Fulton County’s Democratic District Attorney, Fani Willis, has faced a significant setback as Georgia’s highest court has refused to reconsider her disqualification from her repeatedly postponed RICO and 2020 election interference case involving Donald Trump. According to Trump’s principal defense lawyer, this decision should bring an end to the “lawfare persecutions of the President.”

The Georgia Supreme Court issued their verdict early Tuesday morning with three justices dissenting. The case concerns Willis’ prosecution of Trump, along with Mike Roman, David Shafer, Robert Cheeley, Mark Meadows, Cathleen Latham, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, and Harrison Floyd.

In December 2024, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee erred when he gave Willis and her chosen special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, who she had a romantic relationship with, an ultimatum that one must step aside due to a “significant appearance of impropriety.” The appeals court indicated that McAfee should have disqualified Willis and her office entirely, as this rare case required that level of action due to the appearance of impropriety alone.

“The remedy proposed by the trial court failed to rectify the existing appearance of impropriety during times when DA Willis exercised her extensive pretrial discretion regarding prosecutions and charges,” the appellate court stated. “Though the appearance of impropriety usually doesn’t suffice for disqualification, this rare instance necessitates it, with no other remedy adequate to restore public trust in the fairness of these legal actions.”

The appellate court highlighted that the prosecutors did not file a cross-appeal to challenge McAfee’s determination of an appearance of impropriety, leaving that conclusion unexamined, which was relevant for the Georgia Supreme Court’s majority decision on Tuesday.

The lead concurrence, penned by Justice Andrew Pinson, noted that the majority rejected Willis’ request for review because “[t]he root of the problem is the State’s approach to litigating this issue on appeal” — contesting McAfee’s ultimatum as an “abuse of discretion” but not the judge’s finding of an appearance of impropriety.

“In the Court of Appeals, the defendants here appealed the trial court’s disqualification order, which (1) found that the conduct of the district attorney and special prosecutor created a ‘significant appearance of impropriety,’ and (2) as a remedy, determined that one of those two prosecutors would have to withdraw from the case,” Pinson explained. “In doing so, the defendants did not contest the appearance-of-impropriety finding, but they contended that the trial court’s ‘one of you has to go’ version of disqualification was error, and that it should have instead simply disqualified the district attorney. And critically, the State did not cross-appeal the trial court’s ruling.”

The concurring justice was not convinced that answering the question presented — whether a prosecutor “may be disqualified ‘based solely upon [an] appearance of impropriety and absent a finding of an actual conflict of interest or forensic misconduct'” — would actually “help resolve” the underlying case.

“In an appropriate case, that question might warrant our review. The legal basis for a rule that prosecutors may be subject to disqualification based only on conduct that creates the appearance of impropriety is not clear,” Pinson wrote, before concluding that this case was, in fact, a “poor vehicle” for reaching that clarity.

“In short, rather than deciding any broader question about whether an appearance of impropriety can serve as an independent ground for disqualification of public prosecutors, the Court of Appeals’ decision appears to have resolved a narrow, case-specific dispute about the trial court’s choice of disqualification remedy,” Pinson said. “If that’s the best reading of the Court of Appeals’ decision — and I think it is — that decision does not raise a question of gravity that warrants our further review.”

While Pinson predicted that other McAfee-esque ultimatums, as coupled with the “specific and unusual circumstances” of the RICO case, is “not a question of Georgia law at all likely to arise in future cases,” and thus the high court declined to engage in “mere error correction” on an issue that doesn’t “have some broader impact on Georgia law.”

“[I]t seems more likely to me that the circumstances of this case are unique, and I am not convinced that parties will rely on it for anything broader than the Court of Appeals’ stated conclusion that, based on the specific findings in this case, the trial court chose the wrong remedy,” the justice concluded. “And of course, if this prediction turns out to be wrong, we will have the opportunity to address the legal question about the appearance of impropriety standard for public prosecutors when it is properly presented in a case without the unusual procedural limitations and other circumstances that make this case a poor vehicle for reaching that question.”

Justice Carla Wong McMillian, in dissent, said on the contrary that the “novel issue of gravity” surrounding disqualification of a prosecutor based on the appearance of impropriety is such that it “affects every single active lawyer in the State of Georgia” and “is likely to recur,” making this a case well worth reviewing.

“No doubt, the facts of these cases are unusual and the cases are politically-charged due to the subject matter and the parties involved, including the current President of the United States. But neither the unusual underlying facts nor the identities of the parties deprive these cases of gravity,” McMillian wrote. “This is because the legal principles underlying the Court of Appeals’s ruling—in particular, the proposition that an appearance of impropriety alone can warrant and even require disqualification—are not bound to this specific factual scenario or to these specific parties but will instead apply to a wide variety of situations in which a litigant can show only an appearance of impropriety—and those situations are likely to recur with some frequency.”

In response to the ruling, Trump defense attorney Steve Sadow stated that Willis was doomed by her own “egregious” misconduct.

“The Georgia Supreme Court has correctly denied review of the Georgia Court of Appeals decision disqualifying DA Willis and her office as prosecutors in the Fulton County RICO case,” Sadow said. “Willis’ misconduct during the investigation and prosecution of President Trump was egregious and she deserved nothing less than disqualification. This proper decision should bring an end to the wrongful political, lawfare persecutions of the President.”

During the appeal Sadow, had not only asked for Willis’ disqualification but also for a dismissal of the indictment, citing as evidence of the DA’s bias “calculated and egregious” misconduct during a 2024 speech at a Black church in Atlanta in which she “falsely” labeled Trump and co-defendants “racists.” Trump argued that McAfee actually didn’t go far enough with his ultimatum for Willis and Wade because the trial judge had stopped short of finding an “actual” conflict of interest and didn’t take into account the DA’s “unethical, racially charged” words ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Though Trump did not win dismissal, he did win Willis’ disqualification and for reasons unrelated to her remarks.