This article has been updated.

The defiant note sounded by the district attorney of Georgia’s Fulton County, Fani Willis, in a filing opposing efforts to disqualify her and her boyfriend — she now admits to the relationship — from prosecuting the racketeering case against President Trump and 18 others sets up a courtroom showdown over the fate of one of America’s most anticipated cases.

The district attorney, even as she declares that it is “distasteful that such allegations require a response,” admits to a “personal relationship” with that prosecutor, Nathan Wade. She even includes an affidavit from him outlining the timeline of their developing connection.

Ms. Willis derides the accusations against her as “meritless” and “salacious” and “designed to obtain” the attention of the press. She pleads for the presiding judge, Scott McAfee, to deny summarily the motions against her — from one of her defendants, Michael Roman, and Mr. Trump — “without an evidentiary hearing.” 

The position shared by Messrs. Trump and Roman is that Ms. Willis’s hiring of a special prosecutor with whom she was having an amorous relationship should trigger not only their departure from the case, but also the dismissal of the charges altogether. The defendants allege that Mr. Wade was appointed defectively and that the more than $650,000 paid to him by Ms. Willis’s office amounts to a conflict of interest.

The defendants point to receipts that show trips to Napa Valley, the Caribbean, and Florida. They also allege that Mr. Wade once billed Fulton County for 24 hours of work in a single day. Ms. Willis has — without evidence — characterized these and related criticisms as motivated by racial animus. She defends Mr. Wade’s credentials as “impeccable.”    

This is the context in which Ms. Willis admits to a “personal relationship” with Mr. Wade, who is married and going through a divorce. She asserts that their romance began only after he was hired. The defendants claim that Mr. Wade would never have been picked to lead the sprawling case — he has never prosecuted a felony or a racketeering trial —  but for his relationship with Ms. Willis. They also point to a timeline that suggests the romance was kindled long before Mr. Trump’s prosecution. 

On Friday evening, Mr. Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, struck back with an “Initial Reply” to Ms. Willis, asking that if she and Mr. Wade had “nothing to hide in the first place because they did nothing wrong, then why did they intentionally not tell anyone about it until they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar?” Ms. Merchant adds that the court cannot avoid the “growing smoke cloud” of scandal because “peoples’ freedom and lives are at stake.”

In a statement sent to the Sun, Mr. Trump’s attorney, Steven Sadow, writes that Ms. Willis seeks to persuade Judge McAfee “to turn a blind eye to her alleged personal and financial misconduct” and that she “fails to provide full transparency and necessary financial details.” He adds that the district attorney is guilty of “intentional injection of racial animus in violation of her ethical responsibilities as a prosecutor.”

In determining whether Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade are fit to carry on with the case, Judge McAfee could look to Fulton County law, which ordains that officials are to be “in fact and in appearance, independent and impartial in the performance of their official duties.” Mr. Roman writes that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade are ordered “to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.” 

The district attorney argues that she “has no financial conflict of interest that constitutes a legal basis for disqualification” and that she “has no personal conflict of interest that justifies her disqualification personally or that of the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.” She also mounts a defense of Mr. Wade, characterizing criticism of his selection as “factually inaccurate, unsupported, and malicious.” 

Ms. Willis takes the position that the motions to disqualify her and her boyfriend are efforts 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.” The suggestion that she has improperly intertwined the prosecutorial and personal are, she declares, “fantastical theories and rank speculation.”  

While Mr. Roman argues that receipts of shared trips taken by Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis indicate that his appointment was a boon to both, she responds that her “state and county annual compensation is set by state law and county guidelines respectively, and is not in the least bit reliant or dependent on any particular outcome in this case—or any other.”

Ms. Willis notes that she “did not go looking for this case,” but rather that the 19 defendants “centered their racketeering conspiracy to disrupt and overturn the 2020 Georgia election in Fulton County,” leaving her no choice. Prosecutors, though, are granted discretion in the choice of which cases they bring. 

Ms. Willis has long courted controversy for her creative racketeering prosecutions — including of Atlanta public school teachers who cheated on tests and chart-topping rappers whose lyrics she uses against them — and for her decision to retry a wealthy white lawyer, Tex McIver, who shot his wife, he claims accidentally, after getting out his gun allegedly due to fear of Black Lives Matter protesters.  

The core of the district attorney’s position on her “personal relationship” with Mr. Wade is that the “existence of a relationship between members of a prosecution team, in and of itself, is simply not a status that entitles a criminal defendant any remedy.” She also observes that there “are at least two personal relationships among the collection of defense attorneys representing the Defendants.” 

The prosecutor, in describing her boyfriend as a “diligent and relentless advocate known for his candor with the Court, and a leader more than capable of managing the complexity of this case,” appears to be eschewing the advice of some of her allies who have called for her to ask Mr. Wade to step aside to preserve the case’s viability. She goes so far as to say that “no serious person could contest his legal qualifications.”

Ms. Willis also marshals evidence that Ms. Merchant, has in the past been a vocal supporter of Mr. Wade. During his 2016 campaign for a judgeship, she wrote on Facebook: “Why Nathan Wade? Nathan is ethical. … Experience matters.” Now, Ms. Willis says, Ms. Merchant alleges that he is unqualified to try the case against her client.