Disgraced Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been slapped with another devastating setback following her failed case against President Donald Trump.
Willis, who was disqualified from the case in December, has become the face of ham-handed attempts to jail Trump before the 2024 election, and her overzealous prosecution ultimately blew up in her face after it was revealed that she hired her lover to work on the case.
Now, a mountain of legal bills accumulated by Trump could wind up being footed by Georgia taxpayers.
The possibility became very real after Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed into a law a bill that allows defendants to recoup public funds in cases brought by state prosecutors who are later disqualified. The bill, sent to Kemp’s desk by the Republican controlled state legislature, is widely seen as offering Trump the chance to recover millions of dollars in legal fees resulting from Willis’s case.
The Democratic prosecutor had charged Trump and 18 others with conspiring to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, a case that never made it to trial because of the allegations of nepotism against Willis.
Months after obtaining Trump’s historic mugshot, Willis was hit with allegations that she hired Nathan Wade, a fellow prosecutor with whom she was romantically involved, to work on the Trump case. He was paid roughly $700,000 over two years.
She was disqualified by the Georgia Court of Appeals in December, a ruling that could still be overturned on appeal by the Georgia Supreme Court.
Attorney Steven Sadow, who represents President Trump in the case, told Forbes that Kemp’s decision to sign the bill “represents a major turning point in holding unethical, opportunistic and deceitful prosecutors accountable for their misconduct.”
However, no mention was made by Sadow about whether the president will exercise his new right to ask Georgia taxpayers to cough up the cash.
At the height of his four criminal trials and two civil trials, it was estimated that Trump was spending upwards of $50 million per month on legal bills. A significant portion of fundraising for his 2024 election was diverted to fight Willis’s case and the others.
The state Supreme Court has not said if it will take up Willis’s appeal of her disqualification, but the case against Trump may be dead no matter what justices decide to do.
Willis’s future involvement would likely irreparably taint the case. Meanwhile, if she is disallowed from further participation, then the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of the State of Georgia would have to appoint a new special prosecutor to fill her role, a process that could take years to complete.
A new prosecutor would have to start from the beginning, sifting through all the evidence before deciding whether to bring charges, and pre-trial motions would likely push any case into 2028 or after Trump has left office.
The charges against Trump would need to be dropped entirely before he could seek to recoup legal fees, which he is presently paying through his own personal funds as well as those of a political action committee dedicated to keeping his political operation alive and well-financed during his second term.
