A Rough Week for Fani Willis
The crooked Fulton County DA was beset by an array of allegations from defense attorneys, whistleblowers, and House Republicans.
There’s nothing to see here, says Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Move along.
And perhaps she has a point. Willis, of course, is in charge of the Georgia election interference “racketeering” case against former President Donald Trump. And on Friday, she admitted via a 176-page court filing to having a “personal relationship” with Nathan Wade, the newly divorced guy whom she appointed in November 2021 to assist in her investigation of Trump. But just because Wade has exactly zero experience prosecuting cases of this sort, and just because Willis’s office nonetheless funneled him some $654,000 in legal fees in 2022 and 2023, and just because Willis paid Wade $250 an hour while at the same time paying one of the state’s top racketeering experts a miserly $150 an hour, and just because these two lovebirds took lavish tropical vacations together on the taxpayer dime doesn’t mean there’s something amiss here.
In fact, as The Washington Post reports, Willis called the accusations of impropriety “meritless,” “distasteful,” and “malicious,” adding that they’re “irrelevant to the case and that there is no basis in Georgia law for removing her from the prosecution or dismissing the charges.” Willis further whined that the efforts to dig into her personal life amounted to a “ticket to the circus” designed to “garner more breathless headlines” rather than focusing on the case itself.
Hey, at least she didn’t play the race card. Oh, wait.
In her filing, Willis asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee to cancel an evidentiary hearing on the accusations against her, insisting that her relationship with Wade doesn’t create a conflict of interest and that she didn’t benefit financially from it. It’ll be interesting to see whether Judge McAfee, who was appointed by Republican Governor Brian Kemp, buys any of this.
Unfortunately for Willis, the forced admission of her affair with Wade isn’t the only bad news that visited her this past week. In addition, she was hit with allegations that she’d fired a whistleblower, Amanda Timpson, in an act of retaliation — allegations that she, of course, denied. Instead, said Willis, she fired the whistleblower for poor performance — a claim that seemed to be at odds with her on-the-record assessments of Timpson. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, “Willis sang Timpson’s praises in a staff-wide email on Sept. 9, 2021, saying the whistleblower had a ‘dynamic’ skill set that would serve her well in her new role as a liaison between two departments in the office.”
Other emails leaked to the Free Beacon indicate that Willis selected Timpson for her executive leadership team in December 2020, “saying she had bested 400 applicants to secure a role in the select group.”
Timpson’s troubles with Willis began in March 2021, she says, when she “stopped one of the district attorney’s top aides, Michael Cuffee, from dipping into a $488,000 federal grant earmarked for the creation of a Center for Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention to pay for ‘swag,’ computers, and travel.”
We’re shocked — SHOCKED — to hear that a government employee would attempt to misappropriate taxpayer funds in such a shameful way.
“I respect that is your assessment,” said Willis in response to Timpson’s charges. “And I’m not saying that your assessment is wrong.” But less than two months later, she fired Timpson and arranged for seven armed investigators to escort her out of the building.
We’ll let you decide if the recorded conversation between Willis and Timpson — and Willis’s subsequent firing of Timpson — are worthy of a whistleblower retaliation investigation.
If you thought Willis’s week couldn’t get any worse, you’d be wrong. As Fox News reports, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has subpoenaed Willis for information on how her office has been spending its federal funds — especially the funds discussed in Timpson’s whistleblower allegations above. Willis has already ignored three prior subpoenas from Jordan’s committee, and we have to wonder if she’ll ever be held accountable for it.
Speaking of accountability, we’ll watch to see whether the pressure for Willis to step down becomes too great, or whether Georgia Democrats will circle the wagons around their scummy colleague. And if that happens, we’ll keep an eye on Georgia’s attorney general, Christopher Carr, to see if he has the guts to pursue criminal charges against Willis.