The Georgia Court of Appeals will hear an appeal of a ruling that allowed Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, to continue leading the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump on charges related to election interference, the court announced on Wednesday.
The decision to hear the appeal, issued by a three-judge panel, is all but certain to delay the Georgia criminal case against Mr. Trump and 14 of his allies, making it less likely to go to trial before the November election. Legal experts said it may take months for the appellate court to hear the case and issue a ruling.
The court’s terse three-sentence announcement reopened the possibility that Ms. Willis could be disqualified from the biggest case of her career, and one of the most significant state criminal cases in the nation’s history.
At issue is a romantic relationship she had with Nathan J. Wade, a lawyer she hired to handle the prosecution of Mr. Trump. Defense lawyers argued that the relationship amounted to an untenable conflict of interest, and that Ms. Willis and her entire office should be removed from the case.
But on March 15, Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court ruled that Ms. Willis could keep the case if Mr. Wade stepped away from it. Mr. Wade resigned a few hours after the judge issued his ruling.
Steven H. Sadow, the lead counsel for Mr. Trump in Georgia, said in a statement Wednesday that his client “looks forward to presenting interlocutory arguments to the Georgia Court of Appeals as to why the case should be dismissed and Fulton County D.A. Willis should be disqualified for her misconduct in this unjustified, unwarranted political persecution.”
A spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment on the appeals court’s action.
The decision is yet another setback for Democrats who hoped the courts would hold Mr. Trump accountable before the presidential election for some of the most serious crimes he is accused of committing. Mr. Trump is currently on trial in New York in a case involving hush money, but trials in three other criminal cases against him, including the Georgia case, appear increasingly unlikely to begin before November, when voters will decide whether to return him to office.
Mr. Trump faces federal election interference charges in Washington, D.C., and a federal prosecution in Florida over mishandling of government documents.
The Georgia case was already in a kind of administrative limbo over the question of whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution related to his efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election loss — efforts that are at the heart of the state indictment handed up last summer by a Fulton County grand jury.
Mr. Trump has argued that presidential immunity, “rooted in the separation of powers and the text of the Constitution,” should shield him from being prosecuted for his actions in Georgia. Those efforts include a telephone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump pressed Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state at the time, to help him “find” enough votes to overturn President Biden’s victory.
Mr. Trump has also raised the immunity issue in the federal election interference case in Washington, D.C.
The United States Supreme Court heard arguments about the immunity claim last month; it might not rule on the matter until late June or early July.
In Georgia, Ms. Willis’s office has told defense lawyers that it would not respond to Mr. Trump’s immunity motion in that case until after the Supreme Court’s decision.
Judge McAfee’s ruling in March had harsh words for Ms. Willis, even as it gave her a way to stay on the Trump case. Referring to the fact that Mr. Wade had gone on vacation trips with Ms. Willis and had paid for some of the costs, the judge wrote that a “financial cloud of impropriety” existed. He said Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade had engaged in “potential untruthfulness” in court hearings about the matter.
In the end, however, Judge McAfee wrote that disqualifying Ms. Willis would be overly drastic. He noted that Mr. Trump and his co-defendants had not shown that their right to due process had been violated, or “or that the issues involved prejudiced the defendants in any way.”
The appeal of Judge McAfee’s decision will slow the prosecution even more. “We’re now talking about this disqualification issue continuing on throughout the summer,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been following the case closely.
The appeal also spells a rockier road ahead for Ms. Willis, a Democrat who took office in 2021 and is now running for a second term.
Still, the appeal may ultimately have little bearing on her race in Fulton County, which is heavily Democratic.
While the appeal moves forward, a Republican-dominated committee of the State Senate, formed to investigate Ms. Willis, is starting its work.
On Tuesday, Ms. Willis — appearing with a number of Black church leaders who endorsed her re-election campaign — said that she did not think the committee had the right to subpoena her.
Ms. Willis also seemed to imply that the committee’s investigation amounted to political retaliation for her prosecution of Mr. Trump. She said she was sorry it annoyed some people “that everybody gets treated evenly.”
The appeal will be heard by a three-judge panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals.
