District Attorney Fani Willis cannot intervene in a fight for nearly $17 million in compensation for legal fees President Donald Trump and his 2020 election supporters are seeking stemming from her ill-fated election racketeering case.
That’s the ruling this week from Fulton County, Georgia, Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee.
Trump and 13 others were indicted in 2023 over alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
However, the case was dropped after the state court of appeals disqualified Willis for a conflict of interest resulting from a romantic relationship the Fulton County DA had with her special prosecutor Nathan Wade.
Special prosecutor Peter Skandalakis then declined to prosecute after Trump started his second term.
Georgia law allows former defendants to seek legal costs after a prosecutor is disqualified, local news outlet Fox 5 reported. The president and his former co-defendants are now seeking nearly $16.8 million in legal fees from Fulton County under that law.
Willis presented a motion before the court seeking to intervene in the case to argue against the compensation and offer legal opinions on the matter.
Judge McAfee denied her office the chance to fight the Trump lawsuit because it was “wholly disqualified” and cannot return to defend its past decisions, according to Just the News. He also noted that the office’s interests were already “adequately represented” by the special prosecutor who took the case following Willis’s removal.
The judge did allow Fulton County as a corporate entity to participate in the compensation case because it would be the main source of funding should Trump and 14 other former defendants in the racketeering case prevail.
In Willis’s request to intervene, her office claimed, “Without intervention by the District Attorney, any award would violate basic fundamental notions of due process by denying her an opportunity to be heard or even challenge the reasonableness of the claimed attorney fees before it is taken from her budget.”
Willis’s former racketeering prosecution alleged criminal enterprise by Trump and the other defendants to overturn the 2020 election. But it “collapsed on Nov. 26, 2025, after a series of disqualifications, appeals, and shifting jurisdictional boundaries following Trump’s reelection,” Fox 5 reported.
Critics argued her case was politically motivated. As Breitbart News reported in 2024, Willis reportedly had a five-hour meeting at the White House with Vice President Kamala Harris months before the Georgia indictment against Trump.
Trump maintained he did nothing wrong, and the prosecution was seen in conservative circles as one of several “lawfare” cases that were brought by Democrats to so tarnish the former president that he would be unable to win a second term.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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