A ruling that the Department of Justice is required to disclose any correspondence between Special Counsel Jack Smith and the district attorney of Georgia’s Fulton County, Fani Willis, could shed fresh light on the relationship of two of the prosecutors who pursued President Trump.

The decision was handed down by a United States district court judge, Dabney Friedrich, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump at the beginning of his first term. The request for records was filed by a conservative legal organization, Judicial Watch, which alleges “collusion” between the state and federal prosecutors. Judge Friedrich ordered the parties to confer on next steps by February 21. 

When President Biden was still in power, the DOJ resisted Judicial Watch’s request, which took the form of a Freedom of Information petition. The government moved that the demand be dismissed on summary judgment, but Judge Friedrich ruled that since Mr. Smith dropped both of his prosecutions of Mr. Trump on account of presidential immunity, the cases are “closed — not pending or contemplated — and therefore are not proceedings with which disclosure may interfere.”

The DOJ, Judge Friedrich writes, will now be required to “disclose any [responsive] records or establish both that their contents are exempt from disclosure and that such exemption has not also been waived.” Mr. Biden’s DOJ had cited a provision of the Freedom of Information Act that provides for the withholding of information if the records at issue “could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

The DOJ’s refusal to turn over any extant correspondence between Mr. Smith and Ms. Willis was formulated under Attorney General Garland. Tuesday night, though, saw Mr. Trump’s nominee, Pam Bondi, confirmed as America’s next chief law enforcement officer. 

Since Mr. Trump returned to power, the DOJ, under an interim attorney general, has fired dozens of prosecutors involved in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the January 6 demonstrators at the Capitol. It appears unlikely that Ms. Bondi will order the DOJ to appeal Judge Friedrich’s ruling, and will instead facilitate the release of the records.

While Mr. Smith’s cases are history — the DOJ’s position is that there is a “categorical” ban on the federal prosecution of a sitting president — Ms. Willis’s racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 18 others is twisting in legal limbo. She has been disqualified from the prosecution by the Georgia court of appeals because of the “significant appearance of impropriety” generated by her secret romance with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. 

Ms. Willis has appealed that ruling to the Georgia supreme court, which possesses the power of discretionary appeal and has not decided on whether it will hear her request. In the meantime, though, the charges against Mr. Trump and his camarilla for election interference still stand, as the court of appeals rejected Mr. Trump’s request that the indictment be dismissed. The review tribunal rejected that remedy as “extreme.”

A different conclusion was reached by Judge Aileen Cannon of south Florida, who presided over Mr. Smith’s case against Mr. Trump for the storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. She ruled that the special counsel was unconstitutionally appointed — and that the defect was so unlawful that the charges against Mr. Trump and his co-defendants required dismissal.

Judicial Watch’s victory at the District of Columbia follows on the heels of the group’s litigation success at Fulton County. Last month, a state court judge, Robert McBurney, ordered Ms. Willis’s office to pay Judicial Watch $21,578 in “attorney’s fees and costs” in the open records lawsuit for communications Ms. Willis had with Mr. Smith and the House January 6 Committee. 

Ms. Willis claims that she has “no responsive records” related to Mr. Smith and that her correspondence with the House January 6 committee “are exempt” from disclosure because they are protected by several species of privilege. Judicial Watch, though, reckons that her compliance with Georgia’s open records statutes has been “woefully inadequate” and that she has made “no showing that the search was diligent,” as required by law.

Judicial Watch has gone so far as to request that Georgia appoint a special master — an independent chaperone — to ensure that Ms. Willis complies with the Peach State’s disclosure demands. The district attorney contends 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 nature of what — if any — collaboration existed between Mr. Smith and Ms. Willis remains a mystery. Their election interference cases covered similar ground. Both prosecutors homed in on Mr. Trump’s challenge to the outcome of the 2020 election in Georgia. Both of their indictments cite a conversation between Mr. Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Bradley Raffensperger. Mr. Trump told the state official: “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”

In July 2023, before Ms. Willis brought her case, she told an Atlanta radio station, WABE, “I don’t know what Jack Smith is doing and Jack Smith doesn’t know what I’m doing. In all honesty, if Jack Smith was standing next to me, I’m not sure I would know who he was. My guess is he probably can’t pronounce my name correctly.”

Mr. Wade’s testimony in October before the House Judiciary Committee, though, confirmed that before he was forced to resign from the case he met twice with White House counsel. Those conferences — in May and November 2022 — predated Mr. Smith’s appointment, which was announced on November 18, 2023. That was two days after Mr. Trump declared his intention to retake the White House, a quest he completed in November.   

Whether Ms. Willis and Mr. Smith colluded may be of interest to more than just  Judicial Watch. Investigators in both houses of Congress have expressed an intention to get to the bottom of how Mr. Smith’s prosecutions, as well as the prosecutions of the January 6 demonstrators, transpired. 

Ms. Bondi, at her confirmation hearings, refused to say whether she would investigate Mr. Smith. At the same hearing, she said what she knew of Mr. Smith’s conduct she appraised as “horrible.”