A judge in Fulton County, Georgia, just sided with Burt Jones, a Georgia state senator running for Lieutenant Governor, against Fulton County DA Fani Willis. The judge’s ruling on the motion disqualifies her from targeting him as part of her probe into former President Donald Trump and his team’s efforts following the 2020 election.
The judge in the case was Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney. Ruling on Jones’s motion on Monday, January 22, Judge McBurney found that DA Willis was barred from building and bringing a case against state Senator Jones because of her political bias in the matter. Particularly, Judge McBurney noted that she hosted a fundraiser for a Democrat candidate in the race, Charlie Bailey.
NBC News, reporting on the ruling, noted that Judge McBurney described her involvement in the fundraiser and investigation as “harmful” to the case because of the potential bias it shows. He wrote, NBC News reports, “Any decision the district attorney makes about Senator Jones in connection with the grand jury investigation is necessarily infected by it.”
Continuing, NBC News reported that if the case were to focus on state Senator Jones would, even if justified on the basis of the facts, provoke “entirely reasonable concerns of politically motivated persecution” because he is running against Bailey in the race.
Further, NBC News reports that Judge McBurney found that DA Willis’s decision to donate to Mr. Bailey’s campaign was not itself dispositive, but was important in that it “added to the weight of the conflict created by the more extensive, direct, public and job-related campaign work the district attorney performed on behalf of candidate Bailey.”
Explaining why the combined facts of the case mean that DA Willis is disqualified, Judge McBurney then, NBC News notes, wrote that her choice to involve herself with Bailey’s campaign mean that her office is intertwined with his electoral effort. He wrote, “This choice — which the district attorney was within her rights as an elected official to make — has consequences. She had bestowed her office’s imprimatur upon Senator Jones’s opponent.”
In consequence of Judge McBurney’s decision, NBC News reports, DA Willis is prevented from going after state Senator Jones. She cannot subpoena him, ask the grand jury to include a recommendation or recommendations about him in its report, use gathered evidence to build a case against him, or even publicly categorize him as a target.
This ruling comes amidst other problems for Willis, problems that are largely the result of Trump 2020 campaign official Michael Roman’s allegations that she is in a relationship with Nathan Wade, one of the three special prosecutors in the Trump RICO case.
In one recent filing, for example, Trump’s legal team argued that DA Willis violated Georgia ethics rules when she accused those who are criticizing her decision to hire her alleged lover Nathan Wade for the position as being racist, something she said while speaking at a church on MLK Day. Watch her here:
Featured image credit: Fani for DA Campaign Website
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