Metaphorically speaking of course.

Looking back, despite having a nightmarish year personally and in my business, Ethics Alarms has had an excellent year. The Fani Wallis scandal first broke early this year when it was revealed that she had hired her adulterous huggy-bear Nathan Wade as one of the prosecutors going after Donald Trump for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. This was a transparently a political prosecution that Willis had not been shy about trumpeting. She then went on a couple of junkets with Wade in which he paid for their enjoyment and entertainment. I immediately stated here that the this created a conflict of interest as well as the appearance of impropriety, and that both Willis and Wade needed to be separated from the case.

Back in May, I included the sordid tale in a CLE ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, noting also that Willis was incompetent by endangering a high profile prosecution by risking the backlash that in fact occurred when her relationship with Wade was revealed, and also breached her duty of communication by not consulting her client the County through its leadership, regarding her plans to employ a lawyer with no previous criminal law experience because he was sharing her bed. I told the class that the only way Willis or the County could extricate itself from this mess was by separating both Wade and Willis from the case. Eventually a judge ruled that Wade indeed had to go, after which he gave an interview that called into serious question not only his integrity but also his maturity and brain function.

Meanwhile, legal and ethics experts who anti-Trump bias had made stupid and who really, really wanted to see Donald Trump brought down kept writing in columns and on my legal ethics listserv and declaiming on PBS, CNN, MSNBC and the other usual suspects, that the uproar was over nothing. Willis, for her part, claimed—in church, no less—that she was a martyr being victimized because she was a black woman. (In fact she was an idiot being victimized by her own arrogance and stupidity.)

Today the proverbial other show dropped as I knew it would. In a 31-page written opinion , the Georgia Court of Appeals sided with Trump and his eight co-defendants who appealed to overturn a March order by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee rejecting a motion to disqualify Willis and her office.

“After carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office,” the decision says. The court said McAfee’s “remedy … did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.” “While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” the ruling goes on to say.

Bingo. Ethics Alarms said that this was the correct result in March. In January, I explained, after some research that included quizzing other prosecutors, that Willis had befouled herself and the case, probably beyond repair, even as “experts” were being quoted in pieces like “Allegations of a romantic relationship between DA Fani Willis and prosecutor are bad optics, but likely won’t impact Trump’s case, experts say” that none of this matters.

NPR used to contact me as an expert until I displeased them by uttering an analysis that might have supported Donald Trump.

Anyway, I was right and those “experts” were wrong. Time for Fredo!