President-elect Trump’s latest argument that the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, was properly disqualified from the criminal case she brought against him and 18 others could lock in one of his signature litigation victories — and he could celebrate while in the Oval Office.

The 47th president’s filing to the Georgia supreme court was docketed on Friday morning. It urges the Peach State’s highest judiciary body to decline to review the ruling of the Georgia court of appeals that Ms. Willis’s secret affair with her handpicked special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, warrants disqualification. Georgia’s supreme court, like the United States’s, possesses the power of discretionary review, meaning it can decline to hear the case. 

Georgia law mandates that a “petition for the writ will be granted only in cases of great concern, gravity, or importance to the public.” Trump’s attorneys explain that review is “typically reserved for issues of first impression for which the establishment of precedent is desirable — not the application of settled rules of law to unique, undisputed facts that are extremely unlikely ever to recur.”

Trump’s motion came on the same day that the Georgia court of appeals upheld a decision by the trial judge, Scott McAfee, that six of the charges handed up against Trump and his co-defendants at Fulton County were unconstitutionally vague. Ms. Willis challenged that decision, but the appellate tribunal unanimously found that the “indictment fails to include enough detail to sufficiently apprise the defendants of what they must be prepared to meet so that they can intelligently prepare their defenses.”  

Ms. Willis’s appeal to the high court comes after the court of appeals determined, by a 2-to-1 margin, that Ms. Willis’s was the “rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.” Judge McAfee had ruled that Ms. Willis could stay on despite behavior that was “legally improper” and generative of a “significant appearance of impropriety” and an “odor of mendacity.”

The appellate judges, though, reckoned that Mr. Wade’s departure from the prosecution did “nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion” about whom “to prosecute and what charges to bring.” While the court declined to dismiss the charges, it purged Ms. Willis from her own sprawling racketeering case.

Now comes Trump to argue that the court of appeals got it right when it ruled that Ms. Willis’s affair with her “former lover/romantic partner” — Mr. Wade — was sufficient grounds for disqualification. Her office paid him more than $650,000, and the two took vacations together to such destinations as Aruba, Belize, and Napa Valley. They deny the romance predated his hiring, though the president-elect and his co-defendants assert that it is not true.

The president-elect contends that the Georgia supreme court would do well to reject Ms. Willis’s appeal for certiorari because “no Georgia District Attorney has engaged in this level of unprofessional conduct before, it is highly unlikely that any DA will ever do so in the future, and no Georgia court has ever been faced with such actual impropriety by a Georgia DA.” This case is therefore “unlikely to set precedent that will illuminate future cases,” a criteria for granting cert. 

Ms. Willis’s case for review leans on the dissenting opinion issued by Judge Benjamin Land of the court of appeals. Judge Land wrote 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 reproached his colleagues, saying: “It is not our job to second-guess trial judges or to substitute our judgment for theirs.”

The president-elect’s attorneys reject what they call Judge Land’s “newly proposed, bright-line rule of absolute deference,” venturing that it ties the hands of appellate jurists. They also note that even Judge McAfee found that “an outsider could reasonably think that the District Attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences.” 

Judge McAfee also castigated Ms. Willis’s behavior as exhibiting a “tremendous lapse in judgment” and her testimony in court as “unprofessional, and potentially untruthful.” Ms. Willis has accused her opponents — and her defendants — of “playing the race card” in their criticisms of her conduct. 

Trump’s lawyers insist that Ms. Willis’s “adoption and wholesale reliance on the dissenting opinion collapses under its own weight,” so Ms. Willis cannot just hand off the case to a deputy. Georgia courts have held that “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” if their superiors are disqualified.

If Ms. Willis cannot claw her way back onto the case, a prosecutorial panel would have to appoint a replacement, who would then possess the discretion to drop it or press on. In the meantime, the charges still stand. The court of appeals reckoned that dismissing them would amount to an “extreme” measure.  

Trump’s lead attorney in the Georgia case, Steven Sadow, emailed a statement to the Sun saying that his client “has filed a compelling response in opposition to DA Fani Willis’ request that the Georgia Supreme Court review the GA Court of Appeals’ ruling disqualifying Willis. The response persuasively argues that discretionary review is legally unwarranted under the particular circumstances of this case.”