Fani Willis should have seen Trump's predictable attack on her office romance coming

Fani Willis should know better.

The Fulton County district attorney prosecuting Donald Trump and his allies on trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia finally admitted Friday that she’s in a “personal relationship" with the man she hired to lead that case.

Willis should have known that Team Trump would weaponize any lack of judgment – and that’s what she has shown here – to try to derail the case.

After all, that was the driving tactic Trump used after the 2020 election – wrapping rumors, innuendo and outright lies into a twisted narrative that somehow a state he lost fair and square had really been stolen from him. 

Fani Willis got in Trump's crosshairs because of the case against him

That was always more smoke than fire. Still, Trump and his 18 co-defendants felt the burn with indictments in August.

They're accused of operating a criminal organization to recruit "fake electors" to challenge the certification of the 2020 election, harassing election workers who tallied ballots, and pressuring state officials to help Trump "find" enough votes after the election to close the margin with Joe Biden, who won the state and the presidency.

Now Trump has seized on the relationship Wills formed with special prosecutor Nathan Wade – they say after he was hired – to claim some sort of impropriety in hopes of upending the criminal case.

That’s as predictable as Trump always, always, always paints himself as the victim of anything he doesn’t like or that looks bad for him.

Trump has a history of causing smoke then yelling 'fire'

The Trump mercenary who went to court to weaponize the Willis-Wade relationship is Mike Roman, a former Philadelphia Republican official with a history of election skullduggery.

Sixteen years ago, as Sen. Barack Obama ran for president, Roman spread far and wide a video of two members of the "New Black Panther Party" standing outside a Philadelphia polling place. One of them held a nightstick. The Southern Poverty Law Center listed the NBPP as a hate group.

The video became a conservative cause célèbre, airing repeatedly on Fox News as evidence of alleged Democratic election interference. The Department of Justice briefly intervened with a lawsuit before dropping the case.

Here's the point people who pushed this story left out: No voters at the polling place complained about the New Black Panther Party members being there.

All smoke. No fire.

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That didn’t matter eight years later in 2016 as Trump, who as the Republican nominee for president hired Roman, used the video to falsely claim that Philadelphia would be the tip of the spear in an effort to rob him of victory in Pennsylvania.

Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania in 2016 by less than 1 percentage point.

That didn’t stop him four years later from touting Roman’s video and other debunked claims of election fraud, declaring “bad things happen in Philadelphia” during a 2020 debate with Biden.

My hometown took notice. Some folks here in Philly printed T-shirts with that proudly emblazoned as a motto.

Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020 by a little more than 1 percentage point, sending him into a prolonged fit of legal challenges that were all knocked down but gave rise to criminal allegations against the former president in state and federal courts.

Back in Georgia, Willis defends mixing personal with professional

Which brings us back to Fulton County, where Roman exploited legal proceedings in what was then Wade’s pending divorce to drag his relationship with Willis into the spotlight.

Trump jumped in on that action, going to court, seeking to have Willis removed from the case.

Willis went to church in Atlanta last month to defend herself and cast the dispute through a racial lens, noting that no questions were raised about the two white prosecutors she also hired for the case, only about Wade, who is Black.

A better argument here is that whom she dates doesn't change the facts of the case or impact in any way the allegations against Trump and his crew.

Willis is, according to Georgia law, a constitutional officer and an employee of the state's judicial branch of government. She's not covered by Fulton County's 476-page employee guidebook on personnel policies and procedures, available for download on her office's website.

But it offers what could have been some helpful advice on mixing her personal and professional lives and the pitfalls that can present.

The employee guidebook, which covers "romantic" relationships among co-workers, says Fulton County “encourages collegial relationships, but discourages relationships that could disrupt the work environment or lead to an actual or perceived conflict of interest.”

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And that’s where we are, with the Willis-Wade relationship potentially disrupting their case as Trump and Roman put them on blast for a perceived conflict of interest.

In her motion Friday, Willis asked the judge to cancel a Feb. 15 hearing on the issue.

She must know how bad this looks for her and Wade, what a sideshow her behavior has become, a distraction to the very serious case ahead of her. This was all so predictable. Roman's history and Trump's tactics are well known. They weaponize what they can.

How did Willis not see this coming? She should know better.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan