Court Orders District Attorney Fani Willis to Produce Communications and Records in Trump Case

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis at the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta, Ga., on March 1, 2024. Alex Slitz/AFP via Getty Images

The district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, was ordered by a judge to turn over communications she may have had with federal special counsel Jack Smith and the House Jan. 6 subcommittee.

A March lawsuit filed by conservative-leaning Judicial Watch against District Attorney Fani Willis, an elected Democrat, in the Fulton County Superior Court had asked for records related to any possible communications with the committee or Smith’s office. The judge in the case was asked to issue a default judgment to grant Judicial Watch’s request for Willis to pay its attorneys’ fees and provide records to the organization.

In siding with Judicial Watch, the superior court found that Willis had “never moved to open default on any basis (not even during the period when she could have opened default as a matter of right), she never paid costs, and she never offered up a meritorious defense.”

Willis was ordered to “conduct a diligent search of her records for responsive materials within five business days” of the order and is then mandated to provide Judicial Watch “with copies of all responsive records that are not legally exempted or excepted from disclosure.”

If her office withholds the records, she is mandated to follow court-ordered procedures and should “provide an explanation why such correspondence does not exist.”

The Epoch Times contacted the Fulton County district attorney’s office for comment on Tuesday but received no reply by publication time. Her office did not offer a response in court and has not yet issued a public statement after the ruling.

In mid-2023, Willis told a local radio station that she was not coordinating in any way with Smith’s office in investigations and cases brought against former President Donald Trump. Smith had charged Trump, now the president-elect, with both classified documents-related and 2020 election-related charges in two different jurisdictions, while Willis brought charges against him and more than a dozen others for alleged election-related crimes in Fulton County.

“I don’t know what Jack Smith is doing and Jack Smith doesn’t know what I’m doing,” Willis said in July of that year. “In all honesty, if Jack Smith was standing next to me, I’m not sure I would know who he was. My guess is he probably can’t pronounce my name correctly.”

Since then, however, she has made no comments about Smith’s investigation. Smith, meanwhile, has never commented on Willis’s case against Trump.

Smith in November filed court papers confirming he would be dropping his election case against Trump and would stop the appeals process in his classified documents case. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would terminate Smith as special counsel upon taking office.

A letter sent by Willis’s office on Dec. 17, 2021, to the House Jan. 6 committee had “requested access to any Select Committee records relevant to her investigation into President Trump’s actions to challenge the 2020 presidential election, including ‘recordings and transcripts of witness interviews and depositions, electronic and print records of communications, and records of travel,'” House Judiciary Republicans said in a report released last year relating to an investigation they launched into Willis.

Willis has been critical of House Republicans’ investigation into her office and the Trump case, accusing House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of trying to interfere in the case at one point.

“Jim Jordan has, time after time after time, attacked my office with no legitimate purpose,” she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in May.  “Anyone who knows Jim Jordan’s history knows that he only has the purpose of trying to interfere in a criminal investigation.”

In a letter issued to Republicans in 2023, Willis said Republicans are trying to “obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding and to advance outrageous partisan misrepresentations.”

Her case against Trump has stalled in recent months after one of the president-elect’s co-defendants submitted a court filing earlier this year claiming Willis and then-special prosecutor Nathan Wade were engaged in a romantic relationship. The pair confirmed they were in a relationship but denied any wrongdoing.

A judge overseeing the case issued an order in March allowing Willis to remain on the case if Wade resigned, which he did hours later. Trump and several of his co-defendants appealed the decision to the  Georgia Court of Appeals earlier this year, where the case is still pending.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.