Georgia Senate passes a panel with subpoena power to investigate District Attorney Fani Willis
ATLANTA — Georgia’s state Senate joined attempts to investigate Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Friday, voting 30-19 to create a special committee that Republican senators say is needed to determine whether the Democratic district attorney misspent state tax money in her prosecution of former President Donald Trump and others.
“This has to do with following state funds,” said Republican Sen Matt Brass of Newnan. “We want to know where is our money going.”
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The committee, which doesn’t require approval by the state House or Gov. Brian Kemp, is tasked with making recommendations on state laws and spending based on its findings. But the committee can’t directly sanction Willis, and Democrats denounced it as a partisan attempt to try to play to Trump and his supporters.
“You’re talking about partisan politics. That’s all you’re talking about,” said Democratic Sen. David Lucas of Macon.
Trump on Thursday joined an effort by co-defendant Michael Roman to have Willis, special prosecutor Nathan Wade and their offices thrown off the case. Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for Roman, filed a motion Jan. 8 accusing Willis of having an inappropriate romantic relationship with Wade that resulted in a conflict of interest.
Willis has yet to respond publicly to the allegations of a romantic relationship between her and Wade. But she vigorously defended Wade and his qualifications in a speech during a service honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at a historic Black church in Atlanta on Jan. 14. She suggested during that address that the questioning of Wade’s hiring was rooted in racism.
A filing in Wade’s divorce case includes credit card statements that show Wade — after he had been hired as special prosecutor — bought plane tickets in October 2022 for him and Willis to travel to Miami and bought tickets in April to San Francisco in their names. Republican State Sen. Brandon Beach of Alpharetta said that Willis’ employment of Wade is a “prosecution for personal profit scheme,” contending that she has stretched out the Trump inquiry to keep paying Wade and derive personal benefit.
“I believe this scheme — prosecution for personal profit — was a fraud against the court and it was a fraud against you as a Georgia taxpayer,” Beach said.
The new panel would be able to issue subpoenas and require people to testify under oath — powers that no other Georgia legislative committee routinely uses.
People can already be prosecuted for making false statements to Georgia lawmakers. Those are among the criminal charges that Rudy Giuliani and some others face for the false claims they made to Georgia lawmakers in late 2020. They claimed Georgia’s election was marred by widespread fraud and that Trump and not Democrat Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes.
