Democrats gave Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis an award on Friday night. Willis is in charge of prosecuting the Georgia case against former President Donald Trump for meddling in the election.
In August 2023, Trump, who was thought to be the GOP presidential candidate, and 18 other people were charged with planning to overturn President Joe Biden’s election win in Georgia in 2020. All charges against the former president have been dropped, and he has said the case is politically driven.
Willis was given the Woman of Influence award at the Cobb County Democratic Committee’s yearly gala on Friday night. Local candidates for office need the gala to raise the most money, according to Essence Johnson, who is acting chair of the group and spoke to WAGA-TV.
Willis is running for re-election this November against Republican Courtney Kramer and Democrat Christian Wise Smith, who ran against her in 2020. Kramer’s LinkedIn page says she used to work as a litigation consultant for Trump’s legal team.
Kramer called Willis’ actions a “disgrace to the legal community” last month after it came out that the district attorney had a personal relationship with Nathan Wade, who was the special prosecutor at the time and whom Kramer hired to help her with the Trump election interference case.
This year, Willis became famous all over the country when one of Trump’s co-defendants, Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign worker, said that Willis and Wade were seeing each other, which created a conflict of interest that meant they should be removed from the case and the charges against Willis should be dropped. Later, more defendants, including Trump, joined and added to Roman’s move.
Willis and Wade both said they were dating, but they said it began when she hired Wade in the spring of 2022 and stopped in the summer of 2023. They also said that the relationship didn’t make either of them any money.
The judge in charge of the election interference case, Scott McAfee, said last month that the defense’s proof was “legally insufficient” to prove that there was a conflict of interest. However, “the appearance of impropriety remains.”
He told Wade that either Willis and her office would have to step away and let another district attorney handle the case, or Wade would have to quit the case. Wade quit a few hours after McAfee made his choice public.
While Trump was president, Kramer worked as an intern in the Office of White House Counsel. Before McAfee made his decision public, she told the right-wing website Real America’s Voice, “As a lawyer myself, it’s disgusting to see her not follow her rules of professional conduct or take her oath of office seriously.”
