Following months of controversy over District Attorney Fani Willis’ relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade, an appeals court removed Willis from President Trump’s election interference case in Georgia.

From The Hill. A Georgia appeals court booted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s (D) office from the 2020 election interference case against President-elect Trump on Thursday due to her relationship with a top prosecutor on the case.

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The panel described Willis’s relationship with ex-special prosecutor Nathan Wade as a “significant appearance of impropriety.”

The court declined to outright dismiss Trump’s indictment, but disqualifying Willis’s office throws the future of the case — already complicated by Trump’s impending return to the White House — further into doubt.

“After carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office,” Judge E. Trenton Brown III wrote in the court’s ruling. …

The decision leaves open a theoretical possibility another prosecutor could take over the case, but the path forward remains precarious. Trump’s legal team has separately sought to dismiss all his criminal prosecutions on the grounds that he is the president-elect. …

Willis charged Trump and more than a dozen of his allies last summer for allegedly entering a months-long unlawful conspiracy to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia.

The revelation of the romance between Willis and Wade, whom the district attorney hired to spearhead the Trump prosecution, created a months-long detour in the case.

After a whirlwind hearing in February that saw both prosecutors take the stand, Judge Scott McAfee, who oversees the trial proceedings, found the romance amounted to an appearance of a conflict.

The judge said the prosecution could move ahead if Wade stepped aside, which he quickly did. …

The appeals court panel in Thursday’s ruling rejected Trump’s arguments that the romance amounted to an actual conflict — agreeing it was only an appearance of one — but said the judge was wrong to conclude Willis could move ahead. …

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(Excerpt from The Hill. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52646574)