Trump Georgia case: judge says he hopes to have decision on whether to disqualify Fani Willis in two weeks – as it happened

• 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.

1 Mar 202417.04 EST

Sam Levine

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.

1 Mar 202416.58 EST

Sam Levine

Lawyers presented their closing arguments on Friday afternoon 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.

The hearing was the coda to a dramatic deviation from the racketeering case against the former US president and 14 remaining co-defendants for trying to overturn the election in Georgia.

Willis sat at the counsel table in court on Friday for the latter half of the hearing, and Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, said he hoped to issue a decision on the matter in the next two weeks.

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The matter kicked off in January when Michael Roman, a Republican operative and one of the defendants in the case, filed a motion claiming Willis financially benefitted from the case because of a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a top prosecutor in the case. Trump and several other defendants later joined the request.

Willis and Wade both admitted to a romantic relationship, but both said it only began after he was hired on 1 November 2021. They both testified about vacations they had taken together and revealed personal details about a romantic relationship that they say only began in 2022, after he was hired, and ended last summer.

The Republican senator for Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, has endorsed Nikki Haley in the GOP presidential primary, marking the first endorsement from a sitting senator for Haley.

“I’m proud to endorse Gov Nikki Haley,” Murkowski said in a statement.

America needs someone with the right values, vigor, and judgment to serve as our next President – and in this race, there is no one better than her.

The endorsement comes just days before Super Tuesday, when Alaska and several other states will cast their ballots.

Murkowski was among seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump for his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection.

In closing arguments in the hearing to determine whether the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, should be disqualified from handling the Trump election interference case, lawyers for the district attorney’s office argued that the defendants had failed to show any actual conflict of interest.

Adam Abbate, a lawyer with the district attorney’s office, accused the defendants’ attorneys of pushing “speculation and conjecture” and trying to harass and embarrass Willis with questions on the witness stand that have nothing to do with the issue at hand, AP reported.

“We have absolutely no evidence that Ms Willis received any financial gain or benefit” from the relationship, Abbate told the judge.

Judge Scott McAfee has said he hopes to have a resolution on the motion to disqualify the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, from the case she brought against Donald Trump within the next two weeks.

The hearing is now adjourned.

It’s been a big day for two of Donald Trump’s most significant court cases. In the matter of the classified documents found in his possession at Mar-a-Lago, judge Aileen Cannon sounded skeptical of prosecutors’ request for a July trial, but did not set a new date. In the case alleging meddling in Georgia’s 2020 election, Trump’s attorneys argued for the removal of district attorney Fani Willis, saying failing to do so would undermine faith in the legal system. Willis is now in court as her office is expected to argue why it should remain on the case.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Joe Biden said the United States would airdrop aid into Gaza, and may also make deliveries by sea, while calling on Israel to facilitate access by land.

• Trump said Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, is a potential candidate to be his vice-president.

• Nikki Haley campaigned in Virginia ahead of its primary next week, and was interrupted by protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, Fani Willis is back in the courtroom where a judge is considering whether to remove her from the election meddling case she brought against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants:

Joe Biden’s vow to get humanitarian aid into Gaza by air and potentially sea comes after more than 100 people were killed amid a scramble to pick up food in the besieged territory, leading even some of Israel’s allies to demand an investigation. Here’s more on that, from the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood, Emma Graham-Harrison and Julian Borger:

Israel is facing growing international pressure for an investigation after more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza were killed when desperate crowds gathered around aid trucks and Israeli troops opened fire on Thursday.

Israel said people died in a crush or were run over by aid lorries although it admitted its troops had opened fire on what it called a “mob”. But the head of a hospital in Gaza said 80% of injured people brought in had gunshot wounds.

The UK called for an “urgent investigation and accountability”. In a statement, David Cameron, the foreign secretary, said: “The deaths of people in Gaza waiting for an aid convoy were horrific … this must not happen again.” Israel must allow more aid into Gaza, Lord Cameron added.

France called for an independent investigation into the circumstances of the disaster, and Germany said the Israeli army must fully explain what happened. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said: “Every effort must be made to investigate what happened and ensure transparency.”

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said 112 people were killed and more than 750 others were injured as crowds rushed towards a convoy of trucks carrying food aid.

The United States will work with Jordan to drop food into Gaza by air and will consider make deliveries by sea, Joe Biden said, while noting he will “insist” Israel allow more trucks bearing aid to enter the territory by land.

“In the coming days, we are going to join with our friends in Jordan and others in providing airdrops of additional food and supplies into [Gaza] and seek to continue to open up other avenues into [Gaza], including the possibility of a marine corridor to deliver large amounts of humanitarian assistance,” Biden said in the Oval Office. The president initially misspoke, saying the airdrops would be done in Ukraine rather than Gaza.

“In addition to expanding deliveries by land, as I said, we’re going to insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to get more and more people the help they need. No excuses, because the truth is aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough now – it’s nowhere nearly enough. Innocent lives are on the line and children’s lives are on the line.”

In a statement released just as Joe Biden announced the US would airdrop humanitarian aid into Gaza, the independent senator Bernie Sanders called on the president to approve such action – while also insisting the onus lay on Israel to help civilians.

“The United States, which has helped fund the Israeli military for years, cannot sit back and allow hundreds of thousands of innocent children to starve to death. As a result of Israeli bombing and restrictions on humanitarian aid, the people of Gaza are facing an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. Whether Netanyahu’s rightwing government likes it or not, the United States must immediately begin to airdrop food, water, and other lifesaving supplies into Gaza,” the progressive lawmaker from Vermont, who caucuses with the Democrats, wrote.

Here’s more:

But while an airdrop will buy time and save lives, there is no substitute for sustained ground deliveries of what is needed to sustain life in Gaza. Israel MUST open the borders and allow the United Nations to deliver supplies in sufficient quantities. The United States should make clear that failure to do so immediately will lead to a fundamental break in the U.S. – Israeli relationship and the immediate halt of all military aid.

The US will begin airdropping humanitarian aid into Gaza, Joe Biden has said.

Biden said the airdrops will begin in the “coming days”, an announcement that came a day after more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza were killed when desperate crowds gathered around aid trucks and Israeli troops opened fire.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow has argued that Fani Willis should be disqualified from the election interference case because she may have lied to the court about her undisclosed affair with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

Sadow said Willis’s claim under oath that her relationship with Wade did not begin until after she hired him was not credible, Reuters reports. He told the judge:

Once you have the appearance of impropriety ... the law in Georgia is clear: That’s enough to disqualify.

Joe Biden has signed into law a short-term stopgap spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown, the White House has said.

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.

The temporary extension funds the departments of agriculture, transportation, interior and others through 8 March. It funds the Pentagon, homeland security, health and state through 22 March.

A lawyer for one of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case has argued that not removing Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, would undermine public confidence in the legal system.

John Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, argued that just “an appearance of a conflict of interest” between Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade would be “sufficient” to disqualify her from the election subversion case.

Merchant told Judge Scott McAfee that “if the court allows this kind of behavior to go on ... the entire public confidence in the system will be shot”, AP reported.

If the judge denies the bid to disqualify Willis, “there’s a good chance” an appeals court would overturn that ruling and order a new trial, Merchant argued, it writes.

Judge Scott McAfee has said he might be able to make a decision on the hearing on Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis as he hears closing arguments in the case. CNN quotes him as saying:

I think we’ve reached the point where I’d like to hear more of how the legal argument apply to what has already been presented, and it may already be possible for me to make a decision without those needing to be material to that decision.

Closing arguments began about half an hour ago over whether Willis should be disqualified from handling the election interference against Trump because of her romantic relationship with a deputy handling the case.

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