President Donald Trump went after Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis on Tuesday as he left the White House for a state visit to the U.K.
His attack came just hours after Willis lost her final appeal in her attempt to prosecute Trump and his allies for trying to overturn the 2020 election. The Georgia Supreme Court decided in a 4–3 ruling that it would not hear her case. That decision leaves her permanently disqualified from leading the prosecution.
Trump called the ruling “a great decision.”
“It was a big case to start off with. It’s great. The court just ruled that she is a disaster. She’s a disaster with her boyfriend. The boyfriend that she paid $1 million for his expertise, but he never did it before,” Trump said, referencing Willis’ relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired for the case.
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Then he escalated further.
“Now she should be prosecuted. She was a — what she did to people. Forget about me. What Fani Willis did to innocent people. Patriots that love our country, what she did to them by indicting them and destroying them. She should be put in jail. She’s a criminal! Fani Willis is a criminal.”
The case dates back to Willis’ racketeering charges against Trump and his allies, after Trump famously demanded Georgia officials “find” the 11,780 votes needed to flip the state in his favor.
Her removal stems from what judges described as the “appearance of impropriety” tied to her romantic relationship with Wade. In December, the Georgia Court of Appeals barred her office from prosecuting the case. On Tuesday, the state’s highest court refused to overturn that decision.
Willis, in a statement, said she disagreed with the ruling but promised to hand over the case files to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, which will now have to find someone else to handle the case.
“I hope that whoever is assigned to handle the case will have the courage to do what the evidence and the law demand,” Willis wrote.
Ashleigh Merchant, the defense lawyer for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman who first exposed Willis’ relationship with Wade, said: “We hope this will finally close this chapter.”
The ruling leaves Trump off the hook — at least for now. The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council confirmed it will begin searching for a new prosecutor to take the case, but there’s no timeline for how long that could take.
Featured image via YouTube screengrab
