(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) What goes around comes around.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been ordered to pay $21,578 in attorney fees to Judicial Watch after her office was found in default for failing to respond to a lawsuit regarding Open Records Act (ORA) requests.
“Fani Willis flouted the law, and the court is right to slam her and require, at a minimum, the payment of nearly $22,000 to Judicial Watch,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “But in the end, Judicial Watch wants the full truth on what she was hiding – her office’s political collusion with the Pelosi January 6 committee to ‘get Trump.’”
The lawsuit, filed in March 2024, sought communications between Willis, Special Counsel Jack Smith and the now discredited and disbanded Jan. 6 Committee.
BREAKING: The Superior Court in Fulton County, GA, issued an order granting $21,578 “attorney’s fees and costs” in the open records lawsuit for communications Willis had with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee (1/3). https://t.co/qcVL9VTlfT
— Judicial Watch ⚖️ (@JudicialWatch) January 7, 2025
Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after Willis’s office denied its August 2023 records request. Willis claimed her office had no documents related to the ORA request at the time. Judicial Watch later learned this was false.
Willis failed to respond to the lawsuit despite being given 30 days, as requested by Georgia law. This failure led the Fulton County Superior Court to issue a default judgment and a blunt rebuke of Willis’s dismissive conduct with Judicial Watch.
For instance, Fulton County Open Records Custodian confirmed it had forwarded the request to the District Attorney’s Office in August 2023. The request was abruptly closed five minutes later with the false response: “After carefully reviewing your request. (sic) We do not have the responsive records.”
The court rebuked this response, calling it “perplexing and eventually suspicious” as Judicial Watch uncovered at least one document that “should have been in the District Attorney’s Office’s possession that was patently responsive to the request.”
Following the default ruling, Willis’s office suddenly “discovered” documents.
“Despite having previously informed [Judicial Watch] 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 under the ORA,” the court noted, calling out the inconsistency.
Willis, a leftist Democrat, was one of the several prosecutors who unsuccessfully plotted to jail Trump before the 2024 election, accusing him of violating Georgia law by questioning the state’s election results.
The case quickly unraveled after Willis was busted having an affair with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, the same man she had hired to lead the case.
Wade quit the case after presiding Judge Scott McAfee ruled that the relationship created an appearance of conflict of interest.
Unsatisfied with this ruling, Trump appealed to have Willis disqualified and the charges dismissed. An appellate judge agreed to disqualify Willis, indefinitely pausing the case.
