A Georgia court has harshly chastised Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and ordered her to pay a substantial fine for repeated violations of Peach State open records laws.
The violation occurred when the prosecutor’s office denied having any documents containing communications with special counsel Jack Smith or members of the now-defunct House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
Late last year, in response to a lawsuit filed by conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered the district attorney’s office to provide the requested documents and/or explain their continued absence, while leaving open the possibility of attorneys’ fees.
After hearing Willis and her office’s arguments, the judge awarded the plaintiffs $21,578 in attorneys’ fees and costs, according to the court’s most recent order, dated Jan. 3 but released this week.
“Fani Willis broke the law, and the court was correct to slam her and order, at the very least, a payment of nearly $22,000 to Judicial Watch,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton stated in a press release.
“But in the end, Judicial Watch wants the full truth on what she was hiding — her office’s political collusion with the Pelosi January 6 committee to ‘get Trump.'”
In the underlying lawsuit, Judicial Watch accused Willis of making “likely false” statements about the retention of the documents at issue.
In summary, the court agreed with the plaintiffs, ruling that Willis had both procedurally lost the case by failing to respond and violated the law on the merits by repeatedly lying about the existence of at least some of the requested documents.
The court’s order is harsh in its assessment of how Willis and her subordinates violated the Peach State Open Records Act (ORA).
“Most basically, by operation of law Defendant acknowledged violating the ORA when she defaulted,” McBurney points out. “But actual evidence proves the same: per her Records Custodian’s own admission.
The District Attorney’s 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.”
Willis has since admitted that documents responsive to the January 6 committee exist. Her office continues to maintain that there were no communications with the special counsel’s office.
Willis initially claimed that no such records could be found in response to either request, and he maintained this claim for over a year.
“We know now that that is simply incorrect: once pressed by a Court order, Defendant managed to identify responsive records, but has categorized them as exempt.” McBurney continues.
“Even if the records are indeed exempt from disclosure for sound public policy reasons, this late disclosure constitutes a patent violation of the ORA.
And there is no substantial justification for any of this: no one searched until civil litigation compelled them to do so.”
However, the court explains that Willis’ office did have at least one responsive document that was not exempt—a letter Willis wrote to the committee chair on January 6.
Notably, this letter was the focus of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit; the nonprofit obtained the document after Willis denied it existed.
Finally, after defaulting, Willis provided the letter directly, attached to a memo filed in response to a court order.
The judge pointedly recounted this sequence of events:
