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Posts tagged ‘Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’

“No Authority to Proceed”: Georgia Appellate Court Disqualifies Fani Willis


By: Jonathan Turley | December 19, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/19/no-authority-to-proceed-georgia-appellate-court-disqualifies-fani-willis/

Today, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her team in the prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump. The final collapse of the House of Willis came after months of her spending enormous amounts of time and money to try to stay at the lead of the high-profile case. Lawfare holds little value unless you are the lead warrior.

For over a year, some have criticized Willis for her refusal to recuse herself. When her hiring of her former lover was first disclosed, Willis could have done the right thing for her office, the case, and the public. She could have recused herself and may have preserved her office’s ability to continue with the case.

She was then given a further opportunity to do the right thing by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee who disqualified her former lover, Nathan Wade, and found an “appearance of impropriety.”

He, however, left it up to Willis to recuse herself after criticizing her conduct. Some of us noted that the finding did not jive with the order. If there was an “appearance of impropriety,” it would obviously continue with Willis remaining at the lead in the case. However, Willis let the case go dormant and committed her office to the fight to preserve her role. Now, the appellate court has forced her off the case and ordered a new office to take over any prosecution. The court ruled that

“[a]fter carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office. The remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.”

The court admitted that Willis had forced the hand of the court by her refusal to do the right thing in the lower court. It recognized 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.”

Accordingly, it reversed McAffee and found that if “the elected district attorney is wholly disqualified from this case, ‘the assistant district attorneys — whose only power to prosecute a case is derived from the constitutional authority of the district attorney who appointed them — have no authority to proceed.’”

The opinion made clear that these cases cannot become the vanity projects of prosecutors. They are expected to do the right thing, even when the right thing does not come easily personally or politically.

The center of the case now shifts to another prosecutor who will have to decide whether it wants to continue the case and what (and who) to prosecute.

As I have previously written, the Georgia case has viable crimes against others for offenses such as unlawful entry into restricted areas. The case against Trump was deeply flawed. It read like a legal version of six degrees from Kevin Bacon. As my friend and fellow analyst Andy McCarthy noted, this is the first racketeering case that any of us have seen where the strongest connection between the parties was being named in the charging documents.

A new prosecutor should drop the Trump charges and end this ridiculous lawfare enterprise. If not, the case will likely collapse by its own weight due to the attenuated racketeering theory or other legal problems, including the use of evidence barred under the recent presidential immunity decision.

In the end, Willis was reelected by the voters of Atlanta who clearly accepted or supported the weaponization of the criminal justice system to target political opponents. The millions spent in the case were just treated as a cost of doing the business of lawfare.

Hopefully, a new prosecution office will restore a modicum of integrity to the Georgia legal system. It is now time to end this circus as the ringmaster leaves the center ring.

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It’s Not My Fault, It’s The Default: Fani Willis Loses Significant Records Fight


By: Jonathan Turley | December 4, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/04/its-not-my-fault-its-the-default-fani-willis-loses-significant-records-fight/

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her case against President-elect Donald Trump continue to trip wires in the courts with delays and losses. The latest is a fight with the organization Judicial Watch, which won a major records fight to gain access to any communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6th Committee. While it is not clear what records exist, it is the type of demand that most offices fight vigorously to protect their confidentiality and privileges of deliberation. Willis, however, lost by default after failing to make a substantive argument against the claim.

The Judicial Watch lawsuit was based on the Open Records Act (ORA), and Willis had defenses to make, but she failed to make them. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to hand over records within five business days. McBurney found that Willis violated Georgia’s Open Records Act by failing to respond to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit.

He wrote that Willis did not make any “meritorious defense” and that “Plaintiff is thus entitled to judgment by default as if every item and paragraph of the complaint were supported by proper and sufficient evidence.”

The case against Trump is on appeal after the court decided not to disqualify Willis from prosecuting the case.

Willis will also now have to pay Judicial Watch’s attorney’s fees. The hearing on the fees will appropriately come just before Christmas for Judicial Watch on Dec. 20, 2024. That will add to the towering costs for the people of Atlanta in funding this high-profile adventure.

Of course, she can insist “it is not my fault, it’s the default.”

Here is the order: Judicial Watch v. Willis

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

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Law, Political

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The Highly Dangerous Georgia Indictments


By: Ben Shapiro / @benshapiro / August 16, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/16/the-highly-dangerous-georgia-indictments/

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted in Georgia for violation of the state’s version of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Pictured: Trump delivers remarks during the Georgia GOP convention on June 10, 2023, in Columbus, Georgia. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

This week, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis launched a 98-page missile directly into the heart of American politics. That missile was a 41-count indictment charging former President Donald Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators with violation of the Georgia version of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—acts in furtherance of a conspiracy to commit a criminal act. In this case, the criminal act, according to the indictment, was “knowingly and willfully [joining] a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”

Whether this amounts to a crime comes down to the question of whether Trump himself knew that he had lost the election; if he believed that he had won, then all the other accusations about him fall away. After all, it is not a crime to pursue a spurious legal strategy in furtherance of a delusion.

But by charging RICO, Willis extends the case to people who may have admitted that Trump lost the election. This accomplishes two purposes.

  • First, it puts these alleged co-conspirators in serious legal jeopardy, giving them reason to flip on Trump himself.
  • Second, it may allow Willis to charge Trump as part of a criminal conspiracy even if he personally believed he won the election—after all, case law suggests that co-conspirators can be charged under RICO even if they didn’t agree on every aspect of the conspiracy, so long as they knew the “general nature of the enterprise.”

The Georgia case also presents unique danger to Trump because it is a state case.

The Manhattan case against Trump rooted in campaign finance allegations is incredibly weak and is an obvious stretch; the Florida and D.C. cases against Trump are federal, which means that if elected president, he could theoretically pardon himself.

The Georgia case is both wide-ranging and state-based: If convicted, Trump would go to state prison, and would have no ability to pardon himself. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp does not have unilateral pardon power, either: In Georgia, pardons work through an appointed board. So, the very real prospect exists that even were Trump elected, he’d start his term from a state prison.

But even that discussion is premature: The Georgia case, along with all the other indictments against Trump, are going to lock him into courthouses for the rest of the election cycle. What’s more, every waking moment for the media will be coverage of those court cases. That will make it impossible for Trump—even if he were so inclined, which he has shown no evidence of being—to talk about President Joe Biden rather than his legal peril. And there has yet to be a single piece of data suggesting that Americans are driven to vote for Trump because of his legal troubles.

To pardon yourself, you have to be elected president. But spending your entire presidential race in the dock makes that a radically uphill battle.

All of this is quite terrible for the country. No matter what you think of Trump’s various legal imbroglios—from mishandling classified documents to paying off porn stars to calling up the Georgia secretary of state in an attempt to “find” votes—the glass has now been broken over and over and over again: Political opponents can be targeted by legal enemies. It will not be unbroken.

If you think that only Democratic district attorneys will play this game, you have another think coming. Prepare for a future in which running for office carries the legal risk of going to jail—on all sides. Which means that only the worst and the most shameless will run for office.

COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.

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Ben Shapiro@benshapiro

Ben Shapiro is host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire. A graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, he is a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.”

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