Keeping Track Of The Whole Fani Willis Saga

The big news yesterday was Fani Willis's acknowledgement of a "personal" relationship with her special prosecutor Nathan Wade, but that was just a limited hangout meant to minimize what was already generally and correctly assumed. I decided to bring myself up to date on the whole range of other motions, lawsuits, subpoenas, and allegations against Willis in the wake of the initial complaint by defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant on behalf of Trump codefendant Mike Roman. Quite a lot has emerged in just a three-week period.

The original Roman motion to disqualify Willis was filed on January 8 with Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the Fulton County RICO trial. All the other actions have cascaded from this motion.

On January 12,

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to Nathan Wade, an associate of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, demanding documents and information about the coordination of the Fulton County District Attorney's Office (FCDAO) with other politically motivated investigations and the potential misuse of federal funds. Although Fani Willis has so far refused to cooperate with the Committee's oversight, invoices that Nathan Wade submitted for payment by the FCDAO, and made public as part of a court filing, highlight this collusion.

The letter requested all documents, communications, memoranda, invoices, and contracts by Januatry 26. The response from Wade's office is currently unknown, althokugh a February 2 subpoena by Jordan, discussed below, appears to be an attempt to enforce this initial request.

On January 21, the chairman of the Fulton County Audit Committee,

Bob Ellis, sent a letter to Ms. Willis late last week asking whether she engaged in a “romantic relationship” with Mr. Wade or if she “misused” county funds. He also asked whether she “accepted valuable gifts and personal benefits from a contractor [or] recipient of County funds.”

. . . His letter also demanded that the district attorney’s office provide invoices, costs, fees, and other expenses since Jan. 1, 2021. He gave her a deadline for Feb. 2, 2024.

On January 25,

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump said the district attorney in the Georgia election interference prosecution should be removed from the case, claiming she “inappropriately injected race into the case and stoked racial animus” in response to allegations of misconduct against her.

. . . [Trump's lawyers allege] she vigorously defended Wade and his qualifications in a speech during a service honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at a historic Black church in Atlanta on Jan. 14. She suggested during that address that the questioning of Wade’s hiring was rooted in racism.

“These assertions by the DA engender a great likelihood of substantial prejudice towards the defendants in the eyes of the public in general, and prospective jurors in Fulton County in particular,” Sadow and Little wrote. “Moreover, the DA’s self-serving comments came with the added, sought after, benefit of garnering racially based sympathy for her self-inflicted quagmire.”

In doing this, Trump officially joined the original motion filed by Ashleigh Merchant on behalf of Mike Roman to disquality Willis based on her undisclosed relationship with Wade.

On January 26,

the [Georgia] state Senate approved legislation that will permit a special committee to investigate Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis amid misconduct allegations.

The alleged misconduct "includes the ongoing expenditure of significant public funds for the purpose of hiring a special assistant district attorney with whom District Attorney Willis had, and may yet have, an ongoing romantic relationship," the resolution states.

On January 31, the Washington Free Beacon reported on a 2022 whistleblower complaint by Amanda Timpson, an employee in the district attorney's office.

Timpson claimed to Willis that she had been demoted after attempting to stop a top Willis campaign aide from misusing federal grant money meant for a youth gang prevention initiative.

According to Timpson, the aide, Michael Cuffee, planned to use part of a $488,000 federal grant—earmarked for the creation of a Center of Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention—to pay for "swag," computers, and travel.

"He wanted to do things with grants that were impossible, and I kept telling him, like, 'We can't do that,'" Timpson told Willis in a Nov. 19, 2021, meeting. "He told everybody … 'We're going to get MacBooks, we're going to get swag, we're going to use it for travel.' I said, 'You cannot do that, it's a very, very specific grant.'"

. . . Less than two months later, Willis abruptly terminated Timpson and had her escorted out of her office by seven armed investigators, according to Timpson. When Timpson filed a whistleblower complaint the following year that alleged wrongful termination, Willis's office issued a statement describing Timpson as a "holdover from the prior administration" who was terminated because of her "failure to meet the standards of the new administration."

. . . Timpson in August 2022 filed a whistleblower complaint in Fulton County Superior Court, seeking damages for lost wages. The case is in discovery.

The Washington Free Beacon story outlines other allegations from Timpson that cover widespread misallocation of grant money from numerous sources for computerrs, airfare, hotels, and car rentals. The Free Becon infers that this is a general pattern in Willis's office that extends beyond the particular Nathan Wade scandal.

On January 31, Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman who filed the original motion that's led to the subsequent events, filed a lawsuit against Willis with a subpoena demanding that she and Wade testify in the February 15 hearing in Judge McAfee's court:

Merchant alleges in the lawsuit that the DA’s office isn’t complying with the Georgia Open Records Act by intentionally stalling requests for documents. She said that the office has “refused, without adequate explanation, to provide” Roman’s legal team “with many of the requested materials that are known to exist and which are not subject to any exception in the Act and some of which have been outstanding since September of 2023.”

Merchant asks the court to order the DA’s office to hand over the records she seeks or show that they can’t be provided. She also requested that the court award her team the expenses incurred in trying to get Willis to comply with the law.

On February 2, following up on the Free Beacon story linked above,

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) has subpoenaed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over allegations that she misused federal funds.

In the subpoena and cover letter, both obtained by FOX 5, Jordan claims that the District Attorney's Office has "failed to comply voluntarily" with the committee's requests for documents connected to the office's receipt and use of U.S. Department of Justice grants.

. . . Jordan cites in the new letter to Willis a report from the Washington Free Beacon alleging that Willis fired an employee who tried to stop the Fulton County District Attorney's Office from using a federal grant for the creation of a Center of Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention for travel, computers and "swag."

. . . Willis has been asked to appear before the Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C. on the morning of Feb. 23 - a little more than a week after she is scheduled to appear before a Fulton County judge for a hearing on allegations she had an improper romantic relationship with Wade.

This subpoena appears to have been issued in response to Wade's not answering Jordan's January 12 letter. So far, Willis's pattern has been either not to respond to requests for information or to suggest that the allegations against her are based on racism. At this point, though, she will still need to respond to the Fulton County Audit Committee, the February 15 hearing in Judge McAfee's courtroom with the additional Ashleigh Merchant subpoena on that date, the request to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on February 23, and as yet unspecified inquiries from the Georgia state Senate.

This pressure is likely to be unrelanting, and it's hard not to think it will begin to affect the Fulton County RICO trial, as of now tentatively scheduled for August. My own view is that she won't survive this level of public exposure.