Judge Scott McAfee’s decision on whether to disqualify the district attorney of Georgia’s Fulton County, Fani Willis, from the racketeering case she charged against President Trump and 18 others will likely turn on the legal standard Ms. Willis is forced to meet.

The judge has promised a ruling on the fate of Ms. Willis and her special prosecutor and former boyfriend, Nathan Wade, by Friday, the Ides of March, when, according to Shakespeare, Caesar met Brutus’s knives. The judge told an Atlanta-based radio station, WSB, that he has a “rough” draft of the decision, and that “an order like this takes time to write because there’s a lot that I have to go through.” 

The jurist, at 34 years old, is in his first year on the bench and facing a decision that could define the rest of his career. He says that he is “calling it as best I can and the law as I understand it.” That call could depend on whether Judge McAfee determines that, in the words of one of the defendants pushing for disqualification, “An apparent conflict is sufficient to warrant a prosecutor’s disqualification.”

Judge McAfee, a Federalist Society conservative appointed to the bench by Georgia’s Republican governor in 2023, must run for election to retain his seat, and has drawn two liberal challengers in May’s primary. Ms. Willis also faces an election this fall, though she is the favorite to keep her job. 

Ms. Willis maintains that in order to remove her, an actual conflict of interest must be shown. It’s not clear where Ms. Willis draws that interpretation. The code of Fulton County says that  the “appearance of a conflict of interest can exist even in the absence of an actual conflict of interest.” 

Ms. Willis’s case has now taken a two-month detour following accusations that she hired Mr. Wade — and paid him more than $650,000 so far — because the two were romantically involved. One of the attorneys arguing for disqualification, Ashleigh Merchant, has adduced receipts that show that the pair traveled together to destinations like Belize, Aruba, and Napa Valley, where they went on a wine tasting tour. Ms. Willis insists she reimbursed her then-paramour with cash. Her father told the court last month that “it’s a Black thing” to keep large amounts of cash at home. 

Judge McAfee, in determining whether the duo can continue with the case, will likely have to weigh in on whether they are lying — under oath — about when what they describe as a “personal relationship” began. Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade claim that their romance only commenced in 2022, after his appointment. 

The prosecutorial pair’s opponents — all of whom stand to serve time in prison if convicted — maintain that the romantic timeline begins before, in 2019.  Mr. Trump’s attorney, Steven Sadow, has brought to Judge McAfee’s attention an analysis of AT&T phone records that indicate that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade exchanged nearly 12,000 text messages and 2,000 calls during the period when they were not meant to be dating.

The pro-disqualification camp can also point to text messages sent by a former legal associate of Mr. Wade, Terrence Bradley, who represented Mr. Wade during his ugly divorce, asserted that the prosecutors were “absolutely” dating before Mr. Wade was appointed despite never having prosecuted a felony or racketeering case before. On the stand, though, Mr. Bradley qualified that remark as sourceable only to “speculation.” 

Another defendant, David Shafer, has represented to Judge McAfee that another potential witness, Cindi Lee Yeager, a Cobb County prosecutor, overheard Ms. Willis tell Mr. Wade on the telephone: “They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us.” 

Ms. Merchant, in a court filing, writes that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade “personally enriched themselves off the case” and that their behavior amounts to “a form of self-dealing, which creates a personal interest in the case. In other words, the more work that is done on the case (regardless of what justice calls for) the more they get paid.” 

Fulton County’s Code of Ethics mandates that “officers and employees should aspire to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest by avoiding conduct or circumstances that would provide a reasonable basis for the impression that the officer’s or employee’s ability to protect the public interest or impartially perform an official act is compromised by his or her financial or personal interests in the matter or transaction.”

Judge McAfee, though, could opt for a more forgiving standard considering that no prosecutor has ever been disqualified in Georgia as a result of the kind of allegations Ms. Willis faces. She urges him to avoid a “novel, hair-trigger standard for the disqualification of an elected district attorney.” Instead she argues that the defendants need to show “proof of an actual, palpable conflict of interest.”    

The defendants pushing for disqualification believe that they have cleared that bar, and in the process also hurdled the one they see as decisive — whether Ms. Willis’s behavior with respect to Mr. Wade amounted to an “appearance” of a conflict of interest that should take them both off the case.