American People have demanded an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all the Witch Hunts against him. We look forward to uniting our country as President Trump Makes America Great Again,” Trump’s communication director Steve Cheung cheered in a statement after the ruling.
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Last month, special counsel Jack Smith withdrew his four-count 2020 election subversion indictment against Trump and also ended efforts to revive the 40-count Mar-a-Lago document case. His legal team is also scrambling to quash the 34-count “hush money” conviction in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case.
Trump was facing 10 counts in the Fulton County case and has pleaded not guilty.
While Willis may have been booted, the president-elect is not out of the woods yet.
“We cannot conclude that the record also supports the imposition of the extreme sanction of dismissal of the indictment,” the court concluded in its ruling.
Judge Ben Land, who had been appointed to the Georgia Court of Appeals by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, dissented, arguing that the court was overstepping and glossing over some of the lower court’s key findings.