Left: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event Jan. 27, 2024, in Las Vegas. Right: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis reacts as she speaks during a worship service at the Big Bethel AME Church, on Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Locher, File; Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Former President Donald Trump is doubling down on accusations that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis unlawfully added an aura of racial bigotry into his racketeering (RICO) and election subversion case during her recent speech at a historically Black church.
The accusation was leveled by the GOP presidential front-runner against Atlanta’s top prosecutor, a Democrat, in a seven-page reply brief filed with the Fulton County Superior Court on Wednesday.
“Here, the DA’s conduct was indeed egregious,” the filing obtained by Law&Crime reads. “It was undeniably unethical. Her MLK holiday ‘church speech’ intentionally and in bad faith injected race, religion, and politics into the case and stoked racial animus.”
Trump’s filing refers to a lengthy, nationally-televised Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech at Big Bethel A.M.E. Church in Atlanta.
“I’m a little confused,” the DA told parishioners. “I appointed three special counsel, as is my right to do. Paid them all the same hourly rate. They only attack one. I hired one white woman, a good personal friend and great lawyer. A superstar, I tell you, I hired one white man, brilliant, my friend and a great lawyer. And I hired one Black man. Another superstar a great friend and a great lawyer. Oh, Lord, they’re going to be mad when I call them out on this nonsense. First thing they say. Oh, she going to play the race card now? But no. God, isn’t it them who’s playing the race card when they only question one?”
The 45th president previously complained about Willis’s speech in a late January motion that aims to disqualify the district attorney, her entire office, and the special prosecutors hired to oversee the case.
In a response filed by the DA’s office, the state argues that Willis’s comments “neither reference this case nor these defendants.”
Trump’s attorney Steven H. Sadow directly disputes that claim.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” the reply motion reads.
The filing contains an emphasized snippet of the DA’s speech with bolded references purportedly referring to the RICO defendants:
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a worship service at the Big Bethel AME Church on Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024, in Atlanta. The service celebrated Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the historic Black church. (Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP); Snippets of her speech in a reply motion filed by Donald Trump on Feb. 7, 2024. (Motion)
The filing blasts Willis for “asking God why defense counsel and the defendants were questioning her conduct in hiring a Black man but not his White counterparts, and why the judgment of a Black female Democrat wasn’t as good as White male Republicans.”
Those questions were in service of publicly denouncing the defendants and their attorneys for “having the audacity to challenge her personal and professional conduct,” the filing complains.
Trump’s original filing to disqualify Willis was stylized as a supplement to another motion to disqualify the district attorney by co-defendant Michael Roman, a staff member for Trump’s 2020 campaign.
Roman argued in early January, in his headline-generating motion, that Willis and lead prosecutor Nathan Wade should be tossed from the RICO case due to a “conflict of interest” implicating allegedly misspent public funds over their since-admitted romantic relationship.
More Law&Crime coverage: ‘Causes for the disqualification are self-inflicted blows’: Trump RICO co-defendant wants less-democratic jury, district attorney thrown off case
The reply motion argues Willis intended her pulpit remarks to “rebuke” the allegations leveled by Roman in his original filing.
“Thorne in minor part, but first and foremost the defendants, through defense counsel (specifically Roman’s motion and undersigned lead counsel’s statements in open court on behalf of President Trump), had led the exposure of, and the outcry about, the inappropriate personal relationship between the DA and Special Assistant DA Wade, and the DA’s improper hiring of Wade,” the filing reads. “Thus, who else would the DA be repeatedly and predominantly referring to in her use of the words ‘they’ and ‘them’ and ‘themselves,’ other than the defendants via disparagement and condemnation of their defense counsel? Those references are just as clear as the fact that her unnamed reference to the hired ‘black man’ could only be Wade.”
A footnote puts a fine point on Trump’s argument:
Of course, the DA diffidently “neglected” to mention that she only had an intimate, personal relationship with the person she referred to as the “black man” (Nathan Wade) and not the “white women” (Anna Cross) or the “white man” (John Floyd), when she wrongfully accused defense counsel of “playing the race card.”
“The DA’s provocative and inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments, made in a widely publicized speech at a historical Black church in Atlanta, and cloaked in repeated references to God, catalyze the quintessential ‘appearance of impropriety’ regarding her prosecutorial judgment and conduct,” the reply argues.
Trump also accused Willis of raising several issues not relevant to the disqualification motion as part of ongoing “misrepresentations designed to delude this Court.” And, in another footnote, the filing accuses Willis of “gratuitously and falsely” accusing “defense counsel in general, and undersigned lead counsel in particular, of racism.”
The filing categorizes the sum of Willis’s race-based commentary as “prejudicial out-of-court racially partisan and invidious statements” about the case, defense counsel, and the defendants. Sadow argues Willis appears intent to show “the ethical rules, and laws, simply don’t apply to” her and “that this Court is powerless to punish her.”
“The State knows better,” the filing goes on. “The State knows that improper extrajudicial public comments by a prosecutor in the State of Georgia may be dealt with by disqualification.”
More Law&Crime coverage: The Trump Docket: Election subversion Jan. 6 trial date vacated amid looming Supreme Court battles
Law&Crime reached out to Willis for comment on this story but no response was immediately forthcoming at the time of publication.
Trump’s full motion is available below:
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