(BBC News) Two Georgia prosecutors have rejected calls to take them off their election case against Donald Trump after acknowledging they had a relationship.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said conflict of interest claims were “salacious” and in “bad faith”.
Nathan Wade, an outside prosecutor Willis appointed to the case, said in an affidavit the pair had “developed a personal relationship” in 2022.
Trump and co-defendants want them disqualified from the case.
Friday’s filings were the first time the two prosecutors publicly acknowledged their relationship.
One of Trump’s co-defendants, Mike Roman, has alleged the two prosecutors had an improper relationship and benefited financially from the arrangement.
The accusations threaten to undermine the prosecution of the former president and his allies for an alleged conspiracy to reverse Georgia’s 2020 election results.
The former president seized on the admission, writing on Truth Social on Friday that “by going after the most high level person… she was able to get her ‘lover’ much more money.”
In her filing, Willis argues that they do not meet the threshold for disqualification under Georgia state law.
She has asked Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, to reject legal efforts by defendants to remove her.
“The motions attempt to cobble together entirely unremarkable circumstances of special prosecutor Wade’s appointment with completely irrelevant allegations about his personal family life into a manufactured conflict of interest on the part of the district attorney,” she writes. “The effort must fail.”
The judge has scheduled a hearing for February 15 to address the claims.
In his affidavit, Wade denied that his compensation for working on the case was shared with Willis.
He said he never cohabitated, shared household expenses, or shared a joint account with Willis. Wade also said “expenses for personal travel were roughly divided equally between us,” and that they used personal funds for such expenses.
Willis brought Wade on board the investigation as a special prosecutor in 2021. Shortly afterward, Wade filed for divorce from his wife of two decades.
In January court filings, Roman accused Wade and Willis of benefiting financially from an “improper, clandestine, personal relationship.”
He alleged Wade profited “significantly” at “the expense of the taxpayers” and, by extension, so did Willis. The filing accuses them of taking lavish trips together.
The document does not provide concrete evidence of these claims.
Trump and another co-defendant, Bob Cheeley, have since joined Roman’s motion to disqualify the district attorney.
The defendants’ allegations have played out in tandem with Wade’s divorce proceedings. His ex-wife, Joycelyn Wade, had filed a subpoena for Willis to testify in their divorce.
The Wades settled their divorce on January 30, shortly before a scheduled hearing.
If Roman’s efforts succeed, it would deal a serious blow to Willis’s case.
“A disqualification poses a real danger to the work done by the Fulton County DA’s Office,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, told the BBC.
The legal threshold to successfully remove Willis and her office from the case over a conflict of interest is high, he said.
But if the defendants were successful, the entire Fulton County District Attorney’s office would have to be removed from the case and another office appointed in their place, Kreis said.
In that scenario, “it is possible that the trials proceed without any noticeable shifts in strategy,” he said. “Or the new prosecutor could make light plea deals or even give up on the endeavour entirely.”
