Defiant Fani Willis, Refusing To Cover Trump’s Millions in Legal Bills, Calls His Claims ‘Suitably Preposterous’ and ‘Unconstitutional’

The district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, is taking her refusal to pay Trump’s millions of dollars in legal bills to the court of public opinion. A new Georgia law, passed last spring by Georgia’s conservative legislature and signed by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, appears to mandate that when a prosecutor is disqualified and the case is subsequently dismissed, the county served by that prosecutor is required to foot the legal bills accrued by the defendants. The legislation appears to have been designed to thwart Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat who was disqualified from her racketeering prosecution of Mr. Trump and 18 others when her secret romance with her handpicked special prosecutor was exposed. Mr. Trump claims that the Georgia law fits the circumstances under which Ms. Willis was ejected from the case, and that he is owed some six million dollars from Fulton County, which includes much of downtown Atlanta. The total bills for all of the defendants comes to some $17 million, a sizable bill for the county, which brought in about $993 million in taxes for its General Fund in 2025. Ms. Willis, though, has argued in court filings that the law is unconstitutional and that the circumstances under which she was disqualified — for her romance with the subordinate prosecutor, Nathan Wade — are not those envisioned by its terms.Ms. Willis this week told Atlanta’s Channel 2 Action News that “We’re gonna fight with everything we legally can in that particular case” and that “the law’s unconstitutional, and just wrong in so many ways.” She added that “The first problem is that the law was written with the intent of legislators trying to help their friends, and so whenever you do something for a wrong purpose, it’s going to work out wrongly. It’s terribly written. It looks like they wrote it on the back of a napkin.”Ms. Willis also declared that the Peach State lawmakers “should be ashamed” of the law under which her constituents — who reelected her in November in a rout, despite global news coverage of her love affair — could be liable for millions of dollars for an ambitious election interference case that ran aground before it reached trial. Ms. Willis also tells Action News that “the Constitution says you cannot” hold a prosecutor retroactively liable for legal fees.The Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, on November 21, 2023 at Atlanta. Dennis Byron-pool/Getty ImagesMs. Willis has made those arguments in court, writing to a state trial judge that the fees claimed by her erstwhile defendants are “suitably preposterous” and that she “has no intention of allowing Fulton County taxpayers to pay such an absurd amount for such an absurd reason.” She accuses the defendants of being in hot pursuit of an “enormous windfall.” Among the bills, she reports, are receipts for “seafood lunches” and $1,000 a night hotel rooms.The district attorney notes that the law mandating reimbursement applies only to a finding of “actual impropriety,” whereas her affair with the prosecutor, Nathan Wade, was judged to have only generated a “significant appearance of impropriety.” The Georgia Court of Appeals, though judges this to be the “rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.”Ms. Willis also argues that the law in question demands a “nexus” between the dismissal of the case and the prosecutor’s pecadillos. Fulton County taxpayers paid Mr. Wade some $700,000 despite his never having prosecuted a felony before, and while he was working for Ms. Willis the two took vacations to Napa Valley, Aruba, and Belize. The trial judge in the case, Scott McAfee, reckoned that the behavior of the pair emitted an “odor of mendacity.”The case was not dismissed immediately, though. Judge McAfee ordered Mr. Wade to depart, but allowed Ms. Willis to stay on and kept the charges intact. The Court of Appeals saw that aspirationally Solomonic decision as untenable, and disqualified Ms. Willis — though that tribunal judged that dismissing the charges along with the prosecutor would be “extreme.” Instead, the appellate court appointed a new prosecutor and longtime Republican district attorney, Peter Skandalakis. He failed to find anyone willing to take on the case, and eventually dismissed it himself. The defendants argue that Ms. Willis’s misconduct was directly tied to the dismissal because she and Mr. Wade began dating before the case began — and that their romance influenced her decision to prosecute and how to structure the proceedings. The couple insisted that their romance was not kindled until after Mr. Wade joined the prosecution team, but this assertion was undercut by witness testimony at an embarrassing legal hearing two years ago. The defendants also furnished evidence — in the form of thousands of text messages and telephone calls — that the affair was already underway when Mr. Trump and others were charged. The Court of Appeals appeared to credit that evidence when they disqualified Ms. Willis.

Defiant Fani Willis, Refusing To Cover Trump’s Millions in Legal Bills, Calls His Claims ‘Suitably Preposterous’ and ‘Unconstitutional’

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