OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is in charge of the case against former President Donald Trump, donated $150 to the campaign of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis before his appointment on the case.
According to financial disclosures, McAfee made his donation in June 2020 while still working for the Department of Justice (DOJ) as an assistant U.S. Attorney. Following his appointment by Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, he took office on February 1, 2023, according to the Daily Caller.
He must soon determine whether to disqualify Willis due to claims that she received financial gain from assigning her romantic partner, Nathan Wade, to work on the Trump case.
According to the New York Times, McAfee also used to work for Fani Willis, who oversaw the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office’s complex trial division.
Even though McAfee’s donation was “nominal,” Atlanta-based criminal defense lawyer and legal analyst Philip Holloway told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the defendants should have been informed so they could decide “whether they believed that amounted to a conflict of interest on the part of the judge.”
“The donation itself is more or less a token amount and was made before he became a judge,” he said. “But failure to disclose to the defendants a political donation to the prosecutor can be seen as a present appearance of a conflict of interest. Judges are required to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Judge McAfee has not shied away from delivering unfavorable decisions to Willis and even reprimanded her several times earlier this month for her behavior on the stand.
McAfee presided over the hearing on Michael Roman, a co-defendant of Trump, seeking to have Willis removed from office last week. He had turned down the district attorney’s request to postpone the hearing earlier.
Financial disclosures show that McAfee also donated $200 to Kemp’s campaign in 2018 and another $200 to Republican state representative candidate Lyndsey Rudder’s campaign in 2020. The wife of McAfee gave $101 in 2018 and $99 to Willis’ campaign in 2020.
Willis faced off against Paul Howard Jr., a former Democratic district attorney in Fulton County, during the primary.
Criminal defense lawyer Andrew Fleischman of Atlanta disagreed that the donation had to be revealed to the defense.
“It is such a routine part of how Georgia judges and attorneys interact that I don’t think it should have been disclosed, necessarily, past the mandatory disclosures,” he told the Daily Caller.
The Georgia Code of Judicial Conduct states that judges should “avoid both impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in their professional and personal lives.”
Even though a close friend of Willis’s testified against it, Willis and Wade insisted on the witness stand last week that their relationship started after Wade’s contract began. The two claimed there was no record proving Willis paid Wade’s travel expenses back because she gave him cash.
Willis is facing another round of trouble, as she’s now facing a “special meeting” on March 7 related to a pair of ethics complaints filed against her.
The meeting comes as she battles allegations that she had an improper affair with a special prosecutor she hired to help her with the case, Nathan Hale, who was paid nearly $700,000 in taxpayer funds as the two of them took extended trips and vacations together.
Georgetown University law school professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley broke down Willis’ courtroom testimony from last week following allegations that she had an improper relationship with a special prosecutor she hired to help with her case against Trump.
Turley addressed claims that Willis and the prosecutor, Nathan Wade, made false statements to the court about the beginning of their relationship, as well as allegations that they used public funds to take opulent vacations together.
“The astonishing thing about this is that you have two prosecutors accused of filing false statements in court,” said Turley.
“Mr. Wade is accused of answering interrogatories falsely. And Willis is accused of making false statements in her filings. That’s what they’re prosecuting defendants in the case for,” Turley added.
“My question is, will he refer these two to the bar? There are allegations of false statements being filed. Their testimony did not help in that respect. And so will [Judge Scott McAfee] say, ‘Look, I’m going to suggest that one or both of you remove yourselves or maybe even order it, but I am also going to ask the bar to look into these allegations’?”
WATCH:
Roman’s attorneys claimed in a 122-page filing earlier this month that they had a witness whose testimony contradicted Willis’ denials regarding the timeline of her relationship with Wade when she claimed it started after she appointed him as a special prosecutor in the investigation into Trump’s attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
