Fani Willis’s Acolytes Line Up To Replace Judges Who Ruled Against Her in Past — Including on Trump Case

The wave of Fulton County assistant district attorneys — all of whom report to District Attorney Fani Willis — running for state judgeships in non-partisan elections next week suggests that the prosecutor is seeking to alter the face of the Peach State bench.Three prosecutors from Ms. Willis’s office are running against sitting judges in what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reckons is a “retribution tour.” One of them, Will Wooten, worked on the criminal racketeering case against President Trump and 18 others for election interference in the wake of the 2020 vote that eventually ended in dismissal after Ms. Willis was disqualified. That disqualification stemmed from Ms. Willis’s secret romance with her handpicked prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade. He was paid some $700,000 by Ms. Willis’s office, meaning by Fulton County’s taxpayers. While he was employed to prosecute Mr. Trump, he and Ms. Willis took vacations together to Napa Valley, Belize, and Aruba. After Mr. Wade left the case, he declared that workplace romances are “as American as apple pie.” Mr. Wooten is taking on a jurist from the Georgia Court of Appeals, Trent Brown, who voted to disqualify Ms. Willis from the case against Mr. Trump. Judge Brown was appointed by a Republican governor, Nathan Deal, to fill a vacancy in 2018. The vote to disqualify was two to one. The appellate court overruled the trial judge, Scott McAfee, who had allowed Ms. Willis to stay on if Mr. Wade departed even though he said their behavior emitted an “odor of mendacity” and was “legally improper.” Judge Brown wrote for the majority in favor of disqualification that this was the “rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.” He added that the “remedy crafted by” Judge McAfee to “prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion.”Ms. Willis appealed that ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court, which declined to hear her petition on a four to three vote. Soon thereafter an independent prosecutor, Peter Skandakakis, decided to drop the case after he failed to find a single prosecutor willing to take it on. Judge Brown had hesitated to dismiss the charges along with Ms. Willis, finding that such a step would be “extreme.”Mr. Wooten’s campaign website declares that “Will is running for the Georgia Court of Appeals because he believes judges must be independent, principled, and loyal to the Constitution.” He touts endorsements from a Democrat, Senator Jon Ossoff, who is himself up for reelection this fall, and the Georgia AFL-CIO.Judge Brown tells the Journal-Constitution that “I believe Fani Willis absolutely convinced my opponent to run against me. She would prefer a judiciary that operates in fear of her, as opposed to fair and impartial judges concerned with the proper application of the law.” In response, Ms. Willis has said that “Judge Trent Brown was appointed to his position and not elected by the people. He evidently feels entitled to it, but his service falls short. His baseless accusations show that he lacks the temperament and judgment to serve on our Court of Appeals.”Another of Ms. Willis’s prosecutors, Nikia Smith Sellers, is challenging Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, another Republican appointee. Judge Whitaker clashed with Ms. Willis’s office when she presided over another racketeering case, this concerning the rapper Young Thug and his YSL label. That case, the longest in Georgia’s history, was chaotic. So slapdash did Judge Whitaker judge the performance of Ms. Willis’s office that she ordered the entire prosecution team to watch a remedial training video mid-trial.Judge Whitaker is herself a former prosecutor. The campaign website of her challenger, Ms. Smith Sellers, touts more than “a decade of experience in the Fulton County DA’s Office” and her status as the “the granddaughter of Southwest Georgia sharecroppers.” She also notes that she was “an All-Conference three-sport collegiate athlete at Shaw University. This symbolizes the stamina and discipline required to manage a high-volume judicial docket.”A third acolyte of Ms. Willis’s, Janice Moore, is running against Judge Craig Schwall, a Republican appointee whose former intern ran against Ms. Willis in 2024. Notwithstanding her disqualification from the case against Mr. Trump, Ms. Willis won reelection in that race with some 70 percent of the vote. Judge Schwall touts himself as “a steady, fair-minded presence on the Fulton County Superior Court bench since 2005” who is “known for his ‘common sense’ approach to the law.”Ms. Willis, in addition to the trio of prosecutors seeking their judicial robes, has also recruited a discredited jurist to join her office as a prosecutor. In April she hired Judge Shermela Williams, who was the target of a misconduct probe by the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission, a judicial ethics body. The commission charged her with more than 30 counts of violating the Georgia Code of Judicial Conduct. A 66 page report argued for her removal from the bench. She resigned before she could be removed.Among the allegations against Ms. Williams is that she jailed for 45 minutes — for “shock value” — a 21 year-old woman, Molly Dennis, who had been summoned to testify in her parent’s divorce hearing. The then-judge accused the woman of being “flippant.” Ms. Williams has apologized for that incident and reflects that “Hindsight being 20/20 I would not have handled it like that.”

Fani Willis’s Acolytes Line Up To Replace Judges Who Ruled Against Her in Past — Including on Trump Case

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