Judge who attended Fani Willis campaign event recuses from DOJ voting lawsuit

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A federal judge agreed to step aside on Monday from a major voting lawsuit brought by the Trump administration after an investigation discovered the judge attended a campaign event for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D), who prosecuted Trump after the 2020 election.

U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross said she didn’t agree with all the Justice Department’s assertions, but she conceded they were enough for her to recuse.

“And perceived support of Willis’s position on election integrity could cause an objective observer to significantly doubt the undersigned’s impartiality in this case,” Ross wrote. “Therefore, out of an abundance of caution for the potential perception of bias, the undersigned will disqualify herself from further proceedings in this case.”

Ross is an appointee of former President Obama.

Pressure has grown on the judge after an investigation found she engaged in a two-year affair with a high-ranking police officer in her judicial district. It further discovered she had sexual activity in chambers. The judge denied the claims before later recanting her statement.

The investigation also surfaced that Ross had attended Willis’ primary election victory party while serving as a sitting judge.  Ross remarked the next day that she had drunk “too many martinis” the night before, investigation records show.

Willis gained national prominence for criminally charging Trump and his allies with an alleged racketeering conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. The case was later tossed after it came to light that Willis was in a romantic relationship with a top prosecutor she hired for the case.

Ross and Willis have long known each other after working in the district attorney’s office together years ago, but ethics guidelines bar federal judges from engaging in political activity.

The Trump administration responded to the revelation of her victory party attendance by saying she should no longer oversee its lawsuit that hopes to force Georgia to turn over voter rolls to the federal government.

“Glad to see that our specific legal arguments and common sense prevailed in this motion,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon wrote on X.

In her order, Ross emphasized that the report found she attended the campaign event only to reunite with former colleagues, not to help Willis politically. But she acknowledged that she was set to oversee a controversial lawsuit involving the Trump administration and election issues.

“Both the Trump administration’s present and Willis’s past efforts have become heavily polarized,” Ross wrote. “Thus, the Court cannot discount the potential that the undersigned’s attendance at an event sponsored by Willis’s campaign … would lead an objective observer to perceive that the undersigned supports Willis’s position.”

The case will now be reassigned to another federal judge.

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