“Spectacle”: Legal experts say messy hearing shows Fani Willis scandal is a “big nothingburger”

Thursday’s evidentiary hearing on the misconduct claim against Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis yielded a lot of drama but little evidence of wrongdoing, legal experts say.

Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held a hearing after Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Mike Roman, alleged an improper relationship between Willis and top prosecutor Nathan Wade and claimed that Wade used his earnings from the case to fund trips for the pair.

The hearing began with a bombshell claim from Robin Yeartie, a former friend of Willis, who claimed that the pair’s relationship began in 2019, well before they claimed the relationship began in 2022. The prosecutors pushed back that Yeartie was a disgruntled former employee with an ax to grind against Willis.

McAfee ordered Wade to testify after the allegation and Willis, who had resisted a subpoena to testify at the hearing, later entered and agreed to testify. The prosecutors, who said they broke up in the summer of 2023, pushed back on the allegations and accused the TrumpWorld lawyers peppering them with questions of lying about the relationship.

The couple also pushed back on allegations of financial misconduct. Wade testified that Willis reimbursed him for the trips with cash for “safety reasons.” Willis testified that she also keeps six months of cash at home on her father’s advice.

The hearing is set to resume for a second day on Friday but legal experts say there is little from the dramatic hearing that warrants Willis’ removal.

“I simply don’t see any new evidence that requires disqualification. It’s a credibility pissing match so far. Ugly. Dramatic. But the needle hasn’t moved,” tweeted Georgia State University Law Prof. Anthony Michael Kreis.

“As an excavation of a now-defunct relationship, it was Bravo-worthy (and frankly, sad). But as an evidentiary hearing, it wasn’t the win the defense promised, especially under the governing legal standard,” agreed MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.

“Unless something new and dramatic happens tomorrow, I'd say there's almost no chance Willis gets disqualified,” predicted Randal Eliason, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law.

Attorney Ted Boutros called the allegations against Willis “the weakest, most convoluted, ludicrous, legally baseless ‘conflict of interest’ argument imaginable.” 

“The judge should have rejected it as a matter of law,” he wrote.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the hearing featured “a lot of spectacle but not very much substance.”

"Ultimately, at the end of the day yesterday, it was just a big nothingburger," she said. "There was nothing to show that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade had the financial conflict of interest that Georgia law recognizes, something akin to a prosecutor who only gets paid if they win a case. That's the classic case in Georgia law where there is a conflict that results in disqualification. That wasn't there yesterday in the courtroom."

Former prosecutor Karen Friedman Agnifilo told CNN that the TrumpWorld lawyers arguing the case failed to probe the pair’s financial relationship.

“This just devolved into a salacious, private, deeply personal attack on Fani Willis that just really seemed irrelevant to such an extent it was I thought that was a real sideshow and not a lot came out that would actually disqualify where they could have asked a lot of those questions to establish that relationship,” she said.