Fulton County Taxpayers Pay for Fani Willis’s Outrageous Misbehavior – Again

Imagine if you went to Hollywood trying to attract investors for the following movie plot: an incompetent, unethical, but politically ambitious local district attorney criminally indicts a former president (of the opposition political party) and some of his political allies in an abusive prosecution.  It is intended to obstruct his ability to run for re-election, and the DA conspires with the White House (occupied by the current president who is the opponent in the upcoming election) and members of Congress to hatch this plot.  She then hires her lover with whom she is having an adulterous affair (paying him hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars) to prosecute the case.

Hollywood producers would tell you this scenario is too far-fetched and unrealistic to make a believable movie.

But that is the reality of District Attorney Fani Willis, whom the voters of Fulton County, Georgia, unfortunately and inexplicably re-elected this past November to continue to mishandle the duties of her office.  In addition to squandering huge amounts of taxpayer funds on the meritless prosecution of Donald Trump and a host of other Republicans, instead of spending the resources of her office on prosecutions against real criminals harming real victims, Willis is further requiring the taxpayers of Fulton County to front almost $22,000 in court-imposed sanctions to Judicial Watch because of Willis’s refusal to comply with the state’s open records law.

Willis has suffered a long series of setbacks in her Franz Kafka-like case against Donald Trump and his co-defendants who have been the target of her vicious misbehavior, including the Georgia Court of Appeals in December removing her and her entire office from the  prosecution. The court chastised her improper behavior, concluding that “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.”

The latest court order against Willis was issued by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney on Jan. 3. This is the same judge who in 2022 disqualified Willis from  targeting then-state Senator Burt Jones, who was eventually elected as the lieutenant governor, with her grand jury investigation. Why? Because of her obvious conflict of interest in targeting Jones at the very same time she took part in a fundraiser for Jones’s opponent in the lieutenant governor’s race, Democrat candidate Charlie Bailey.

In her latest travails, Fani Willis received a request from Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that promotes government transparency and accountability, under Georgia’s Open Records Act, O.C.G.A § 50-18-70, a very expansive law that makes government documents and communications available to the public with only limited exceptions.

Judicial Watch sent the request on August 22, 2023, to Fulton County’s online portal, seeking all communications between Willis and DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith as well as the U.S. House January 6^th Committee.  The next day, the county confirmed that the request had been channeled to the district attorney, although it asked Judicial Watch to “simplify” the request. The judge found it noteworthy that “literally five minutes later, before any simplification had occurred,” the county sent a second email to Judicial Watch saying there were no “responsive records.”

That response, said the judge, was “perplexing and eventually suspicious” to Judicial Watch since it “subsequently uncovered through [its] own effort at least one document” in the DA’s possession that was “patently responsive to the request.”  Judicial Watch eventually filed a lawsuit against Willis.

The judge goes through the litany of what happened with this open records request. The bottom line is that Willis kept denying there were any responsive records. But as the judge says, a deposition of the records custodian revealed that no search was actually done for any records: “Just a ‘no, go away.’” Even after Judicial Watch sued, “there still was no organized, comprehensive examination of the District Attorney’s records.” Instead, Willis “simply (and falsely)” informed the county’s open records custodian that no records existed.

In other words, Willis refused to comply with the open records law and conducted no search until the judge finally issued an order on Dec. 2, 2024, ordering Willis “to conduct a diligent search of her records for responsive materials.” Her lame response, which clearly irritated Judge McBurney, “consisted of an undated, unsigned two-page memo” claiming there were no communications with Smith but there were communications with the J6 Committee. But those J6 Committee documents, Willis claimed, “were exempt from disclosure.”

As Judge McBurney says, “Despite having previously informed Plaintiff four separate times that her team had carefully searched but found no responsive records, now there suddenly were – but they were not subject to disclosure.” Only when “pressed by a Court order” did Willis finally “identify responsive records,” but then claimed they are exempt from disclosure.

Even if that were true, says the judge, “this late revelation is a patent violation of the” open records law “and for none of this is there any justification, substantial or otherwise: no one searched until prodded by civil litigation.” Because of Willis’s intransience and her failure to comply with the law, McBurney awarded Judicial Watch $19,360 in attorney’s fees and $2,218 in expenses. All of which, unfortunately, will be paid by the taxpayers of Fulton County and not by Willis personally.

But the fight is not over. Litigation will continue as Judicial Watch tries to find out what the records are that have been withheld and whether the statutory exemptions really apply to them, or whether Willis is once again defying the law and just trying to keep politically embarrassing information out of the public’s view.

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