Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis attends a hearing on the Georgia election interference case on March 1 in Atlanta.Alex Slitz/Reuters
An appeals court has halted the Georgia election-interference case against former U.S. president Donald Trump and others while it reviews the lower-court judge’s ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to remain on the case.
The Georgia Court of Appeals’ order on Wednesday prevents Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee from moving forward with pretrial motions as he had planned while the appeal is pending. While it was already unlikely that the case would go to trial before the November general election, when Mr. Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee for president, this makes that even more certain.
The appeals court on Monday docketed the appeals filed by Mr. Trump and eight others and said that “if oral argument is requested and granted,” it is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 4. The court will then have until mid-March to rule, and the losing side will be able to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.
A spokesperson for Ms. Willis declined to comment on the appeals court ruling.
A Fulton County grand jury in August indicted Mr. Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a sprawling scheme to illegally try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Four defendants have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors, but Mr. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. It is one of four criminal cases against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump and eight other defendants had tried to get Ms. Willis and her office removed from the case, arguing that a romantic relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest. Justice McAfee in March found that no conflict of interest existed that should force Ms. Willis off the case, but he granted a request from Mr. Trump and the other defendants to seek an appeal of his ruling from the state Court of Appeals.
Justice McAfee wrote that “an odor of mendacity remains.” He said “reasonable questions” over whether Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade had testified truthfully about the timing of their relationship “further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it.” He said Ms. Willis could remain on the case only if Mr. Wade left, and the special prosecutor submitted his resignation hours later.
The allegations that Ms. Willis had improperly benefited from her romance with Mr. Wade resulted in a tumultuous couple of months in the case as intimate details of Ms. Willis’s and Mr. Wade’s personal lives were aired in court in mid-February.