A court in Georgia ordered Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to pay a legal group more than $21,000 in legal fees amid an open records lawsuit against the prosecutor.
Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, submitted an Open Records Act (ORA) request to Fulton County in August 2023 to obtain possible communications Willis’s office may have had with special counsel Jack Smith and a now-defunct House committee that was investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
Willis brought criminal charges against President-elect Donald Trump and more than a dozen others for alleged criminal activity following the 2020 election.
A response issued by Willis’s office to Judicial Watch “was perplexing and eventually suspicious to [Judicial Watch], given that Plaintiff subsequently uncovered through own effort at least one document that should have been in the District Attorney’s Office’s possession that was patently responsive to the request,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in an order this month, uploaded online by Judicial Watch on Jan. 7.
Judicial Watch’s president, Tom Fitton, hailed the decision by the court and said his organization “wants the full truth” from Willis on whether she communicated with the Jan. 6 committee.
After Judicial Watch submitted the request, according to the order, Willis’s office “received confirmation that its request had been delivered and would be channeled to the ‘appropriate department.'” However, the county a day later informed the group to “simplify” its request.
“Literally five minutes later, before any simplification had occurred, Plaintiff received a second e-mail from the Records Custodian: ‘After carefully reviewing your request. [sic] We do not have the responsive records,'” the judge’s order noted.
On multiple occasions, Fulton County officials said there were no communications between the office and Smith’s special counsel office, which brought separate charges against Trump in two jurisdictions.
However, Willis had “previously informed Plaintiff four separate times that her team had carefully searched but found no responsive records, now there suddenly were—but they were not subject to disclosure under the ORA,” McBurney said in his order.
“The ORA is not hortatory; it is mandatory. Non-compliance has consequences,” the judge said. The office “flatly ignored Plaintiff’s original ORA request, conducting no search and simply (and falsely) informing the County’s Open Records Custodian that no responsive records existed,” he said.
The judge then ordered Willis to provide Judicial Watch $21,578 in attorney and legal fees for violating the law.
In December 2024, the court ordered Willis’s office to turn over any relevant records sought by Judicial Watch because 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.”
In July 2023, Willis told a radio station she wasn’t coordinating in any capacity with Smith’s office in investigations and cases brought against Trump, including a classified records case in Florida and an election-related case in Washington.
“I don’t know what Jack Smith is doing and Jack Smith doesn’t know what I’m doing,” Willis said. “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.”
Smith, meanwhile, has never made any public comment on Willis’s case. In December, Smith confirmed his office would drop both cases against Trump after his election victory in November, while Willis was disqualified several weeks ago by Georgia’s Court of Appeals amid allegations of impropriety.
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