The district attorney of Georgia’s Fulton County, Fani Willis, is facing fresh pressure this week from Republicans on Capitol Hill to open the books on her troubled racketeering case against President Trump and 18 others.
The House Judiciary Committee, controlled by Republicans, issued a series of letters to Ms. Willis’s staff soliciting information — testimony and documentation — about any collaboration between the district attorney’s office and the House January 6 committee, which handed up criminal referrals against Mr. Trump and other officials for alleged election interference in the 2020 election. If she fails to comply, a subpoena could be in the offing.
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For months Ms. Willis has been resisting efforts by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, to investigate her ties to the now-disbanded January 6 committee, which Mr. Jordan and his fellow Republicans opposed as an instance of legislative overreach. In February, Ms. Willis wrote to Mr. Jordan that his investigation “ignores centuries of precedent about the limits of congressional power” and “tramples over foundational principles of state sovereignty and federalism.”
Ms. Willis calls Mr. Jordan’s attempts to “bully” her a “complete waste of your time” and accuses him of being “confused” as to the oath of office to which he was sworn.
Ms. Willis, though, is the one who has repeatedly been found to have acted crosswise with the law. In December the Georgia court of appeals disqualified her from her racketeering prosecution against Mr. Trump, holding that 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.”
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Judge McAfee, though, declined to disqualify Ms. Willis. He determined that Mr. Wade’s resignation was enough to cure the impropriety. The court of appeals adduced that Ms. Willis was lying when she testified that the relationship with Mr. Wade began only after he was hired. The appellate court found that the romance tainted the period when she was “exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute.”
Ms. Willis has appealed her disqualification to Georgia’s supreme court, which possesses the discretion to hear the case or leave the disqualification ruling intact. She has, in two separate lawsuits, been ordered to pay more than $75,000 in attorneys’ fees for violating Georgia’s open records laws. These violations involve formal records requests made by a conservative legal group, Judicial Watch, that pertain to the same correspondence with the House January 6 committee that Mr. Jordan is eyeing.
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Ms. Willis argues in a court filing that “the appointment of a Special Master in an open records case is not provided for by statute, unprecedented under the law, and overly intrusive.” The presiding judge in that matter, Robert McBurney, indicates that he will consider such an appointment depending on the volume of records that need to be inspected.
Ms. Willis is also facing investigations at the local level. Republicans in the Georgia state senate first subpoenaed the district attorney in September, a summons that she has been working to squash in court. Fulton County courts, though, have found that Ms. Willis’s arguments for evading the subpoena can be characterized as “absurd” and have determined that her invocations of various species of privilege strain the reach of those protections.
* Original Article:
https://www.nysun.com/article/fani-willis-caught-red-handed-hiding-records-legal-group-and-house-gop-demand-details-on-her-collaboration-with-democrats-on-january-6-committee
