Trumped-up nonsense: Smearing Fani Willis won’t get Donald off the hook in Georgia

Michael Roman, an indicted criminal co-defendant in Trump’s Georgia election interference case, has a new mission.

He’s filed a 127-page motion to dismiss and disqualify Fulton County DA Fani Willis, her outside counsel Nathan Wade — and the entire Fulton County prosecutors’ office. He wants them removed from the case on the grounds that Willis and Wade are allegedly having a consensual affair.

Roman, Trump’s former director of election day operations, was indicted along with Trump and others on a full range of election felonies, including impersonating government officials, forgery, pressuring officials to lie and supporting false electors to falsify Georgia’s election results.

Roman’s motion is defeated by its own attached exhibits, which you’ll understand in a moment. Trump, whose trial counsel struggles with exhibits in general, has now joined in the motion. It appears Trump lawyer Alina Habba hasn’t read the exhibits either, nor has mainstream media. Depending on how aggressive Willis decides to be in her response, counsel for the defense could be facing sanctions for filing a frivolous motion defective on its face.

A trumped-up claim

Roman claims Willis hired Wade without county authority, and that, as a result, Willis and Wade are “defrauding taxpayers.” Roman has moved for an order disqualifying Willis, her office and Wade “... on the grounds that [they] have been engaged in an improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case…”

He argues that under Georgia law, Willis was required but failed to obtain Fulton County’s approval prior to appointing Wade as special prosecutor, which means the indictment “suffers from a structural and irreparable defect and must be dismissed.”

Despite spending the bulk of real estate in his motion on the claim that Willis hired Wade without permission from Fulton County commissioners, Roman seems to have overlooked his own exhibits.

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Exhibit C, attached to his motion to disqualify, is a fully executed Fulton County document titled, “A resolution authorizing funding for additional personnel for the office of Fulton County District Attorney personnel,” the exact authorization Roman claims is lacking.

The resolution was signed by the Fulton County commissioners on Sept. 15, 2021. It granted Willis nearly $800,000 for 2021 and $5 million for 2022 to retain more staff to prosecute crime. The resolution did not limit the types of crimes to be prosecuted in any way. Two months after the Fulton County commissioners authorized the additional funds, Willis hired Wade to assist with the election felonies.

Roman argues that the county’s authority was limited to prosecuting COVID backlog cases. Not only were the alleged election crimes committed during the heart of COVID, but, despite being less than two pages long and double spaced, the signed resolution says no fewer than four times that Fulton county also appropriated the funds to help Willis address Georgia’s rising crime rate. Georgia crimes would include any felony, including election felonies.

Willis will likely highlight Fulton County’s resolution when she files her response to the motion on February 2. But by then, the damage will be done because mainstream media journalists can’t stop themselves from circulating everyone else’s opinion by repeating the same empty headlines about “taxpayer expense” and “conflict of interest” without examining what those words actually mean in this context.

MSM is helping MAGA by amplifying Trump’s deflection

Extremists in the Republican party have developed a dark but effective media strategy to protect Trump from the optics of his own criminality. They have lodged repeated complaints, claims and investigations — without an underlying good faith basis in law or fact — against visible Democrats. They’ve done this to deflect from Trump’s illegal conduct as we enter the 2024 election cycle. The noise from their constant false allegations minimizes Trump’s crimes in the court of public opinion and leads exhausted voters to tune out and simply lump all politicians facing legal charges into one fungible pile.

When Roman’s filing hit the court, mainstream media pounced. Headlines claimed that Willis and Wade were seen taking “lavish vacations” at “taxpayers’ expense.” Details about their luxurious vacations swirled on the front pages of nearly every major publisher. Even CNN got in on the sloppy reporting, repeating the same line about taking vacations “at taxpayers’ expense.” It seems no one in the media bothered to read the fine print.

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If it isn’t patently obvious, any employee or contractor who works for the government, including prosecutors and their outside counsel, are always paid with taxpayer funds. Roman’s claim that Willis and Wade were “profiting” and “vacationing” at “taxpayer expense” just means they got paid from county coffers for doing the job they were hired to do. Government-paid employees and contractors can spend their income however they wish. They can use it to clone unicorns if they want.

The motion also alleges that Willis personally profited from Wade’s contract, because Wade paid — or helped to pay, or shared the cost — for romantic trips he took with Willis. Roman alleges that “Willis and Wade have traveled personally together to such places as Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean… Wade has also purchased hotel rooms for personal trips with funds from the same account used to receive payments under his contract with Willis.”

Insert eyeroll here.

Wade’s use of “funds from the same account used to receive payments under his contract,” just means he deposited his county check into his personal bank account, then spent his own money, like everyone else. Writing “same account…contract” just makes it sound suspicious.

The motion to disqualify trumps up a fake motive

The bottom line of the disqualification motion is that Willis hired Wade because they were involved romantically, and she wanted to benefit financially from his hourly compensation, which Roman claims is excessive.

It’s a sloppy theory.

According to a newly released book, “Find Me the Votes,” Willis tried to hire two other prominent attorneys before she offered the role to Wade. Willis first asked Roy Barnes, a former Georgia governor, to serve as senior counsel in the Trump prosecution, but Barnes declined.

According to CBS News, Gabe Banks, a former federal prosecutor, was next, and also turned down Willis’ offer. Both men were reportedly concerned about MAGA threats to their personal and family safety, with Barnes asking, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want a bodyguard following you around for the rest of your life?”

The fact that Willis only hired Wade after two other prominent attorneys turned her down wholly defeats Roman’s claim that she hired “her boyfriend” in order to “benefit financially” from his contract.

Although Willis made a campaign quip, during an interview, that she would not date her staff, outside counsel and staff attorneys don’t follow the same office hierarchy. Campaign commitments are not legally binding in any event, to the great relief of everyone who’s ever been elected. Regarding Wade’s hourly fee of $250 per hour, Willis ultimately retained two additional outside attorneys to work on the election interference case. She paid all three outside attorneys the same rate, but the motion to disqualify targets only Wade’s hourly rate. Wade is Black; the other two outside attorneys are white.

Where is the conflict of interest anyway?

The strategy, more PR than legal, is to distract the public’s attention away from damning recorded evidence of a defeated Trump on the phone pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 non-existent votes — an obvious election felony. Indictment-adjacent, the deflection gives Fox News and right=-wing pundits a plausible substitution to avoid discussing the damning fusillade of evidence against Trump.

Headlines keep repeating Roman’s unexamined claim that Willis’ alleged affair with Wade presents a “conflict of interest.” A consensual affair with someone on your own team doesn’t create a conflict of interest, nor does traveling together, nor does getting paid.

The motion waxes on about Willis’ alleged attempt to “defraud the public” by personally benefiting “from an undisclosed conflict of interest” without identifying exactly where Willis’ conflict of interest lies. Roman recites boilerplate language from Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct’s instruction that, “[a] lawyer shall not represent or continue to represent a client if there is a significant risk that the lawyer's own interests … will materially and adversely affect the representation of the client.”

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But the client here is Fulton County, not Roman. The county’s interest is in securing a just conviction for Trump and his colleagues, if that is where the facts and law lead. Willis and Wade want the same thing their client wants. They don’t have their own interests outside of their client’s interest, and their interests do not conflict with the county’s, in any event. There is no “conflict” where attorneys and client want the same outcome.

Roman’s brief relies on Whitworth v. State, but that case dealt with bribery, and a Georgia statute that prohibits state employees from receiving “anything of value” to which they are not entitled in return for procuring a specific outcome. Roman seems to believe that Wade and Willis’ desire to succeed on his conviction, like expecting to get paid for their work, creates an unethical “personal interest” in his conviction. Under that take, attorneys would be acting unethically every time they care about the outcome of a case, or they submit an invoice for their work.

Before repeating Roman’s salacious headlines, journalists should make the distinction between a consensual affair and classic quid pro quo. Taking romantic trips together is not the same as when a judge, or a Supreme Court justice, receives millions of dollars in gifts from a litigant appearing before the court, then rules in favor of the gifting party in payback quid pro quo. There is no allegation that Wade or Willis accepted a bribe, or that they are pursuing Trump’s conviction for financially illicit purposes. Both prosecutors want to secure a conviction; there is no allegation that they received “gifts” to influence how they go about getting one.

Roman finally complains that Wade has an incentive to continue working on his prosecution because that’s Wade’s source of income. But all attorneys represent clients because they get paid (unless their client is Donald Trump.) Wade’s “financial incentive” to prosecute Trump and Roman in this context again sounds sinister, but it means nothing other than the expectation of receiving pay for work performed.

A parting shot about the glaring double standard

As journalists bend over backward to throw dirt on Democrats to counterbalance Trump coverage, obvious political stunts such as Trump/Roman’s motion to dismiss garner excessive coverage. It is all meant to equalize coverage of Trump’s traitorous conduct, which has no equal.

Last summer in the E. Jean Carroll case, a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual assault, the legal equivalent of rape, yet Republicans still consider him qualified to serve as president of the United States.

To MAGA voters, a man can rape a woman, and brag about grabbing her genitalia without permission, and accumulate accusations of inappropriate behavior from at least 18 women, and still occupy the highest office in the nation.

But a woman in a consensual affair with outside counsel is disqualified from service as a county prosecutor.

Got it.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year federal trial attorney specializing in First and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.