ATLANTA — A year ago, President Trump was fighting 13 felony counts in Georgia for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and the prosecutor who charged him was seen as a rising star.
Now Trump is president again, immune from prosecution for the next four years, and Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis has been rebuked by the courts and is fighting to keep the case alive.
Trump and Willis began their second terms in office a few weeks apart. To celebrate her inauguration, Willis hosted a gala and political fundraiser the night before Valentine's Day with a black, pink and gold dress code. The theme: "For the Love of Justice."
During her first term, Willis developed a reputation for prosecuting racketeering cases, indicting high-profile defendants like Trump and rapper Young Thug. But over time, both of those cases became mired in drama. At the gala, Willis expressed no regrets.
"In my first four years in office, I learned a really hard lesson," Willis told supporters. "Folks are here for you during the good times, but the slightest bit of wind and folks quickly begin to fall to the wayside. See we are living in a time, not of a mild wind, but I submit to you, a tsunami."
That wind began to pick up last January, when one of Trump's co-defendants lodged a serious allegation: the DA was involved in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired for the case. Though a judge eviscerated Willis' judgment, he found no evidence of an actual conflict of interest and allowed her to continue if Wade resigned.
But in December, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that Willis and her office should still be removed from the case. Willis appealed, and the Georgia Supreme Court has yet to decide if it will hear the case.
Trump praised the ruling. On stage at her gala, and with Wade seated at her table, Willis seemed to excoriate it.
"See, there are judges in my very state, s*** in my very courthouse, that are more interested in their next appointment than upholding the rule of law and following their oath," Willis said.
Rather than speak at length about specific goals for her second term or accomplishments from her first, Willis devoted much of her remarks to grappling with how a man she indicted in 2023 was back in power. While she did not mention Trump by name, references like "convicted felon in the White House" were not lost on the crowd.
"There's a lot of room for redemption here, but this case is much more on life support than it's ever been before," said Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.
Kreis says Trump had almost no chance of going to trial last year, no matter what Willis did, once the U.S. Supreme Court established broad presidential immunity. That decision complicated not only the Georgia prosecution, but Trump's two federal criminal cases. The federal charges were dropped once Trump was elected president again.
"I think people wanted the criminal justice system to do something that perhaps the criminal justice system was just never built to do," Kreis said. "Yes, we have a system of justice which is meant to protect democracy against election law crimes. But it's just never been tested like this, a nationalized conspiracy to intervene and subvert a presidential election."
Trump's 14 remaining co-defendants in Georgia could still see trial in the next few years. But if Willis is disqualified from the case for good by the Georgia Supreme Court, Kreis says it is unlikely anyone will be appointed to take over the prosecution.
"If Fani Willis is removed and none of the co-defendants are ever brought to trial, I think this will be a real failure and a real mark of shame for the DA's office, the criminal justice system in Georgia and for our constitutional principles more broadly," he said.
Most Republicans, including the president, have praised the prosecution's unraveling as a triumph of justice. A framed image of Trump's Fulton County mug shot now hangs just outside the Oval Office. And GOP lawmakers in Congress and the Georgia Senate have continued their own investigations of Willis.
"It's been a political circus for way too long," state Sen. John Albers, a Fulton County Republican, said of the Georgia election interference case before a recent vote to renew the committee probing Willis. "The people who are stuck in the middle of this can't move on with their lives and their very basic freedoms."
But at the weekly farmer's market on the grounds of the Carter Presidential Center in a progressive Atlanta neighborhood, Wendy Cooper said she feels empathy for the district attorney.
"As a Black woman living in America, this is to be expected," Cooper said. "Powerful, smart, African American women are really the target of a lot of hatred."
Cooper said she believes that even if Willis had pulled off a conviction, it probably would not have mattered. Trump had already been found guilty on separate criminal charges in New York.
"But did it have an impact on the election? No," she said.
Stopping at the market, Atlanta residents Lorraine and Andy Ramey said they strongly disagree with the court decision to remove Willis. They believe her romantic relationship was an error in judgment that had nothing to do with the integrity of the charges.
But they also feel Willis bungled the best shot to hold Trump responsible for his actions after 2020, which included pressuring Georgia's secretary of state to find him votes.
"That made it very personal," Lorraine Ramey said. "I was hopeful, and then it slowly faded. She knew better."
Andy Ramey said he's fed up with the justice system, fed up with how Willis handled such an important case and fed up with a country that sent Trump back to the White House.
"The justice system has embarrassed itself, from Fulton County all the way to the Supreme Court," he said.
Last fall, Lorraine Ramey begrudgingly voted to keep Willis in office — she voted for every Democrat on the ballot. But when Andy Ramey stepped into the voting booth, he said he made a decision he did not take lightly.
In the race for district attorney, he left his ballot blank.
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