Georgia attorney Ashleigh Merchant said she doesn’t see “anyway” that Fani Willis’ 2020 election interference case against former President Trump will progress before the November election, despite Willis’ warning that the “train is coming.”
“I don’t see how this could happen before the election,” Merchant told presenter Steve Doocy on “Fox & Friends” Monday.
Last week, Georgia Judge Scott McAfee permitted Trump and his co-defendants to appeal his decision to keep Willis on the case after she fired prosecutor Nathan Wade, with whom she was accused of having an inappropriate connection.
Merchant, a lawyer for one of Trump’s co-defendants, detailed how the matter will now be heard by the Court of Appeals. The court can then rule whether Willis is disqualified, return the matter to Judge McAfee, or refer it to the Supreme Court.
“No trial is going to be resolved and happen before the election,” she claimed, claiming Willis’ case was “extremely overbroad.”
“So what they’re looking at is someone running for office, possibly for president, being put on trial. That is unheard of,” she said.
Willis recently went up about the lawsuit for the first time after Judge McAfee decided that she or Wade must withdraw from the proceedings. Wade resigned from the case hours after the order was issued, leaving Willis to handle it.
“My team continues to work on it… We were still handling the case the way it needed to be,” she told CNN on Saturday. “I don’t feel like we’ve slowed down at all. I believe there are efforts to slow down this train, but it is coming.”
While Merchant believed Willis’ election interference case was unlikely to be settled before the election, she maintained that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money payments lawsuit against Trump may advance before then.
“But, you know, this is by far the weakest case, in my opinion, among all of them. And so it’s ironic that this is the one they’re campaigning for and the one that will be heard,” she explained.
Trump is due to appear in a central New York City courtroom on Monday for a hearing related to Bragg’s investigation into alleged hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s criminal trial was supposed to begin Monday with jury selection. However, earlier this month, Judge Juan Merchan postponed it until mid-April to allow the former president and his lawyers more time to review 15,000 records of potential evidence supplied by the Justice Department from a prior federal inquiry.