The US House judiciary committee has subpoenaed Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, for records related to the use of federal grant money in prosecutions and the potential misuse of those funds.
The subpoena escalates the conflict between Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican congressman, judiciary committee chair and ardent defender of Donald Trump, and Willis, whose office charged the former president and 18 others with 41 counts over interfering with a Georgia election and illegally attempting to undo Biden’s victory in Georgia.
Willis responded to the subpoena on Friday. She said: “These false allegations are included in baseless litigation filed by a holdover employee from the prior administration who was terminated for cause. The courts that have ruled found no merit in these claims. We expect the same result in any pending litigation.”
She went on to tout the office grant programs and said they are in compliance with Department of Justice requirements.
The back and forth between Jordan and Willis began last year with correspondence Jordan sent on 24 August, the day Trump stood for a mugshot at the Fulton county jail. Jordan’s letter suggested Willis had subjected Trump to “politically motivated state investigations and prosecutions due to the policies they advanced as president”, and that any coordination her office had with federal prosecutors may have been an improperly partisan use of federal money.
Willis’s scorching response in subsequent replies said the inquiry offends principles of state sovereignty and the separation of powers; that it interferes with a criminal investigation; that Trump is not immune to prosecution simply because he is a candidate for public office; and that Jordan himself was “ignorant of the US constitution”.
The Republican-led committee opened a formal investigation into the Willis’s office in December.
Willis has been under fire over the past month after allegations of an improper relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she hired to work on the Trump case in Fulton county.
Jordan sent a letter to Nathan Wade on 12 January, asking for his cooperation in his committee’s inquiry into “politically motivated investigations and prosecutions and the potential misuse of federal funds”. The letter notes Wade’s billings for meetings with the federal January 6 committee, which the letter characterizes as partisan. “There are open questions about whether federal funds were used by [Fulton county] to finance your prosecution,” the letter states.
Willis responded on Wade’s behalf 12 days later.
“Your letter is simply a restatement of demands that you have made in past correspondence for access to evidence in a pending Georgia criminal prosecution,” she said in the reply.
“As I said previously, your requests implicate significant, well-recognized confidentiality interests related to an ongoing criminal matter. Your requests violate principles of separation of powers and federalism, as well as respect for the legal protections provided to attorney work product in ongoing litigation.”
