The Georgia Court of Appeals has temporarily halted former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial proceedings while it considers his appeal to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis after Trump’s legal team argued that Willis should not handle the case because of her relationship with senior prosecutor Nathan Wade.
The trial’s pause, as detailed in a one-page ruling issued on Wednesday, all but ensures that it will not proceed before this year’s election. “The proceedings below in the Superior Court of Fulton County are hereby stayed pending the outcome of these appeals,” the court filing reads.
With oral arguments tentatively scheduled for October, the trial is likely to be postponed until after the presidential election. Former President Trump, the presumed Republican nominee, is aiming to return to the White House and is looking to delay his legal challenges. A specific trial date has not yet been set.
Last month, a Georgia state senator leading the investigation into Willis’ office described some of her statements as “dubious” following a whistleblower’s testimony. The Georgia Senate Special Committee on Investigations, chaired by state Senator Bill Cowsert, held another hearing as part of its investigation into alleged misuse of funds and other misconduct.
The committee heard testimony from Amanda Timpson, who previously worked in Willis’ office as the director of juvenile diversion programs. Timpson testified that she was demoted and later dismissed after reporting the misuse of funds within Willis’ office.
Additionally, Timpson testified that Nathan Wade, a former special prosecutor who was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to work on the case while allegedly having an affair with Willis, was on the D.A.’s staff as early as 2020. Both Wade and Willis have testified that their relationship only began when Wade was hired to work on the case in late 2021.
After hearing Timpson’s testimony, Cowsert now believes the timeline provided by Willis and Wade isn’t correct. “[Wade], for a whole year, was her confidant and collaborator on running the office before he gets hired,” Cowsert said in an interview with Fox News. “And then she’s acting like it was just something that happened in the summer of 2022. That they began a relationship months after the hiring. That’s a dubious claim, you know?”
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The timeline of the relationship between Wade and Willis has become a focal point in both the Georgia Senate investigation and the disqualification hearings regarding Willis. In March, Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for a Trump co-defendant in Willis’ “election interference” case, testified that cellphone data from Nathan Wade indicated he visited a condo owned by Willis on numerous occasions before his official hiring.
“It’s pinging from his house all the way down to the condo at midnight 1 a.m. And then he calls her when he gets there. And then it goes silent for four or five hours. And then, you know, early in the morning hours, he starts pinging again, driving back, and then he texts her when he gets home,” Merchant said while describing the location of Wade’s phone.
