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ajc.com
By Tamar Hallerman
1/25/24
Trump joins effort to oust Fulton DA Fani Willis, citing racial bias
Willis’ defiant remarks at a Black church showed “racial animus” toward Trump
Donald Trump on Thursday joined a push to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Fulton County’s election interference case, saying her defiant remarks at a historic Black church showed “racial animus” toward the former president and his co-defendants.
In a court filing, Trump’s two top Atlanta attorneys accused Willis, who is Black, of a “glaring, flagrant, and calculated effort to foment racial bias into this case.” That could unfairly prejudice a jury, they said, and violated Georgia’s rules of professional conduct.
Trump’s lawyers Steve Sadow and Jennifer Little weighed in a little more than two weeks after explosive allegations emerged that Willis was in a secret relationship with one of the case’s special prosecutors and benefitting financially from it.
Willis’ only public comments about the claims so far came in a recent Martin Luther King Jr. Day service at downtown’s Big Bethel AME Church. During her 35-minute speech, Willis didn’t address the relationship accusations head-on but defended the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, who is also Black, and accused her critics of playing the “race card
Timeline of allegations against Fulton DA Fani Willis
Sadow and Little argued the DA’s “provocative and inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments, made in a widely publicized speech at a historical Black church in Atlanta, and cloaked in repeated references to God, reinforce and amplify the ‘appearance of impropriety’ in her judgment and prosecutorial conduct.”
A Willis spokesman declined to comment.
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Tamar Hallerman is an award-winning senior reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She covers the Fulton County investigation into whether former President Donald Trump or his allies criminally interfered in Georgia’s 2020 election