The Georgia prosecutor who led a sprawling criminal case against Donald Trump sparred with Republican state lawmakers investigating her decision to investigate the president and his allies for their efforts to overturn the state’s election results in 2020.
In a heated GOP-led state senate committee hearing Wednesday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis blasted Republicans for trying to “create QAnon committees that will judge prosecutors” and repeatedly shut down questions she and her attorney said had nothing to do with why she was hauled in to testify.
She fired back at allegations that she was set on prosecuting Trump before she took office on January 1, 2021, calling one question about her investigation a “dumba** question” and blasting the hearing as a “damn joke.”
“I didn’t know he was going to commit a crime prior to me taking office. Like, it’s factually impossible,” she said.
In another exchange, she said Georgia Republicans, in league with Trump and his allies, have tried to “intimidate” her office into dropping the case and chasing her out of the role.
“You have been trying to intimidate me for five years,” she said. “Thousands of threats have come to my office. … I’m not Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m not going to quit in a month after someone threatened me.”
A furious Willis asked Republicans on the committee why they didn’t investigate “how many times my house has been swatted” and “how many times they’ve called me the n-word” after her office secured a grand jury indictment.
“I took an oath to do the right thing. People came into my community and committed a crime and I indicted them, and rest assured, if someone else comes in my community and commits a crime, I will indict them again,” she said.
The hearing follows a judge’s decision to drop a sweeping racketeering case against the president, who was accused of leading a “criminal enterprise” with a so-called “fake elector” scheme to falsely assert his victory while seeking to seize control of voting machines, intimidate election workers, and push the state’s top election official to “find” votes Trump would need to win.
Willis charged Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants — including allies Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman — under the state’s RICO Act, typically used to break up organized crime, and faced a lengthy list of other charges tied to the alleged conspiracy to subvert the state’s election results.
Several defendants had already pleaded guilty before the case came crashing down.
Willis was disqualified from the case after a lengthy court battle over allegations involving Nathan Wade, a former romantic partner she hired as a special prosecutor in the case.
Peter Skandalakis, director of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Council of Georgia, then assigned the case to himself. Last month, he recommended that the case be dismissed, and a judge granted the request — marking the end of a historic series of criminal cases against the president.
The Republican-dominated Georgia Senate requested Willis’s testimony for a “Special Committee on Investigations” probing her relationship with Wade.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Willis said she hired Wade because her office was “drowning” in other cases.
“Every lawyer I had with that level of experience had a huge project,” she said. “I made a decision, the people of Fulton County elected me to make that decision, and I did.”
Republicans have also accused Willis of conspiring with Joe Biden’s administration and a congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack to prosecute Trump, showing bills from Wade that he had traveled to Washington, D.C.
Willis said Wade likely traveled there to “get information on some of the criminals I ended up indicting.”
She argued that any meetings between prosecutors from her office and officials in Washington were related to obtaining documents and testimony from federal custody.
“You’re trying to imply some wrongdoing where none exists,” said former Georgia governor Roy Barnes, who represented Willis in the hearing.
He repeatedly appeared exasperated by Republicans’ questions and urged Willis to avoid answering them.
“This has always been a witch hunt,” he said at one point.
“What are we doing?” Barnes said at another. “I thought this was supposed to be about rules of conduct. Now you’re getting into whether the electors met here, whether they were really electors … How does this have to do with the conduct? … I’m amazed anyone thought the election was fixed — that was five years ago!”
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