Closing summary
Lawyers presented their closing arguments in a three-day evidentiary hearing to determine whether the district attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from handling the election interference against Donald Trump because of her romantic relationship with a deputy handling the case.
Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the Georgia election interference case, indicated that he would rule within the next two weeks on whether to remove Willis from the case.
Joe Biden signed into law a short-term stopgap spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown. The bill was approved by the Senate on Thursday following a House vote that narrowly averted a shutdown that was due to occur this weekend.
A federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case over his retention of classified documents appeared inclined to reject a proposal by special counsel prosecutors that she set a schedule culminating in a July trial. Trump himself attended the entirety of the hearing on Friday.
Prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s office said holding Trump’s classified documents trial before the November presidential election would not violate the justice department’s policy against taking actions close to an election.
Joe Biden announced that the US will begin dropping food into Gaza by air “in the coming days” and consider making deliveries by sea. The news came after more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza were killed when desperate crowds gathered around aid trucks and Israeli troops opened fire on Thursday.
The Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski has endorsed Nikki Haley in the GOP presidential primary, marking the first endorsement from a sitting senator for Haley.
Greg Abbott, the hard-right governor of Texas, is “absolutely” on Donald Trump’s short list for vice-president should Trump as expected win the Republican nomination to face Joe Biden.
Updated
A key question before Judge Scott McAfee is what standard he should use to determine if Fani Willis should be disqualified. Lawyers for the defense argued that the appearance of a conflict of interest was enough to disqualify Willis.
Adam Abbate, a lawyer in Willis’s office, said on Friday:
Not a single shred of evidence was produced through the exhibits or any testimony showing how their due process rights or constitutional rights were violated by the relationship that began in March 2022. There has been absolutely no evidence the district attorney has benefitted financially at all.
Adam Abbate, representing Willis, said that Georgia law was clear in saying an actual conflict had to exist. “They must show an actual conflict,” he said. Experts say state law has long established this high bar to clear and the defendants in the case have not done so, but McAfee seemed somewhat skeptical on Friday that the appearance of a conflict wouldn’t be enough.
A disqualification would upend the case and delay it past the 2024 election. The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, a state agency, would have the sole discretion to reassign the case to another prosecutor, and there’s no timeline for how long that could take.
Pressed by McAfee, Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for Michael Roman, struggled to articulate what exactly Willis’s personal interest in the case was. “I think you know it when you see it,” he said.
