Fani Willis, Alluding to Trump, Calls Her Opponents ‘Scared Little Boys’ in NAACP Speech Vowing To Fight Disqualification Over Secret Romance

A defiant speech to the NAACP delivered by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, underscores that the prosecutor is unbowed by her recent run of legal losses in her pursuit of President Trump. The remarks were recently made at Atlanta NAACP’s first annual women’s brunch. They remind us that though Ms. Willis has been disqualified from her case against Mr. Trump and 18 others because of a secret romance with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, the charges she filed still stand and she could yet be reinstated by the Georgia supreme court and attempt to resume her felony racketeering prosecution of the president. Her appeal is pending.Ms. Willis declared that her foes “picked the right lady” to investigate because she plans to “continue to follow my oath. And I don’t really care how many times you threaten me.” Without naming them directly, she called her political opponents — which include Mr. Trump and his personal legal team — “Scared little boys.” The district attorney also mounted a defense of a fellow Georgian, Stacey Abrams, a failed, two-time gubernatorial candidate. In January a nonprofit that Ms. Abrams founded, the New Georgia Project, was fined $300,000 for violating campaign finance laws. The Georgia state senate, which is investigating Ms. Willis, has also turned its sights on Ms. Abrams. Mr. Trump in his address to a joint session of Congress accused Ms. Abrams of siphoning off $1.9 billion in climate funds.Ms. Willis called herself and Ms. Abrams “two of the most powerful Democrats in the state.” The district attorney identified herself as the “daughter of a civil rights attorney” — John Floyd III — who was a “Black Panther.” She has told the New York Post that she speaks to him some 10 times a day. Mr. Floyd also testified under her oath at the hearings relating to Ms. Willis’s affair with Mr. Wade. Mr. Floyd, who in the 1960s called police in Los Angeles an “occupying army” and referred to a Lone Star State politician a “Texas cracker,” was a founding member of the Los Angeles Black Panthers in 1967, and would go on to serve as chairman of the Black Panther Political Party. He left the Panthers in the early 1970s to practice criminal defense law. Mr. Willis testified last February that he knew Mr. Wade only glancingly and that keeping cash at home was a “Black thing.” That bolstered Ms. Willis’s argument that while Mr. Wade paid for the vacations the two took to Napa Valley, Aruba, and Belize, Ms. Willis paid him back in cash transactions she couldn’t document for the court. Judge Scott McAfee, who declined to disqualify Ms. Willis — Mr. Wade was ordered to resign, though — called that account “not so incredible as to be inherently unbelievable.” The judge did also say, however, that the couple’s protestations that they were not an item when Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade bore “the odor of mendacity.” The appeals court, which later overruled Judge McAfee and disqualified Ms. Willis, concluded that their romance predated his hiring and compromised her prosecutorial “discretion.”The prosecutor’s speech comes as she has suffered setbacks on several fronts at Fulton County. She has been ordered to pay some $75,000 in fines and attorneys fees in two separate cases for failing to comply with Georgia’s open records laws. She still faces the possibility that a special master could be assigned to supervise her compliance. A judge also rejected her request to quash a subpoena issued by the Georgia state senate, finding her arguments “absurd.”Ms. Willis’s biggest defeat, though, is her disqualification from the racketeering case against Mr. Trump. The Georgia court of appeals, which overruled Judge McAfee on this head, held that “while we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, 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.” At the women’s brunch, Ms. Willis also mounted a spirited defense of diversity, equity, and inclusion, a program that has come under sustained attack from the Trump administration. She said: “Every time they try to make that word DEI an ugly word, you need to tell them that is a beautiful thing. The reason why the United States is such a great country is because we are diverse. For them to suggest that diversity is an ugly word shows you how cowardly and ugly they are.”

Fani Willis, Alluding to Trump, Calls Her Opponents ‘Scared Little Boys’ in NAACP Speech Vowing To Fight Disqualification Over Secret Romance

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