Fani Willis Comes Under Fire as Georgia’s GOP Lawmakers Plan Sweeping Restrictions Following Her Failed Prosecution of Trump

Republican state senators in Georgia are readying a package of legislation to curb the power of local prosecutors to bring cases related to elections — a blitz of lawmaking intended to prevent a repeat of Fani Willis’ failed prosecution of President Trump or anything similar. An initial vote is scheduled for next week. Ms. Willis, the elected Democratic district attorney of Fulton County, which includes much of downtown Atlanta, brought a criminal racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 18 others in 2023. She alleged a conspiracy to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election in the Peach State. She was disqualified, though, following the disclosure of a secret romance with her handpicked special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. A new prosecutor assigned to the case ultimately moved to dismiss the charges this past November. The dismissal came a few weeks after Ms. Willis was resoundingly reelected.Georgia is party to a dynamic similar to that in many Southern states where white lawmakers in GOP controlled legislatures spar with elected black mayors and district attorneys in large cities. This dynamic has been playing out in the jousting between Ms. Willis and Georgia state lawmakers.A law passed by these lawmakers last year could put Fulton County taxpayers on the hook for some $17 million in legal fees left over from Ms. Willis’s case — a not insignificant portion of Fulton County’s billion dollar General Fund. The statute mandates that if a prosecutor is disqualified and the charges are subsequently dismissed, the county the prosecutor serves is on the hook for attorneys’ bills. Ms. Willis is challenging the demand that she pay up by asserting that the law is unconstitutional.The same Senate Special Committee on Investigations that generated that law is now wrangling to bring in Mr. Wade to testify under oath about his relationship with Ms. Willis. He has agreed to appear but scheduling issues have held back his testimony. Ms. Willis has already appeared before the committee in a session in which she called Mr. Trump and his erstwhile co-defendants “criminals” and “crooks” and accused Republicans of wanting to take her “back to 1948, where an African American prosecutor can only prosecute certain types of people.”Now that committee — which is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats — is proposing to create statewide grand juries to investigate election and voting crimes. While Georgia has in recent years emerged as one of America’s most significant swing states, its purple status is largely arrived at by combining Atlanta’s ultramarine political hue with the rest of the state’s beet-red politics.In recent elections, Georgia Republicans have tangled with Stacy Abrams, a black political figure who’s been instrumental in getting out the vote in Georgia’s black community and fighting back against Republican efforts to combat what they say is voter fraud. Should these statewide grand juries go into effect, it would be a setback for Ms. Abrams. A special committee of the Georgia Senate has been established to investigate financial mismanagement in Ms. Abrams’ voter registration organization.The grand jury that Ms. Willis convened drew from Fulton County, where Vice President Kamala Harris won some 70 percent of the presidential vote, while Mr. Trump carried the state as a whole. One of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, engaged in a years-long effort to move his case to federal court. That was likely motivated by a desire to access a more political heterogenous jury.Another bill aims to grant new authority to the state attorney general to prosecute a variety of crimes, which would shrink the jurisdiction of local prosecutors like Ms. Willis. Georgia’s current attorney general, Chris Carr, is a Republican. The chairman of the committee investigating Ms. Willis , Bill Cowsert, also a Republican, is running to replace Mr. Carr, who is running for governor to replace Mr. Kemp. He is term-limited.Another bill being championed by Mr. Cowsert would create additional criteria for disciplining or removing elected district attorneys and solicitors general. The new grounds for disqualification include failure to exercise impartiality in prosecutions, failure to strictly comply with the State Bar of Georgia’s code of professional conduct, and failure to comply with open records laws.Those criteria all appear to be drawn from Ms. Willis’s conduct. The Georgia Supreme Court, which disqualified her, found that this was the “rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.” That ruling reversed the trial judge, Scott McAfee, though he found that her behavior with Mr Wade was“legally improper” and emitted an “odor of mendacity.”Ms. Willis contends that she was disqualified only for a “significant appearance of impropriety” and not for “actual misconduct.” Fulton County’s code of ethics, though, mandates that even the appearance of improper conduct can be enough to end a prosecutor’s time atop a case. The Georgia Supreme Court elected not to hear Ms. Willis’s appeal, and an independent prosecutor subsequently decided to drop the troubled case altogether.Ms. Willis has also been under fire for her lack of transparency. Her office’s non-compliance with judicial orders for disclosure under Georgia’s open records law — a state version of FOIA — has been so severe that judges have in two separate matters levied fines against her office for the combined total of some $75,000. Judge Robert McBurney condemned her “desultory efforts to determine the full universe of responsive information” and “repeated denials” of the existence of relevant documents.Those records requests were brought by a conservative legal group, Judicial Watch. The groups’ president said in a statement that “Fani Willis can’t be trusted. Every time we go back to court there are new excuses and new documents that she said never existed. And now we find that entire universes of records may have been ignored.”Mr. Carr, the attorney general, said in a statement this week that he supports the bills but that “If the legislature is going to give the Attorney General’s Office statewide grand jury authority, they shouldn’t stop at elections cases — they should do so for human trafficking, gang activity, domestic terrorism, organized retail crime and public corruption as well.” The reference to “gang activity” appears to allude to Ms. Willis’s troubled prosecution of Jeffery Wiliams, also known as Young Thug, and his YSL label, which she alleged was a gang. That case, also formulated as a racketeering one, was another failure for Ms. Willis. The longest trial in Georgia history ended without a single murder conviction.

Fani Willis Comes Under Fire as Georgia’s GOP Lawmakers Plan Sweeping Restrictions Following Her Failed Prosecution of Trump

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