A judge in Georgia has extended a three-month stay in the proceedings against one of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case.
“As a current member of the General Assembly, the Defendant is automatically entitled to a continuance and stay from ‘all aspects of the case,’” the latest filing in Georgia state Sen. Shawn Still’s (R) case read.
Pretrial motions in Still’s case now have until mid-April to be filed, The Hill noted.
“All other provisions, including initial reciprocal discovery obligations, remain in place,” the filing read. “Additional extensions will only be considered upon the filing of a particularized motion containing a detailed, fact-based explanation of the need for the extension, including the amount of time needed.”
A federal court blocked Still and two other “fake electors” accused of conspiring with the former president in Georgia from taking their cases to federal court in September 2023. David Shafer, Cathy Latham, and Still were unable to assert their status as federal officials when they signed documents in December 2020 claiming to be electors from the Peach State, according to three separate rulings by U.S. District Judge Steve Jones.
“The Court finds that Shafer was not a federal officer when operating as a Republican-nominated presidential elector,” Jones wrote in Shafer’s case.
A co-defendant in Trump’s RICO case has made a stunning claim about District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the case against Still, Trump, and other co-defendants.
A court filing claimed that Nathan Wade, a private attorney who is acting as a special prosecutor in the case, paid for vacations he allegedly took with Willis using money the county paid his law firm as compensation for work on the case. The report said that his firm has been paid around $650,000.
The motion was filed on behalf of co-defendant Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official. The paper said that the filing, however, “offers no concrete proof of the romantic ties between Willis and Wade, except to say ‘sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney have confirmed they had an ongoing, personal relationship.’”
The motion requests that the court dismiss all charges against Roman and Wade, as well as the DA’s entire team, be “disqualified from further prosecution of the case,” the paper continued.
The motion also claimed that some of the alleged activity could constitute “honest services fraud, a federal crime in which a vendor gives kickbacks to an employer.”
The AJC went on to speculate that Roman could have filed the motion to “simply muddy the waters by questioning Willis’ professional ethics,” though at this point, there is no evidence that the presumption is accurate either.
“Multiple co-defendants in the case have flipped and have agreed to testify against the others. Some of those who have flipped include multiple attorneys who represented Trump after the 2020 election,” The Daily Wire noted.
In the wake of Roman’s accusations, the former president went after Willis.
“You had a very big event yesterday as you saw in Georgia where the district attorney is totally compromised. The case has to be dropped,” Trump said. “They went after 18 or 20 people. … She was out of her mind. Now it turns out that case is totally compromised.”
The Hill noted: “Wade was paid nearly $654,000 in legal fees in 2022 and 2023 as he worked on the investigation, county records show. The district attorney’s office authorizes those funds, according to the records. Roman’s attorney argued the setup amounted to an irreparable conflict of interest, seeking to dismiss the charges and block Willis, Wade and the Fulton County district attorney’s office from continuing to prosecute the case.”
“Wade has personally and financially benefited from his personal relationship with Willis since he has received lucrative amounts under his continued contracts with Willis,” the motion states. “He will continue to be incentivized to prosecute this case based on his personal and financial motives, so he has acquired a unique and personal interest or stake in Mr. Roman’s continued prosecution. That is, he is motivated to prosecute Mr. Roman for as long as possible because he will continue to make exorbitant sums of money.”
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