Frustrated Fani Willis Denounces GOP ‘Clown Show’ Even as She Suffers Setback in Effort To Avoid Paying Trump’s Legal Bills

The district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, is denouncing as a “clown show” the effort by Georgia Republicans to scrutinize her for her secret romance with a handpicked special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, that disqualified her from the biggest case of her career.That defiance was delivered in a keynote address at Georgia’s Capitol this week to mark International Women’s Day. It came just hours after Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Ms. Willis is barred from participating in ongoing litigation over some $17 million in attorneys’ fees. Ms. Willis’s criminal racketeering and election interference case was ultimately dropped after her disqualification.The feud over the bills will now be handled by Fulton County itself rather than the district attorney’s office. While the difference might be academic — either way it appears as if taxpayers will be on the hook — it further cements Ms. Willis’s place on the outside looking in on the case that vaulted her to national prominence. Mr. Trump alone is seeking some six million dollars. Ms. Willis taunted her adversaries — “If you think you are going to impact me by threats, by legislation or anything else, you are not.” She added with respect to Republicans that “there are so many real things they could be doing for Georgians. Instead, they play games.” She declares that “My crime is that I have the audacity to hold people accountable who commit crimes in my jurisdiction.”Ms. Willis had not been seen at the Capitol since December, when she testified in front of the Senate Special Committee on Investigations, a tribunal dominated by Republicans that has spent some two years investigating her for her criminal racketeering prosecution of President Trump and 18 others for election interference in the wake of the 2020 vote. Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, was disqualified from the prosecution by the Georgia Court of Appeals, which found it 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.” During her December appearance she called Mr. Trump and his camarilla “criminals” and told GOP lawmakers that “I know you want to take me back to 1948, where an African American prosecutor can only prosecute certain types of people.” Ms. Willis also insisted that “I’m not Marjorie Taylor Greene. I ain’t gonna quit in a month because somebody threatened me.” She was reelected in November with some 70 percent of the vote, but the Senate committee has recently generated a set of bills that aim to preclude prosecutions like the one she launched and eventually lost. Last Friday, the Senate approved a bill to establish new grounds for disciplining or removing district attorneys or solicitors general.Last week the Peach State’s Lieutenant Governor, Burt Jones, endorsed the proposed law as a response to “Fani Willis’s lawfare of President Trump and his allies. He added that the bill would empower a commission with “the ability to go after DAs who refuse to be transparent, who engage in unprofessional attorney conduct, and who don’t take seriously their duties.”That bill now awaits consideration by Georgia’s House, which is controlled by Republicans. Ms. Willis this week, though, said of Republicans that “they’re mad I have the audacity to believe and practice the principle that no one is above or below the law.” One law passed last spring mandates that if a district attorney is disqualified for misconduct and the charges are eventually dismissed. It is under that law that Mr. Trump and his co-defendants are seeking reimbursement for their legal bills. Judge McAfee’s ruling determined that Ms. Willis is “wholly disqualified” from contesting that claim. Her office had maintained that the law that appears to mandate payment is unconstitutional and that the defendants did not demonstrate a nexus between Ms. Willis’s misconduct and any prejudice to their cases. Judge McAfee’s ruling is tinged with irony in the sense that he initially declined to disqualify Ms. Willis on the basis of the same evidence that the Georgia Court of Appeals found sufficient to end her participation in the case that she brought in the summer of 2023. He did find that her behavior emitted an “odor of mendacity” and was “legally improper.”In an emailed statement to the Sun, Mr. Trump’s lawyer in the case, Steven Sadow, celebrated Judge McAfee’s latest ruling in this “dismissed, lawfare case.”

Frustrated Fani Willis Denounces GOP ‘Clown Show’ Even as She Suffers Setback in Effort To Avoid Paying Trump’s Legal Bills

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