The disqualification by the Georgia Court of Appeals of the  district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, from the racketeering case against President Trump and 18 others is a stunning  victory for the president-elect less than a month before he takes the oath of office. The indictment against him, though, still stands.

The ruling came after the appeals court mysteriously cancelled a hearing on the issue that was to be held earlier this month. Now, a panel of three appellate jurists, all appointed by Republican governors, have stripped her of her role atop one of the highest-profile prosecutions in American history. 

The decision comes after a trial judge, Scott McAfee, ruled that while Ms. Willis’s romantic relationship with her handpicked special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, projected a “significant appearance of impropriety” and an “odor of mendacity,” she could stay on the case if he resigned. Judge McAfee also labelled as “legally improper” her accusation  — in a church, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — that her opponents were “playing the race card.”

Now two judges — Todd Markle and Trenton Brown — have ruled that Judge McAfee “erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office.” Ms. Willis can appeal that conclusion to the Peach State’s supreme court. A third, Benjamin Land, dissents and would have left Judge McAfee’s ruling intact.

The motion to disqualify Ms. Willis from the case gained steam after it was disclosed that she was engaged in a secret romantic affair with Mr. Wade, whose credentials she defended as “impeccable” despite the fact that he had never prosecuted a felony. The two deny that their affair predated his appointment, but cellular phone data adduced by Trump’s co-defendants showed thousands of text messages and calls exchanged before his hiring. 

All told, Mr. Wade earned more than $650,000 for his work on the racketeering case. While he was working for Ms. Willis’s office, he took trips with the district attorney to destinations like Belize, Aruba, and Napa Valley. Ms. Willis insists she paid him back for those vacations with cash she stored at her home. Mr. Wade reckons that workplace romances are “as American as apple pie.”

The Sun spoke to a defense attorney in the case, Harvey Silverglate, who represents the attorney John Eastman. Mr. Silverglate tells us that if there were grounds to remove Mr. Wade from the case, “then there were grounds to toss her off as well. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango.”

The appeals court reasoned that while Mr. Wade’s “contract allowed a $250 hourly rate — a relatively low amount by metro Atlanta standards,” the remedy “crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.”

The Georgia Court of Appeals explains that “while we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.”

Georgia courts have held that when a district attorney is disqualified, the “assistant district attorneys — whose only power to prosecute a case is derived from the constitutional authority of the district attorney who appointed them — have no authority to proceed.” They would not go so far, though, as to dismiss the indictment altogether, a measure they venture would be “extreme.”

Judge Land, who joined the court in 2022, dissents from his two colleagues on the bench. He writes that he is “particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court to make and converted it to something else entirely.” He explains that “It is not our job to second-guess trial judges or to substitute our judgment for theirs.”

The judge adds that “we have no authority to reverse the trial court’s denial of a motion to disqualify. None. Even where there is an appearance of impropriety.”

If the ruling of the majority stands, though, a new special prosecutor will have to be appointed. A Georgia law passed in 2022  assigns the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia with finding another prosecutor for the case. 

The executive director, Pete Skandalakis, told NBC News in February that if Ms. Willis is disqualified “it becomes incumbent upon me to select a special prosecutor and appoint a special prosecutor.” He explains that “As I read the statute, a DA cannot refuse an appointment, but it’s best to find somebody willing to take on the assignment.” He said he would look “for someone who’s a neutral arbiter and can make decisions based upon the evidence.”

Mr. Skandalakis is a longtime district attorney who has once before been tasked with replacing Ms. Willis once before — in her prosecution of Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor, Burt Jones. That process took years.

Ms. Willis was recused from that case after she held a fundraiser for one of Mr. Jones’s political opponents. Mr. Skandalakis’s grandfather was killed by communists — and his father captured — during the Greek Civil War of the 1940’s.