On Friday, June 13, 2025, the United States Department of Justice asked a federal judge to remove herself from the department’s own lawsuit against Georgia election officials. The reason given: she had attended an event honoring Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. That is the fact. Hold it up to the light for a moment.
The lawsuit in question was filed by the Justice Department against Georgia election officials. The federal government chose the court. The federal government chose the docket. Now the federal government has decided, at a moment of its own choosing, that the judge it drew is inconvenient, and it wants a different one. The technical word for this is recusal. The older word is judge-shopping.
Fani Willis is not an abstraction. She is the Fulton County District Attorney who brought a RICO indictment in August 2023 against nineteen defendants, including a former president, for alleged efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. That case has moved at the speed of a mule in August. Willis survived a disqualification attempt in early 2024 over a personal relationship with a special prosecutor she had hired. She is, to put it plainly, a figure the current federal apparatus has reason to want diminished.
An event honoring her is not evidence of corruption. Judges attend dinners. Judges accept plaques. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges does not prohibit a federal judge from sitting in a room where someone the government is interested in gets applauded. If social adjacency were disqualifying, the federal bench would empty out on a Wednesday.
What the motion does, whatever its technical merit, is place a flag on the judge. It says: we have looked at you and found a reason. That reason, whether it holds in court or not, is now in the record. A replacement judge — should the motion succeed — will understand what happened to her predecessor’s assignment.
This is the government’s right. Recusal motions are a legitimate instrument of litigation. The instrument has a second use, and everyone in a courthouse knows what it is.
The DOJ filed no brief on the merits of the Georgia election case on Friday. It filed this.