‘The train is coming!’: Fani Willis denies dispute over her relationship with prosecutor delayed Trump prosecution

Ex-president faces racketeering charge in Georgia after conflict of interest dispute ends

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis disputed that her office’s prosecution of Donald Trump for his efforts to pressure state officials in Georgia to change the 2020 election results was in any way hindered or slowed down by the dispute over her relationship with a prosecutor on the case.

Ms Willis spoke to a CNN reporter on Saturday and said that while outside forces were working to slow the case down, her office had continued working on the case throughout the recent proceedings determining whether there was a conflict of interest on Ms Willis’s part given a romantic relationship she engaged in with a prosecutor on her team. A judge determined that there was not, but the dispute took several weeks to litigate.

“No, my team’s been continuing to work,” she said when asked if the prosecution had been set back even temporarily by the complaint.

“All while that was going on...we were still doing the case in the way that it needed to be done,” the district attorney continued. “I don’t feel like we’ve been slowed down at all. I do think that there are efforts to slow down this train, but the train is coming.”

Mr Trump has continued to rail against Ms Willis and her team following his repeated failure to stifle or dismiss entirely the charges filed against him in Georgia. The case represents one that he, as president, would not be able to wipe away with a pardon and also represents a clear risk of jail time for the former president given the mandatory minimum sentence a racketeering charge carries.

The Georgia charges represent just one of the four prosecutions bearing down on the twice-impeached former president; he faces a total of 91 felony counts. It’s one of two cases, the other taking place in Washington DC, charging him with crimes related to his effort to stop Joe Biden’s election victory from being certified.

Ms Willis’s case did suffer a minor setback earlier this month when a handful of charges against Mr Trump and his allies were dismissed, though the bulk of her case remains intact. Court rules also allow for those charges to be refiled.

The former president is once again his party’s presumed nominee for the White House; he is set for a rematch against Mr Biden in the fall. He is almost certain to be in court for parts of his campaign against Mr Biden; this week a court in New York set jury selection for April in his criminal hush money trial.