Republicans at the state and federal levels are calling for multiple tactics to unseat Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, even if their legal standing is murky and they lack the support of Georgia’s Republican governor.
Steve Gooch, the Georgia senate majority leader, and Clint Dixon, a state senator, have said they plan to use a commission designed to discipline and potentially remove rogue prosecutors to investigate Willis following her indictment of Donald Trump for attempting to reverse the results of the 2020 election.
In May, Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill, SB92, that makes it easier to remove elected district attorneys. Under the law, a prosecuting attorneys qualifications commission has the power to investigate complaints and discipline or remove district attorneys whom the appointed commissioners believe are not properly enforcing the law.
Kemp on Thursday dismissed talk of using the commission or the legislature to remove Willis from office, but said the decision was not his. “Up to this point, I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’s actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission, but that will ultimately be a decision that the commission will make,” the governor said.
The commission will begin receiving complaints on 1 October 2023, and earlier this month Burt Jones, the Republican lieutenant governor, announced three appointments to the eight-member group. Jones, who served as one of Georgia’s fake electors when he was a state senator in 2020, recently criticized Willis’s prosecution of Trump and said her treatment of the defendants like criminals is “very disturbing”.
Outside Georgia, the US House judiciary committee opened a congressional investigation into Willis last week. Republican Jim Jordan, the committee’s chair, sent a letter to Willis insinuating that the indictment was politically motivated.
“You did not bring charges until two and a half years later, at a time when the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is in full swing,” he wrote.
Similarly, Georgia senators Gooch and Dixon have accused the Fulton county district attorney of using her job to indict Trump and 18 other co-defendants in an effort to “weaponize the justice system against political opponents”.
But critics of SB92 say the details of how Kemp and Republican lawmakers could use the commission to remove prosecutors including Willis remain murky.
Earlier this month, Public Rights Project (PRP), a non-profit organization, filed a lawsuit on behalf of four district attorneys against the state of Georgia and Kemp challenging the constitutionality of the law. The group has since filed a preliminary injunction, asking a judge to postpone any commission activity until there is a ruling in their lawsuit.
Jill Habig, the founder and president of PRP, said there were several issues with the legislation. She believes the commission would violate separation of power, free speech rights and due process.
In a statement on Thursday, Habig called Kemp’s recent statement disapproving use of the commission to oust Willis “welcome, but too little too late”, given that he had already signed the problematic legislation. She also noted that Kemp controls only 25% of the commission’s appointments.
In addition to allowing lawmakers to go after Willis for her prosecution of Trump and his allies, the legislation could lead to investigations of district attorneys who have stated their offices won’t prosecute crimes related to abortion, marijuana usage and more, despite the fact that backlogged district attorneys have long had discretion over which crimes they choose to prosecute.
Habig said she also worries about the potential precedent this could set. Several states have introduced bills that would allow lawmakers to remove prosecutors from office, but Georgia, she said, is “ground zero” for using a commission to do so.
“There are not a lot of standards for how the commission can initiate and conclude [an] investigation or criteria by which it can make its decisions,” she said. If lawmakers were able to successfully use the commission to oust Willis after complaints start being considered in October, Habig said, the appeal process is uncertain.
In Florida, Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, has removed two Democratic prosecutors from office. Habig said she worried the Georgia commission was “a little bit of an attempt to put a veil of legitimacy around the kinds of actions that Governor DeSantis has already taken”.
Kemp signed SB92 after Georgia elected 14 people of color as district attorneys in 2020, an increase from the five who were previously working throughout the state.
“I, quite frankly, think the legislation is racist. I don’t know what other thing to call it,” Willis told a senate panel earlier this year, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Willis’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dixon, the Republican state senator, has said he sees the commission as a more legitimate way to “stop Fani Willis’s bad behavior” than a special legislative session, which Kemp has said will not occur despite a petition launched by Colton Moore, another Republican senator, calling for one. The special session was already unlikely because it would have required support from Democrats.
“The Legislature does not have control over her office or funding. And even if the legislature was empowered to act, calling a Special Session requires a 3/5s majority of the legislature, meaning Democrats would have to go on the record in opposition of their aspiring super star,” Dixon wrote on Facebook. “This reality is one of the reasons we passed a law this year to hold rogue District Attorneys accountable.”
Willis, who has served as the lead prosecutor in Fulton county since 2020 and has earned a reputation for bringing racketeering cases against multiple defendants under Georgia’s broad Rico statute, has said she intends to begin the trial of Trump and his 18 co-conspirators on 4 March 2024, although the former president’s federal trial has been set for the same date.
The 41-count indictment in Fulton county uses racketeering and conspiracy charges to allege Trump, advisers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman and others worked together to subvert the democratic process and the election results in Georgia.
