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Fani Willis Calls Trump and Allies ‘Criminals’ at Georgia Senate Hearing

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The district attorney in Atlanta addressed a Republican-led committee created to investigate her conduct during her prosecution of President Trump last year.

Video - Fani Willis Defends Failed Election Interference Case in Heated Hearing 2:21
The Atlanta-area district attorney called President Trump and his allies “criminals” while being
questioned by a Georgia Senate committee on Wednesday. Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

By Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim
Richard Fausset reported from Atlanta,
and Danny Hakim from New York.

Dec. 17, 2025

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., was unrepentant about her failed elections case against President Trump during a combative hearing on Wednesday, calling Mr. Trump and his former co-defendants “criminals” and “crooks” before members of the Republican-led State Senate.

The hearing, in a packed room at the State Capitol in Atlanta, took place a few weeks after a state judge dismissed Ms. Willis’s election interference case. She was removed from the case last year, following revelations that she had a romantic relationship with the lawyer she had hired to oversee it.

For Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, the dismissal was a humiliating end to what had begun as one of the most significant cases against Mr. Trump after he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state — one that might have culminated in the trial of a lifetime for the longtime Georgia prosecutor.

But if state Republicans hoped to use the hearing to embarrass her, Ms. Willis appeared equally intent on turning the tables. She used her time to assail a number of Republican adversaries, stump for political allies and criticize the lawmakers for their fealty to Mr. Trump.

The committee of five Republicans and two Democrats was created early last year to investigate Ms. Willis, following the revelations of her relationship with Nathan Wade, the lawyer she had hired. Defendants in the elections case had accused her of “self-dealing” because she took a number of vacations with Mr. Wade after hiring him, while using public funds to pay him more than $650,000 for his work on the case.

Ms. Willis walked into the hearing room on Wednesday cheered on by supporters holding signs, one of which read “Fearless With Fani.” She took her place before the committee alongside her lawyer, the former Democratic governor Roy Barnes, who repeatedly advised Ms. Willis not to answer questions and cast doubt on the powers of the committee to pursue some lines of inquiry.

She was in no mood to sit quietly. She accused the Republican members of being racist, divisive and unconcerned about the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. She also accused them of holding the hearing to help their own political campaigns.

Three of the Republicans on the committee are running for lieutenant governor, and a fourth, Bill Cowsert, the committee chairman, is running for attorney general of Georgia. Mr. Cowsert did not attend the meeting because of a medical issue.

In a fund-raising social media post in June, Mr. Cowsert said that if he was sworn in as attorney general, Ms. Willis would have a “rude awakening coming.”

Ms. Willis’s eagerness to publicly excoriate the Republican committee members tracks with Georgia Democrats’ broader calculation that Mr. Trump will prove to be a weight around the necks of Republican candidates in the swing state in next year’s midterm elections.

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State Senator Greg Dolezal, a Republican who led the questioning of Ms. Willis, tried to focus on her office’s finances and trips that her staff members took, including one to Washington, D.C., where some of her aides apparently met with members of the congressional Jan. 6 committee.

Ms. Willis, whose campaign sent out a fund-raising pitch ahead of the hearing, had other agendas.

“I know you want to take me back to 1948, where an African American prosecutor can only prosecute certain types of people,” she said at one point, “but I prosecute and stand up for all victims that come into my circuit.”

“I’m not Marjorie Taylor Greene,” she said at another point in the proceedings. “I ain’t gonna quit in a month because somebody threatened me.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/12/17/multimedia/17nat-georgia-willis-wmkq/17nat-georgia-willis-wmkq-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
State Senator Greg Dolezal tried to focus on the finances of Ms. Willis’s office and her staff’s expenditures. Alyssa Pointer/Reuters

Ms. Willis asked Mr. Dolezal, “You and Jim Jordan working together?” She was referring to Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and Trump ally who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has been conducting its own investigation of Ms. Willis’s office in the wake of her Trump investigation.

Mr. Dolezal said he had “never talked to Mr. Jordan.”

Mr. Trump has referred to Ms. Willis as a “criminal.” And he has directed the Department of Justice to prosecute his perceived enemies, in a sharp break from norms. The New York Times reported earlier this year that the department has issued several dozen subpoenas in an investigation related to Ms. Willis.

On Wednesday, Ms. Willis referred to the defendants in her failed case as “criminals” more than once, saying at one point that she had “no way of knowing that these criminals were going to commit a crime.”

She also criticized Pete Skandalakis, a veteran Georgia prosecutor who took over the Trump case after she was removed from it by the state courts. In November, Mr. Skandalakis determined that no charges were warranted against Mr. Trump, the final nail in the coffin on the matter.

She said that Mr. Skandalakis, who last ran for office as a Republican, had not taken a close enough look at the huge amount of evidence that had been amassed.

“There is no way he read the entire file,” she said. “There’s no way that he reviewed all the evidence.”

Ms. Willis also defended the charges in the case, which accused Mr. Trump and a number of his allies of organizing a criminal racketeering enterprise to reverse the 2020 election results in Georgia. “They got charged because they came into my community and committed a crime, and two grand juries passed forth an indictment,” she said.

At one point, the committee members appeared to cut her microphone. Ms. Willis could still be easily heard from the back of the room.

Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.

Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/us/fani-willis-georgia-senate-hearing-trump.html