President Trump’s latest barnburner of a brief to the Georgia Court of Appeals underscores his relentless pursuit of the disqualification of the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis.

The 22-page filing, which hit the appellate docket on Monday, is a reply to Ms. Willis’s position that she ought to remain on the case. The 45th president argues that her secret love affair with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, can only be remedied by her removal. Trump also contends that Ms. Willis’s accusations that her foes are “playing the race card” risked poisoning the jury pool. He cites her “repeated public display of racial animus.”

The 45th president claims that he “was aggrieved by the trial court’s failure to disqualify Willis and suffered adverse personal impact from Willis’ church speech.” That address was delivered at Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. She defended Mr. Wade’s credentials as “impeccable” despite his never having tried a felony case and also touched on the racial motivations of her defendants. 

The trial judge, Scott McAfee, found those comments to be “legally improper” and that Ms. Willis’s conduct as a whole emitted an “odor of mendacity.” He nevertheless determined that the harm inflicted by her conduct could be cured by Mr. Wade’s departure from the case. Before he stepped down, Mr. Wade was paid more than $650,000 by the office of the Fulton County district attorney. The two denied being romantically involved when he was hired — Trump disputes this — and Mr. Wade has since ventured that romances in the workplace are “as American as apple pie.”

Trump also argues that Ms. Willis’s claim from the pulpit at Big Bethel that her prosecution was “God’s work” essentially “inverted the presumption of innocence and thus shifted the burden of proof” onto Trump and his co-defendants in the sprawling racketeering case. Under due process doctrine, a criminal defendant is owed the presumption of innocence and guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.    

The Sixth Amendment vouchsafes to the defendant the right to an “impartial jury,” but Trump argues that the district attorney “intended that every potential Fulton County juror, “exposed to the “racist speech,” would be exposed to prejudice. The 45th president decries her “insidious, calculated references” to himself and his co-defendants. Ms. Willis retorts that she was merely speaking in generalities, not in reference to those she hopes to convict. 

Trump insists that Ms. Willis “knew what she was doing and got precisely the reaction she wanted” with her “repeated public display of racial animus towards” toward himself and his co-defendants. While Judge McAfee refrained from calling for Ms. Willis to step aside, Trump asks the appellate court to disqualify her for her  “intentional injection of racism into this historic case.” Fulton County, which includes downtown Atlanta, is a majority- minority district that voted overwhelmingly for President Biden in 2020.

Trump’s team leaves little to the imagination, accusing Ms. Willis of making  “racist claims in a Black church, before potential Black jurors who were celebrating MLK, Jr. (blocks from where he lived his entire life – in Fulton County)” and then following up that rhetoric with “unethical, racially charged media comments.”

The relevant section of Georgia’s Rules of Professional Conduct orders prosecutors to “refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.” The former president asserts that Ms. Willis’s words, “publicly and falsely labeling President Trump and the other defendants as racists in a historic Atlanta Black church celebrating the birthday of MLK, Jr., was unmistakably designed to heighten public condemnation.”    

Ms. Willis has struck a defiant pose even after Judge McAfee in March reprimanded her for a “tremendous lapse in judgment.” Weeks later, she told a crowd at Fulton County that, “Recently, they tell me they don’t like me to talk about race. Well, I’m going to talk about it anyway.” She has also said “the train is coming” to convict Trump and the 18 other defendants she charged.     

Trump’s attorney, Steven Sadow, in a comment emailed to the Sun, declares that Ms. Willis “should be disqualified and the case dismissed because her proven false, incendiary racial rhetoric in the church speech was calculated to heighten public condemnation of, and thereby prejudice, the defendants in the eyes of potential jurors.”