- Did you listen to any of the arguments? - I did hear the arguments this morning. It's ridiculous to me that you lied on Monday. And yet here we still are. I very much want to be here. So I'm not a hostile witness. - I very much want to be here. - Not so much that you're hostile. This will be an adverse witness. [00:00:15] Your interests are opposed to Mr. Merchants. So after. After that, you started dating shortly thereafter. Correct a lie. That's one of your lies. Okay. I need to explain this, and I think I get to explain my answers. That was an incredibly combative Fani Willis, the district attorney [00:00:32] of Fulton County, Georgia, testifying in court in regard to some legal challenges that Donald Trump's defense attorneys had brought forward in regard to her alleged conflicts of interest. In naming Nathan Wade as the lead prosecutor in that case, she was having [00:00:49] an intimate relationship with him, and so the legal team representing Donald Trump raised that as a big concern. Now we have a pretty big update on the story, because it turns out that she's going to be removed from the case entirely. [00:01:05] Now, that wasn't always the case because following the Trump defense team challenging her role in it, in this case, the judge had made a completely different decision. So with that in mind, let's go to CNN's senior legal analyst, Elie Honig, [00:01:24] explaining what had initially happened as a result of the hearings that you just saw some clips of. During the pretrial process. Donald Trump and some of his co-defendants allege that the Da, Fani Willis, had a conflict of interest. She had a relationship which she later admitted with Nathan Wade, a person [00:01:41] who had been brought in from the outside to be the lead prosecutor on this case. There were a series of televised hearings on this issue last year, during which Fani Willis and Nathan Wade both testified. Yes, we had this relationship, but it didn't start until after Nathan [00:01:57] Wade became the lead prosecutor. And then with regard to the allegation that their finances had been intermingled because Nathan Wade was being paid a lot of money to work on this case, the testimony was essentially that they split the cost on everything and they did it all by cash. Well, the trial judge here found that there were significant questions about [00:02:15] the truthfulness of Fani Willis testimony. The trial judge said, quote, the odor of mendacity remains around this case. He said there's real questions about whether her testimony was untruthful. That's a, quote, untruthful from the trial judge. But nonetheless, the trial judge said, well, we can solve this [00:02:30] if Nathan Wade leaves the case. And that's exactly what happened. So Fani Willis wanted to remain on the case, and so she decided to remove Nathan Wade from the case entirely. However, that wasn't good enough for Trump's defense team because they decided [00:02:48] to file yet another appeal, challenging Fani Willis remaining on the case. And the appeals court has sided with the Trump team. So in a 2 to 1 decision, a three judge panel reversed the decision of the trial judge, who in March allowed Fani Willis to keep the case despite revelations [00:03:07] about a romantic relationship she had with the lawyer whom she hired to manage the prosecution. That was Nathan Wade. Now, the appeal panel's majority decision, written by Judge Trenton Brown, said that judge McAfee's decision did not cure the already existing [00:03:25] appearance of impropriety. Now it was a 2 to 1 decision, meaning that there was one judge who did not agree with this. And so in a dissent, Judge Benjamin, a land of the Court of Appeals, wrote that he was particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken [00:03:44] what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court to make, and converted it to something else entirely. He says if this court was the Trier of fact and had the discretion to choose [00:04:00] a remedy based on our own observations, assessment of the credibility of the witnesses and weighing of the evidence, Judge Land continued, then perhaps we would be justified in reaching the result declared by the majority. He added but we are not trial judges and we lack that authority. [00:04:19] So Willis is not giving up. She has now filed her own appeal. She did so swiftly and so we'll see how this plays out. But if she loses upon appeal, it's very likely that this case will never come to fruition. Yeah. So let me explain why in a second. First. [00:04:36] Who's right? The, the this ruling by the appellate court is wrong. The dissenting judge is correct on the law. Normally, the trial judge gets to decide matters like this. This is a mainly Republican appointed court going. Yeah, that's true, except we like Trump and he's president now. [00:04:53] And we know that if we overturn this, this thing is toast. And so they did. And so it doesn't mean that the case is gone according to their ruling. It just means that Fani Willis can't be in charge. But they know that once their ruling gets appealed, it's going to go to an even more [00:05:09] Republican appointed court. That is almost certainly going to back them. And then what happens after that? It goes to a Republican committee to decide what to do with the case next, and that committee will almost certainly kill the case. So this thing's pretty much over after this ruling. And so it would be shocking if they brought this case back now. [00:05:27] It would have to be a bunch of Republican judges or lawmakers in Georgia who are like, no, no, we still want to prosecute the the sitting president. - It's not going to happen. - Never going to happen. Right. It'd be shocking. So now what went wrong here? [00:05:42] Well, the Democrats found themselves with all of these cases. There's only one exception. And that's the documents case, because that normally took a long time because they tried to get the documents back. Trump wouldn't. They had to do the raid and Trump kept more documents, etc.. That one went on a normal pace. [00:05:58] Okay, but Alvin Bragg in New York, Fani Willis in Atlanta, or prosecutors in general in Atlanta and and Merrick Garland at the national level, they dragged their feet for two and a half years. And we told you at the time, not after the election. [00:06:14] Okay. We told you when they were doing it. Why aren't you going now? In the beginning of the term, Biden's term, if you. We thought that Trump did cheat. And if you thought Trump cheated, that's a massive, massive crime. You can't let him get away with that crime because the next guy might want to cheat. [00:06:31] Wait, let's be precise in our language. Not that he cheated, that he attempted to overturn the election, right? Like that with the fake elector scheme? Yeah, that's what I. Mean by cheating. That he tried to fake elector scheme. ET cetera. And they did arrest those fake electors. Now, some of those are going to get tossed out. [00:06:46] They're almost all certainly going to get tossed out in Georgia. All of his co-defendants that are with him. So they all skate and and some of those guys signed plea deals, some of them are might still go to prison, but a lot of them are going to skate on this too. So they had a fraudulent scheme that it was super important to prosecute. [00:07:05] But the Democrats waited and waited and waited. And there's a couple of possibilities. One is that they're grossly incompetent. You can't ever rule that out with Democrats. But the more likely one is what we were worried about. They waited two and a half years so that the trials would happen right in the middle of the campaign and in their idiotic heads. [00:07:23] I think that some of them thought, well, that way Trump can't run against us. Well, then you made it political. And once you make it political, it's toxic. You should have done it from day one. And you didn't think, oh, something might go wrong in the trial. [00:07:38] I might take longer than I thought. You've never run a trial or. Look, this is the last theory, and I. This one is less likely, but it's possible that they thought. Oh, yeah, we'll never get it done in a year and a half. So we'll just use it against him in the campaign. [00:07:53] And whether he wins or loses will dismiss it because we never meant it. We were just trying to hurt him politically. So that's so frustrating for those of us who thought he actually did those crimes. And and it's certainly frustrating to MAGA who thought he didn't do those crimes. [00:08:10] But the, the timing, we said from day one for the whole four years. And when they brought the cases, the timing was super suspect and and potentially political. Thanks for watching. If you become a member, you get to watch all this ad free. Except for of course, this ad still hit the join button below.