Fani Still Getting Whapped

Just because we haven’t heard anything from Georgia’s hardest-hustling prosecutor doesn’t mean she still isn’t around.

She is.

Willis and her office are still in court tussling with judges and defense lawyers over the 2020 election-related fraud cases against now-President Trump and his co-defendants.

While Willis herself was thrown off of the Trump case prosecution in a mid-December decision by the Georgia Court of Appeals…

The Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting the 2020 election subversion case against President-elect Donald Trump and dozens of others but rejected a request to dismiss the indictment.

The court issued its opinion on Thursday, ruling that Willis’ “romantic relationship” and multiple vacations with Special Assistant District Attorney Nathan Wade, who was her lead prosecutor on the case, resulted in a “significant appearance of impropriety” and conflict of interest for the case. 

In August 2023, Willis and her office charged Trump and numerous co-conspirators, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, and Kenneth Chesebro, with crimes in connection with a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

…the court did not dismiss the indictments. So, the defense work continues as appeals play out.

Willis is appealing being booted.

The person who did score a recent win in this ongoing artificial melodrama was the lawyer of one of Trump’s co-defendants, Ashleigh Merchant.

Back in January, Fani had been slapped with a $22K fine for telling Judicial Watch to piss up a rope when they submitted an Open Records Request for records relating to any contacts and coordination between her office and Jack Smith and Congressional members. It was Judicial Watch themselves who found a smoking gun piece of paper that proved such documents existed and they should have been given something.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was ordered to pay nearly $22,000 in legal fees to a conservative watchdog last week after a Georgia court found that she “flatly ignored” an open records request submitted by the organization. 

The group, Judicial Watch, had submitted an Open Records Act (ORA) request to Fulton County in August 2023 seeking communications Willis had with special counsel Jack Smith and the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

One day after the request was made, the Fulton County District Attorney’s office told Judicial Watch that it did not have any “responsive records.”

“This response was perplexing and eventually suspicious to [Judicial Watch], given that Plaintiff subsequently uncovered through own effort at least one document that should have been in the District Attorney’s Office’s possession that was patently responsive to the request,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his Jan. 3 order. 

The judge warned Willis at the time that legitimate records requests were not up to her discretion as far and answering.

…“The ORA is not hortatory; it is mandatory. Non-compliance has consequences,” the judge ruled, noting that Willis’ records custodian admitted that “the District Attorney’s Office flatly ignored Plaintiff’s original ORA request, conducting no search and simply (and falsely) informing the County’s Open Records Custodian that no responsive records existed.”

“We know now that that is simply incorrect: once pressed by a Court order, Defendant managed to identify responsive records, but has categorized them as exempt. Even if the records prove to be just that — exempt from disclosure for sound public policy reasons — this late revelation is a patent violation of the ORA,” McBurney added.  “And for none of this is there any justification, substantial or otherwise: no one searched until prodded by civil litigation.” 

Fani has taught her thugs well, as they all think they are too slick by half. Darned if that office didn’t try that ‘ain’t got none‘ gambit again on a request from Merchant. 

If you’ll remember, that particular lady is the female tiger of a defense lawyer who uncovered the bombshell and highly inappropriate Willis-Wade gruesome office twosome, to begin with. 

Merchant also memorably tore the sassy Fani a new one during her cross last fall.

Another judge, another fine, and 30 days to give up the goods or else.

A judge has ordered Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to pay more than $54,000 in attorneys’ fees and to turn over documents after finding that her office violated Georgia’s Open Records Act.

Attorney Ashleigh Merchant represents former Trump campaign staffer Michael Roman, one of the 18 people indicted in August 2023 along with President Donald Trump on allegations that they illegally tried to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. Merchant sued in January 2024, alleging that the district attorney’s office had failed to turn over public records she had requested.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rachel Krause found that the failures to comply with the records law “were intentional, not done in good faith, and were substantially groundless and vexatious.” Because Willis and her office “lacked substantial justification” for not complying, Merchant is entitled to attorneys’ fees and litigation expenses totaling just over $54,000, Krause found.

It sounds as if Merchant is going digging into whether ‘justice’ or ‘poll testing’ was the basis for the Trump and Co. Georgia prosecutions. 

I wasn’t aware that Willis had public favorability soundings done before bringing these cases.

No wonder she’s, as the judge phrased it, ‘openly hostile‘ to letting Merchant have those records, especially with the appeal still up in the air.

...Willis’ office was “openly hostile” to Merchant and testimony showed that Merchant’s requests “were handled differently than other requests,” Krause wrote in her order. Open records officer Dexter Bond said during a hearing that he refused to communicate by phone with Merchant, even though it was his regular practice to call the requester if a request was unclear.

Treating Merchant’s requests this way “indicates a lack of good faith,” Krause wrote.

Among the records Merchant sought were reports provided to Willis’ office by companies hired “to track the impact of Willis’ statements to the media and whether such statements were viewed favorably by the public,” according to a court filing. The filing says Willis began contracting with those companies just before she and her office sought to indict Trump, Roman and others.

Merchant also asked for a copy of the non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement that employees of the district attorney’s office are required to sign, as well as a list of attorneys Willis had hired.

So Willis was apparently busy surveying public opinion about how her anti-Trump rhetoric was playing before she dropped the indictments.

That really would lead one to question motivation, no? Certainly, with Willis’s obvious ambition sprinkled in.

Would Georgia’s ‘Get Trump’ be better than Letitia James’ big splash in New York had been?

Did that play a part in Fani’s calculations?

Holy smokes. The thought is so mind-blowingly calculated and craven.

…Even if the Georgia Supreme Court agrees to hear the case and eventually rules in Willis’ favor, it seems unlikely that she will be able to prosecute Trump while he’s the sitting president. But there are 14 other defendants, including Roman, who still face charges in the case.

And there are still people’s lives in the balance in relation to this case right now. All in limbo.

But was it ever a case of ‘justice’ to begin with?

I’ll bet that $54K seems like a pittance compared to what will happen if Merchant finds what she’s looking for.

Holy SMOKES