A majority of Georgia voters think the state should drop the crumbling 2020 election interference case against President Donald Trump, per a new poll out of the Peach State.
According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey of 1,000 registered Georgia voters, more than half (51 percent) of poll respondents said the state should stop pursuing the Trump prosecution—previously spearheaded by Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who was kicked off the case in December for prosecutorial misconduct. However, about 47 percent of those surveyed are fine with the case's continuance.
As the AJC assessed, "The survey results show that despite the DA's insistence that politics did not drive her decision-making, Georgia voters largely view the case through a partisan lens." Approximately 94 percent of Republicans said the lawfare against Trump should end while around 95 percent of Democrats want the prosecution to proceed. Notably, 54 percent of independents, a critical voting bloc in the swing state, feel that Trump's Fulton County case should be tossed out.
Support also fell along gender and racial lines. Sixty-two percent of men recommended that the state kill the case while 57 percent of women called for it to continue. 68 percent of white voters backed the case's dismissal whereas 4 in 5 black voters believe Trump should still be prosecuted.
The survey polled voters from all over the state, but Willis only answers to constituents in deep-blue Atlanta. In November, Fulton County voters overwhelmingly opted to reelect Willis to a second term over a GOP contender.
Ahead of early voting in Georgia's general primary, Willis was a no-show at the county's Democratic debate, decidedly skipping the face-off to host her annual "Fani T. Willis Self-Care Fair" while Georgia voters were gearing up to head to the polls. The incumbent's absence left her opponent debating an empty podium.
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Gesturing towards where she should have stood, her primary challenger asked, "Where are you, Ms. Willis?" Willis apparently bailed because she was too busy "schmoozing" with Washington elites. The Grio, a black lifestyle news outlet, photographed Willis wearing a blue ballgown at a swanky White House dinner where guests rubbed elbows with high-level officials in the Biden-Harris administration.
Critics of Willis say other criminal cases have been neglected across the crime-ridden county as a result of her relentlessly trying to take down Trump.
Charles Morrell, one of the Fulton County residents who wants to see the "useless" Trump case come to an end, said the president should not be preoccupied with such a frivolous indictment.
"I think that President Trump should be worried about running the country versus having this case—in my opinion, it's a useless case—being charged against him," the 51-year-old Roswell resident, who works in health care, told the AJC.
Last election, Morrell supported Willis and initially backed the Trump probe. However, he swung this election cycle and decided not to vote for Willis.
"She just don't seem like a good district attorney to me," Morrell said. "I just think that you're calling the president shady, but you're just as shady yourself because you're doing stuff that shouldn't be done."
But 39-year-old Lakeisha Brown, a model in the area, is all for the Fulton County case advancing against Trump, whom she said "needs to pay for his crimes."
"Coming from an African American woman, I'm pretty sure there is nothing that I can do illegally that I could skirt [the law] and get away with," Brown told the local outlet. "Nothing like him. So I think everything should be equal across the board.”
The University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs Survey Research Center conducted the survey between January 2 and 10 in the weeks following the Georgia Appeals Court's bombshell order that officially disqualified Willis.
After a Fulton County judge allowed Willis to remain in charge of the Georgia RICO case, the appellate court decided that the Democrat DA's undisclosed affair with a top Trump prosecutor, whom she had hired, warranted her removal. The appeals panel ruled that the arrangement, which involved trips the two took together around the world, allegedly courtesy of Fulton County taxpayers, created "a significant appearance of impropriety."
Willis has since asked the state's Supreme Court to overturn the appellate court's ruling, calling the majority opinion an "overreach" of authority and arguing that failure to reinstate her would "infect" case law for years to come. She insisted that her alleged self-enrichment scheme "had not actually affected the case in any way." Disqualifying her on that allegation alone, she said, "divest[ed] her of her constitutional authority to investigate and prosecute crimes."
If the court of last resort declines to take up the case or does not uphold the disqualification decision, jurisdiction rests with the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, a non-partisan state agency that could either appoint another prosecutor to take over or decline to move the matter forward altogether. Regardless, it's unlikely that a different district attorney or a special prosecutor would willingly involve themselves.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr urged the state's Supreme Court to reject her Hail Mary attempt to hold on to the prosecution, the final criminal case facing Trump. Carr said Willis was "rightfully removed" for "creat[ing] her own conflict" of interest. "It's our hope that the DA will now focus taxpayer resources on the successful prosecution of violent criminals in Fulton County," the state's AG said.
Willis is now demanding more taxpayer money to hire additional staff after she spent over three-quarters of a million dollars on the salary of the subordinate she slept with amid the Trump investigation.
Willis says that in order to adequately perform her duties, she needs to dip deeper into the county's coffers. "If the District Attorney's Office doesn't have the right amount of attorneys, investigators—we can't continue to excel and to make progress for our city," Willis said. "We can't continue to enjoy a safe city."
Willis is urging Fulton County citizens to call their commissioners while the board is finalizing the 2025 budget. "We ought to demand that the DA's office is financed in a way where we can properly prosecute crimes," she said at a news conference last week.
Her request for a funding boost comes after she blew hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on the wages of an underqualified attorney she had appointed to a supervisory position despite his scant prosecutorial experience.
Under oath, her lover, Nathan Wade, told Congress he had never worked on a RICO case beforehand and even had to attend "RICO school" to learn about the complicated legal concept. No one oversaw Wade's work once he was hired to head the Trump prosecution team.
Nevertheless, Willis awarded Wade a high-paying contract that outmatched his more qualified colleagues, who were paid far less. In sworn statements, Willis said her lover "made much more money than the other special prosecutors only because Wade did much more work." To this day, she maintains that their affair "never involved direct or indirect financial benefit."
Wade ultimately took home more than $770,000 in taxpayer funds for his work on the Trump case.
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