Who is Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor who indicted Trump with RICO charges?
"‘Star witness’ mostly silent in hearing to disqualify Fani Willis "‘She came in hot!’ Fani Willis torches Trump lawyer in stunning testimony""
Related: A sanctimonious conix attack on Willis and sortagreen You are one blind piece of DNA, sorta. If you lived in Atlanta, you would know better...but you do not. Willis has been criticized on prosecution decisions for years. You are not doing anyone any favors by not recognizing incompetence and malfeasance just because someone has a darker skin pigment. A meritocracy is color blind. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173869037
By Andrew Goudsward and Tom Hals August 16, 2023 12:48 AM GMT+10 Updated 6 months ago
VIDEO
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (Reuters) - The indictment of Former President Donald Trump for interfering in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia will be the biggest case of prosecutor Fani Willis' career, but it will not be her first contentious prosecution.
Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney who charged Trump with illegally trying to overturn his defeat under a law that prosecutors typically use against organized crime gangs, is known for her tenacity in pursuing criminal cases, at times drawing accusations in her community of overreach.
"Rather than abide by Georgia's legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia's presidential election result," Willis told a late night press conference after the indictment was filed.
Willis previously successfully led a high-profile prosecution of schoolteachers in Atlanta who cheated to improve the standardized test scores of their students and indicted well-known rappers for alleged gang activity.
“She’s not afraid of big cases,” said Gerald Griggs,a criminal defense attorney and president of the Georgia state conference of the NAACP. “She’s not afraid of going against popular opinion and public sentiment.”
The indictment of Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, is of a different magnitude for a prosecutor whose office is focused on local crimes in the Atlanta area. The case marks the fourth time Trump has been indicted this year.
But attorneys in Georgia said the case has a special resonance in a state with a history of voting rights battles and would endure even if Trump is elected president in 2024 and ends the federal prosecutions against him or pardons himself in those cases.
Willis, a Democrat and the first woman in the district attorney post, has faced a barrage of criticism and at times inflammatory attacks from Trump in the run-up to the indictment.
Trump, who has denied wrongdoing, has accused Willis of targeting him for political gain, called her a racist and criticized her handling of violent crime in Atlanta, Georgia's largest city and part of Fulton County.
Willis has brought to the election investigation the same apparent indifference to outside criticism that has defined her career as a prosecutor, according to lawyers who have worked with her.
"You are both wrong and confused," she wrote last year to a lawyer for Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who called the election probe politically motivated. “Despite your disdain this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”
ANTI-MOB LAW
IMAGES [1/4]Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks to the media after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against Former President Donald Trump and 18 of his allies in their attempt to overturn the state's 2020 election results, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. August 14, 2023. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage Purchase Licensing Rights
Throughout her career, Willis has made aggressive use of Georgia's anti-racketeering law, initially designed to target organized crime, which is the cornerstone of the indictment against Trump and his associates.
Georgia's racketeering law is more far-reaching than its federal counterpart, enabling charges against "corrupt organizations" if the prosecution can show they engaged in a pattern of criminal activity including two or more separate offenses.
[Insert: That's a Georgia plus, I'd guess. Fani Willis is obviously a 2nd Georgia plus whom most all good Georgians would appreciate.]
The law was a central part of the prosecution in the Atlanta school cheating case and is also key to the ongoing case brought by Willis’s office against rapper Jeffery Lamar Williams, who performs as Young Thug, and 27 others linked to him who are accused of gang activity.
Willis has at times faced pushbackfrom defense lawyers and activists who have accused her of being overzealous in bringing sweeping racketeering prosecutions. Willis has defended the cases as legitimate.In the teacher case, 11 of 12 defendants were found guilty of racketeering and conspiracy after a 2015 trial.
Jay Abt, a Georgia criminal defense lawyer who has represented witnesses in the election investigation, said he disagreed with Willis's use of the law, but added that her prosecutions are carefully considered.
“She’s extraordinarily professional,” Abt said. “She’s not someone who would take this lightly. She’s not flippant.”
‘BUILT FOR THIS’
Willis told South Atlanta Magazine in 2021 that she was raised primarily by her father, a criminal defense attorney who was a member of the Black Panther Party, a Black power movement that began in the 1960s.
She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., that Vice President Kamala Harris also attended, and Emory University School of Law in Atlanta before working as a criminal defense and family law attorney in private practice.
Willis worked from 2001 to 2018 in the Fulton County prosecutor's office, then won election as county prosecutor in 2020, defeating her former boss, Paul Howard. She faces re-election next year.
Willis campaigned on building leniency programs for some low-level offenders, but also adopted a hard line on violent crime and gang activity.
Griggs, the NAACP leader who worked with Willis at the start of his legal career, said she is adept at blocking out outside criticism in major prosecutions.
“She’s built for this,” Griggs said. “Anybody that thinks they can unleash insults from a podium and that’s going to shake Fani Willis is sorely mistaken." conix,
Reporting by Andrew Goudsward in Washington and Tom Hals in Wilimington, Delaware; Editing by David Bario and Alistair Bell
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Tom Hals Thomson Reuters Tom Hals is an award-winning reporter with 25 years of experience working in Asia, Europe and the United States. Since 2009 he has covered legal issues and high-stakes court battles, ranging from challenges to pandemic policies to Elon Musk's campaign to end his deal for Twitter.
Team Trump’s Case for Disqualifying Fani Willis Is Collapsing
"‘Star witness’ mostly silent in hearing to disqualify Fani Willis "‘She came in hot!’ Fani Willis torches Trump lawyer in stunning testimony""
--- Related: [...]They sound like adults, whose live are no one's fucking business. Basically, this looks like a smear job. That's one point. Next, we have the fact that Fani Willis hired Wade after two other attorneys had turned her down... one citing reluctance to live his life needing bodyguards. Nathan Wade isn't intimidated by Donald or any of you violent MAGAts. Lastly... exactly how do you imagine there's any conflict of interest? https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173959609
Ex-wife of special prosecutor accused of obstructing Trump election interference case in Georgia [...]In the filing, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis claims Joycelyn Wade, the estranged wife of special prosecutor Nathan Wade, has used their pending divorce as a means to harass and damage Willis' reputation and obstruct the election interference probe. Willis contends Wade’s ex-wife “conspired with interested parties in the criminal election interference case to use the civil discovery process to annoy, embarrass and oppress District Attorney Willis.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173871408 ---
By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Fani Willis and Nathan Wade. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Like a soufflé collapsing when it’s overbaked, the effort by Donald Trump’s Atlanta legal team to get Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her lead prosecutor, Nathan Wade, disqualified from his racketeering case has lost a lot of altitude and could soon get tossed in the trash altogether. The run-up to the trial of Trump and his confederates was sidetracked in January when Ashleigh Merchant, the attorney for minor Trump crony Michael Roman, made a motion to have Willis and Wade dismissed from the case for allegedly sharing the spoils of Wade’s fees as part of a romantic relationship, which ostensibly explained why Wade was hired despite questionable credentials.
The judge supervising the racketeering case, Scott McAfee, has been conducting a lengthy series of hearings over the motion to disqualify the two top prosecutors. The hearings have featured fiery testimony from Willis .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/fani-willis-hearing-key-moments .. claiming Trump’s attorneys are trying to put her, rather than Trump and his friends, on trial. But soon the proceedings got frozen in a lengthy dispute between the two sides over whether testimony from Wade’s former law partner (and attorney in his highly contentious divorce) about the Willis-Wade relationship was precluded by attorney-client privilege. After a private hearing with this attorney, Terrence Bradley, on February 25, Judge McAfee allowed him to be questioned about text messages he had sent to Merchant alleging a long-standing relationship between Willis and Wade, which had helped precipitate this entire dispute. Bradley promptly denied he knew anything .. https://www.ajc.com/politics/ex-wade-law-partner-testifies-he-doesnt-know-when-relationship-with-fulton-da-began/BYQNHPMNZ5AKNCMOP64K7OJ35U/ .. about when the two prosecutors began their affair, and dismissed what he had told Merchant in text messages as “speculation.”
McAfee has promised a ruling on the disqualification motion by the end of this week, but about all Team Trump has in reserve are cell-phone records allegedly showing Wade in the vicinity of Willis’s home on many occasions prior to his hiring as lead prosecutor. They’ve already lost access to potentially juicy intel from Wade’s estranged wife when the couple agreed on a divorce settlement last month.
--- The underlying accusation in all of this is that Wade and Willis lied about the length of their relationship, the same relationship, mind you, that defense attorneys have failed to show is either a conflict of interest for the prosecution or a source of financial enrichment for either Willis or Wade.
The real question now is why any of this is relevant? And more than that, why are defense attorneys, including those for Trump, spending so much time trying to discredit Willis and her team and so little time trying to prove their clients’ innocence of the charges against them? ---
Even assuming McAfee rejects the disqualification motion, the whole saga has helped Team Trump by delaying the pretrial proceedings and also by damaging Willis’s reputation .. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fulton-da-fani-willis-nathan-wade-optics-battle-over-trump-case.html . Even if she didn’t do anything legally or ethically wrong in hiring Wade or entering into a relationship with him, there remain questions about Wade’s qualifications to serve as lead prosecutor in the most important criminal case held in Atlanta in decades. And her very public dismissal of questions about her handling of the case as motivated by sexism and racism won’t mollify her critics, not all of whom are Trump backers.
In the end, the best way for Fani Willis and Nathan Wade to quell the doubts that have been raised about them is simple: Prosecute the case and win. After the scandalfest we’ve witnessed since the disqualification motion was filed, they may now have the opportunity to do just that.
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