ATLANTA (AP) – The district attorney who is investigating whether former President Donald Trump should file charges for trying to put Georgia’s chief of staff under pressure to change the results of the presidential race in his favor has a reputation as a difficult veteran in the courtroom, not only as a prosecutor but also as a defense attorney and judge.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was sworn in last month after achieving a resounding victory over her former boss in 2020, entered the national spotlight on Wednesday when letters to top officials revealed that her office was investigating. whether there have been illegal attempts to influence the state’s 2020 election. These include the Jan. 2 call in which Trump was included and asked Georgia’s secretary of state to reverse his defeat.
The prosecution of Trump is likely to be a career-determining step for Willis – and one with risks, said Atlanta attorney Robert James, a former district attorney in neighboring DeKalb County. Voters in the strong Democratic Atlanta would demand an aggressive prosecution. The former Republican president is likely to unleash an army of lawyers to defend him. And news coverage will investigate every step, or erroneous mistake.
“No one should be confused about going into a whirlwind,” James said. “If she does it based on the facts and evidence, she’s smart enough and tough enough to handle it, according to what I know of her as a prosecutor.”
Willis has been criticized in her early weeks at work for trying to file two high-profile cases against police officers, including a fatal shooting. But fellow lawyers who have stood before her in court say she is a capable litigator who is not afraid of difficult cases.
“She’s a hard-hitting, tough trial lawyer,” Atlanta defense attorney Page Pate said. “I will never question her ethics. I will never question her zeal or her intelligence. She’s a bulldog if she thinks she’s on the right side. ‘
Willis worked for 17 years as an assistant district attorney under Paul Howard, who was Georgia’s first black DA when he took office in 1997. Before challenging Howard for his job in 2020, he spent brief periods as a criminal defense attorney and a municipal judge.
Willis waged an aggressive campaign in which she accused Howard of mismanagement, and Willis ran in the by-elections for the Democratic nomination in August, winning nearly 72% of the vote. With no Republican on the ballot, Willis sailed to victory in November.
In her most sensational case under Howard, Willis serves as the chief prosecutor who has charged nearly three dozen public school educators in Atlanta in a fraud scandal. In April 2015, after a rude trial over months, a jury found 11 former educators guilty of racketeering for their role in a plan to inflate students’ scores on standardized exams.
Pate, who defended one of the accused educators, said Howard had ruined the case and should have lost. But Willis and her fellow counsel, he said, “put that thing together, worked day and night to make it.”
The new district attorney came under fire for wanting to drop some cases against Atlanta police. One of them involves officers accused of dragging two black college students out of a car during May over racial protests. The other is about two officers who were charged in the shooting death of Rayshard Brooks, a black man killed on July 12, when he tried to flee drunk driving.
Willis asked Georgia’s attorney general Chris Carr last month to re – assign the case to an outside state prosecutor, arguing that her predecessor had acted improperly in the cases, including politicizing them during his re-election campaign. Carr did not want to transfer the cases.
Although some attorneys said Willis had good reason to resign, she angered members of Brooks’ family.
“Not only have you hurt me, but so has everyone out here who trusts you to do the right thing,” Brooks’ widow Tomika Miller said at a news conference last week. “You say you do not run. But honey, you ran away from this one. ‘
Shean Williams, an Atlanta civil rights lawyer representing the family of a man killed in another police shooting that is being prosecuted by Willis’ office, said he understood the desire to get such cases through the to prosecute local district attorney. He applauded Willis for investigating Trump’s phone call and said it made him hopeful that his police officers and others would stay in power.
It is uncertain whether Willis will file charges against Trump or anyone else in connection with the election.
Senior Trump adviser Jason Miller has already rejected the investigation, saying it is a continuation of a “witch hunt” by Democrats against the former president.
Although Willis’ letters to government officials did not cite Trump as a target, prosecutor spokesman Jeff DiSantis confirmed that investigators, among others, were investigating the call between Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, can be heard on the call rejecting Trump’s repeated calls to state-certified results of the presidential election, which President Joe Biden won by about 12,000 votes.
“In most cases, you would have said that she said that she said that one person disputed another party, said something,” said Cathy Cox, dean of law school at Mercer University and a former secretary of state of Georgia, said. ‘But you have a band of Trump’s real words. There is no dispute about what he said. ‘
Either way, in cases against celebrities and public officials like Trump, it can even be difficult to get a complaint from a grand jury that can take a case to a trial court, ‘said James, the former prosecutor in DeKalb County, said. This is because citizens who are adorned to hear such cases find it difficult to be impartial about famous accused, he said.
“Ultimately, you as a prosecutor are to prosecute cases without fear, favor or affection,” James said. “You look at the law, you look at the facts and you compare the two.”
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Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia. Associated Press author Sudhin Thanawala contributed from Atlanta.