Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis faced hours of questioning from a Georgia Senate committee on Wednesday about her office and their handling of the now-dismissed 2020 election case against President Donald Trump and his allies.
Willis appeared before the Georgia Senate Special Committee on Investigations nearly two years after it was created amid the Fulton County district attorney’s prosecution of Trump. The hearing came less than a month after the dismissal of the sweeping Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act case against the president and his allies over their alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
Committee vice chairman and Republican state Sen. Greg Dolezal asked the questions for the GOP majority on the panel, ranging from the hiring practices of her office to her prosecution of the Trump anti-racketeering case. Willis evaded many of the questions asked by Dolezal, slamming the committee and defending her decisions as district attorney.
“The people of Fulton County elected me to make those decisions. And I know y’all want to come in and be daddy and create QAnon committees that will judge prosecutors and have these committees,” Willis said, pointing to her recent election results.
“So the people of Fulton County have selected me to make these choices, and I make them, and my city and county are safer because I make them,” she added.
Willis was questioned about her selection of Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor, a decision which ultimately derailed the prosecution of the RICO case after it was revealed that Willis and Wade had a romantic relationship.
She was also questioned about an April 2022 trip to Washington, D.C., by people in her office, which included a meeting with the now-defunct House Jan. 6 Committee. The district attorney claimed she did not recall who her staff spoke with in D.C. during that trip, after previously defending efforts to get information from beyond Fulton County.
“You’ll have to remember the criminals that I indicted, they had committed crimes all over the country, and so as a result, as a prosecutor, if you know that a criminal has done crimes in this state and other states, it would almost not be due diligence to try to get information from them,” Willis said.
The Fulton County district attorney also threw jabs at the vice chairman of the committee and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has also investigated Willis after she pushed forward in her prosecution of Trump. She accused Dolezal of seeking to advance his 2026 bid for lieutenant governor and also asked him if he was working with Jordan. Dolezal replied that he has never spoken to Jordan.
Willis’s prosecution of Trump began in August 2023, when a grand jury indicted the president, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and more than a dozen other Trump allies over their alleged plot to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Within months of the indictment, defense attorneys surfaced Willis’s romantic relationship with Wade.
JUDGE DISMISSES RICO CASE AGAINST TRUMP IN FULTON COUNTY, GEORGIA
The relationship Willis had with Wade led to Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruling in March 2024 that either Wade or Willis would have to leave the prosecution for it to continue. The Georgia Court of Appeals later ruled on appeal in December 2024 that Willis and her office would be disqualified from prosecuting the case. The Georgia Supreme Court denied Willis’s bid to be allowed back on the case.
With Willis’s office disqualified, Peter Skandalakis, director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, attempted to find another office to take on the case. Unable to do so, Skandalakis himself later had to take on the case. Skandalakis requested the case be dismissed on Nov. 26, a request that McAfee quickly granted.
