The Georgia RICO case was supposed to be The Big Moment for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. She was going to “get” Donald Trump and put him in jail.

And then it turned out that not only was the RICO case quite a stretch (even though it carried enough legal threat that some of the co-defendants took plea deals), but Fani Willis was so obviously corrupt that she had hired her own lover, Nathan Wade, to be the prosecuting attorney in the case. Not only did it look improper, there is a strong allegation that the whole thing was a money laundering scheme. We heard about vacations, and cash, and how this was all racist, and how the ex-wife was ratting out poor emasculated Nathan Wade about their divorce. By the time that Judge Scott McAfee was forced to rule that either Willis or Wade had to get off the case this last March, any semblance of “justice” had long since disappeared into a sideshow circus of a petty DA who quite literally thought herself above the law.

Wade voluntarily left the case (but not Fani Willis, even though she claimed they had broken up, as he showed up with her when her daughter was being arrested), but the judge had essentially punted. Everyone knew that the Trump legal team would be appealing the ruling to try and also remove Willis from the case. And on December 19th, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled – after putting a pause on the whole case earlier – that Fani Willis was disqualified from continuing on the case.

The long-awaited decision, in a state criminal case against Trump that was already on hold, raises questions about whether the case can move forward in court. The appeals court found that Willis’ office can’t prosecute the case, so a new special prosecutor would need to be appointed for the case to continue.

The appeals court found that a “significant appearance of impropriety” was enough to potentially taint the case in the public eye. The appellate court decided, however, it wouldn’t dismiss the sprawling racketeering conspiracy case entirely.

“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,” the court wrote in Thursday’s opinion.

The court added: “We cannot conclude that the record also supports the imposition of the extreme sanction of dismissal of the indictment.”

Willis will continue to fight to stay on the case, as her team has asked the state’s Supreme Court to review the appeals court’s decision.

This ruling was seen as the death knell for the case. Yes, the indictment still is active, but would any other prosecutor truly be willing to pick up Fani Willis’s droppings and try and reconstitute a legal case out of it?

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Thursday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ disqualification will bring the election interference case against President-elect Donald Trump to an end.

“For all practical purposes, it’s over,” Honig told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “This case was already in deep trouble because of the conduct of the district attorney, Fani Willis. And now, it’s all but over.”

“Now as result this case, it’s not quite dismissed, but Fani Willis and her office will be disqualified from handling it and as a practical matter, it now goes into a sort of purgatory for an undefined amount of time. It’s not coming back, it’s over,” Honig continued.

Honig said Willis could have stepped aside early on in order to prevent the case from falling apart. McAfee also said that Willis engaged in “legally improper” conduct by stating that the pending case against her was brought about due to her race, the legal analyst added.

Professor Jonathan Turley concurred that the case was a wreck and Fani Willis had to go.

The court admitted that Willis had forced the hand of the court by her refusal to do the right thing in the lower court. It recognized 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.”

Accordingly, it reversed McAffee and found that if “the elected district attorney is wholly disqualified from this case, ‘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.’”

The opinion made clear that these cases cannot become the vanity projects of prosecutors. They are expected to do the right thing, even when the right thing does not come easily personally or politically.

The center of the case now shifts to another prosecutor who will have to decide whether it wants to continue the case and what (and who) to prosecute.

As I have previously written, the Georgia case has viable crimes against others for offenses such as unlawful entry into restricted areas. The case against Trump was deeply flawed. It read like a legal version of six degrees from Kevin Bacon. As my friend and fellow analyst Andy McCarthy noted, this is the first racketeering case that any of us have seen where the strongest connection between the parties was being named in the charging documents.

A new prosecutor should drop the Trump charges and end this ridiculous lawfare enterprise. If not, the case will likely collapse by its own weight due to the attenuated racketeering theory or other legal problems, including the use of evidence barred under the recent presidential immunity decision.

But as promised, Fani Willis moved up the chain and appealed the case to the Georgia Supreme Court. She just won reelection in deep blue Fulton County (which covers the city of Atlanta) because she was the Democrat in the race, so even though the Georgia Court of Appeals has now disqualified her, she still is the district attorney – and she’s not giving up her 15 minutes of fame.

“We’re asking the (Georgia) Supreme Court to review the court of appeals decision,” Willis said.

She said hopefully the Supreme Court will take this decision up for review and said she does not agree with the decision.

Willis said she does not want to comment in detail on the merits of the case because “too much is in the balance.”

Well, now Fani Willis has to contend with the Attorney General of Georgia weighing in against her. Chris Carr, who will be running for governor in 2026, has asked the Georgia Supreme Court to reject her appeal.

Please see my statement below on Fulton County DA Fani Willis. pic.twitter.com/2ATSw3t10V

— GA AG Chris Carr (@Georgia_AG) December 30, 2024

Naturally, this made Fani Willis big mad.

Willis fired back at Carr, arguing that the state official was “trying to influence” a case for which he was subpoenaed to testify in the investigation as well as boost his chances of winning the Georgia governorship.

“Mr. Carr is a witness in the case he is trying to influence,” Willis said in a statement, obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Apparently, he is more focused on the politics of the 2026 Republican gubernatorial primary rather than the law.”

“If Mr. Carr cannot separate his ambition to become Governor from his duties as Attorney General, he should resign and focus on being a full-time candidate rather than serving as a constitutional officer sworn to uphold the Constitutions and laws of the United States and Georgia,” she added.

Carr, 52, announced last month that he is running to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in the Peach State’s 2026 gubernatorial election.

Honestly, Fani Willis is the last person who should be pointing out others’ actions as evidence of their political ambitions. She wanted to make her bones on putting Donald Trump in jail, cementing her status as a leftist darling and guaranteeing herself a shot at higher office. But she is so hopelessly corrupt that she couldn’t see how hiring her own lover and using him for vacations, along with abusing her own employees, might be a problem. I mean, it’s obviously not a problem for the voters of Fulton County, but that is their decision.

The odds that the Georgia Supreme Court takes Willis’s appeal is low – the court is currently made up of eight Republican appointees and one elected justice. This could very much be the end of the legal road for Fani Willis if the court declines to hear her appeal, and both the attorney general and the governor of Georgia are weighing in against her. The 15 minutes of fame are coming to an end – but the infamy may continue on, since the Georgia Senate is being allowed to subpoena Fani Willis regarding prosecutorial misconduct in the Trump case. Her time in the spotlight may not be up yet, but she might not enjoy it from now on.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click