The resignation of Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade — the former lover of the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis — secures her place on the case against President Trump and 18 others for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Mr. Wade takes his leave after a ruling from Judge Scott McAfee that he or Ms. Willis could prosecute the case, but not both of them, due to a “significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team.” The judge found that Ms. Willis’s behavior with respect to Mr. Wade has been defined by a “tremendous lapse in judgment.”

Mr. Trump and a group of his co-defendants argue that the romantic relationship between Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis predated his hiring. The prosecutorial pair deny it, but Judge McAfee detected an “odor of mendacity” around how Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade handled, under oath, the story of when their relationship began. Once he was hired, Mr. Wade took Ms. Willis on trips to places like Aruba, Belize, and Napa Valley. 

Judge McAfee found that the “evidence did not establish the District Attorney’s receipt of a material financial benefit as a result of her decision to hire and engage in a romantic relationship” with Mr. Wade. He reckons that Ms. Willis’s contention that she paid Mr. Wade back with cash is “not so incredible as to be inherently unbelievable.” The “financial gain flowing” from her hiring of Mr. Wade, the jurist finds, “was not a motivating factor on the part of the District Attorney to indict and prosecute this case.”

Nevertheless, Judge McAfee declared that “a perceived conflict in the reasonable eyes of the public threatens confidence in the legal system itself,” and reasons that when “this danger goes uncorrected, it undermines the legitimacy and moral force of our already weakest branch of government.” Judge McAfee appears affronted by Ms. Willis’s declaration that her relationship with Mr. Wade, whom she has paid more than $650,000 of taxpayer money, is “stronger than ever.”

Mr. Wade’s resignation means that Ms. Willis and her office will stay on the case, one of the most highly anticipated in American history, pending a likely appeal from the defendants to a Georgia appellate court. In his resignation letter, Mr. Wade writes that he departs “in the interest of democracy, in dedication to the American public, and to move this case forward as quickly as possible.”

The erstwhile special prosecutor, whose affair with Ms. Willis transpired as he was undergoing a divorce from his wife of 16 years, Joycelyn. He adds in his resignation letter that the “furtherance of the rule of law and democracy is and has always been the North Star of our combined efforts in the prosecution of those who are alleged to have attempted to overthrow the results of Georgia’s 2020 Presidential Election.”

In a letter accepting her former boyfriend’s resignation, Ms. Willis writes, “I compliment you for the professionalism and dignity you have shown over the last 865 days, as you have endured threats against you and your family, as well as unjustified attacks in the media and in court on your reputation as a lawyer.”