On Sept. 27, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a response to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s strongly worded letter accusing him of interfering with a state investigation into former President Donald Trump.
Mr. Jordan is counter-accusing Ms. Willis of pursuing the case for political reasons, using the indictment against a former president to advance “her own notoriety.”
Congress has a strong interest in seeing that local prosecutors don’t “misuse their law-enforcement authority to target federal officials for political reasons,” he wrote. “We can only conclude from your hostile response to the committee’s oversight that you are actively and aggressively engaged in such a scheme.”
Mr. Jordan had previously notified Ms. Willis that she was the subject of a committee investigation and had requested that she address concerns that the state case sought to incriminate and regulate “federal officers acting in their official capacities.”
Ms. Willis responded by accusing Mr. Jordan of advancing “outrageous partisan misrepresentations” of the case, which charges 19 defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for their actions in challenging the 2020 election results.
Instead of supplying the requested answers and documents, Ms. Willis made a lengthy argument that Mr. Jordan was improperly interfering with her investigation, recommended that he purchase a textbook on Georgia RICO law, and said that his “threats” to deny federal funds to her office would hurt at-risk youth benefiting from after-school programs funded through these grants.
Mr. Jordan called Ms. Willis’s arguments “baseless” and accused her of noncompliance with a legitimate legislative investigation.
State and Federal Law
Mr. Jordan’s basis for an investigation is that several of the indicted people were federal officers, and that Ms. Willis has crossed the line in terms of state jurisdiction in pursuing her case.“The indictment of a former president of the United States and other former senior federal officials by an elected local prosecutor of the opposing political party, who will face the prospect of reelection, implicates substantial federal interests,” Mr. Jordan wrote in his Sept. 27 letter.
He argued that if such prosecutions are allowed to take place, they have strong implications for future holders of office.
Five of the 19 defendants are seeking to remove their cases to federal court.
Jeffrey Clark, former Department of Justice (DOJ) official, is also trying to remove his case. He, too, is arguing that all of the actions that he’s alleged in the indictment to have undertaken were done from his DOJ post, with his attorneys arguing in a recent court hearing that they would have been impossible to do if he weren’t a federal official.
Ms. Willis’s office is arguing that because other DOJ officials opposed the actions—the drafting of a letter stating the department had concerns about election fraud in multiple states—Mr. Clark effectively went rogue and wrote the statement not as part of his official duties. Mr. Clark, who was absent from his hearing, has argued in court filings that President Trump gave him the role and task for which Ms. Willis is prosecuting him.
Three alternate electors in the Georgia 2020 election—David Shafer, Shawn Still, and Cathleen Latham—have also filed for removal, arguing their roles were created by an act of Congress and that they qualify as “federal officials.” At minimum, they argued, they would have been acting under the direction of the former president and his legal counsel. Prosecutors have refuted the argument, claiming that state elections fall solely under state jurisdiction.
“Rule X of the Rules of the House of Representatives authorizes the committee to conduct oversight of criminal justice matters to inform potential legislation,” Mr. Jordan wrote, adding that the committee could develop rules to reform the federal removal statute “or clarify the immunity of federal officials.”
