A lawyer for one of the defendants charged along with former President Donald J. Trump in the Georgia election interference case said in a court filing on Monday that the district attorney overseeing the case, Fani T. Willis, had engaged in a “clandestine” relationship with the special prosecutor she hired to help handle it. The filing argued that the relationship should disqualify Willis, her office, and the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, from prosecuting the case, The New York Times reports. The defense lawyer, Ashleigh B. Merchant, also wrote that Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., was “profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers,” charging that Willis and Wade had taken vacations together with money he made working for her office. Merchant also argued in the filing that Willis had not obtained the proper approval to appoint Wade and that the case should be dismissed as a result.
It is unclear how the claims will affect the Georgia prosecution, one of several criminal cases against Trump. The former president filed a flurry of motions in the case on Monday, including one in which his lawyers argued that he is immune from prosecution in the case. Clark D. Cunningham, a law and ethics professor at Georgia State University, reviewed Roman’s filing and questioned why it did not contain any proof of a relationship between the two prosecutors. Merchant said she believed records showing proof were included in Wade’s sealed divorce filings and asked in a separate court filing this week that those records be unsealed. The claims by Merchant appeared in a 39-page motion filed in Fulton County Superior Court on Monday on behalf of Roman, who as a Trump campaign official in 2020 took part in a plan to organize pro-Trump electors in Georgia despite Trump’s defeat there.
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