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Adding to the woes of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is a court order finding her financially liable in a lawsuit by a government watchdog group.

The Superior Court in Fulton County, Georgia, ordered Willis to pay Judicial Watch thousands in “attorney’s fees and costs” in a lawsuit over the state’s Open Records Act (ORA).

“Judicial Watch filed this lawsuit in March 2024 filed after Willis falsely denied having any records responsive to Judicial Watch’s earlier Georgia Open Records Act (ORA) request for communications with Special Counsel Jack Smiths office and/or the January 6 Committee,” the group noted in a press release this week.

The court had previously found that Willis was in default in the lawsuit and ordered a hearing on December 20. Judge Robert McBurney reprimanded the DA, who has been in pursuit of President-elect Donald Trump in a Georgia election interference case and gave her two weeks to pay the organization.

“Even if the records prove to be just that—exempt from disclosure for sound public policy reasons—this late revelation is a patent violation of the ORA. And for none of this is there any justification, substantial or otherwise: no one searched until prodded by civil litigation,” the judge wrote in this week’s order.

He ordered Willis to pay Judicial Watch $19,360 in attorney’s fees and another $2,218 in other related expenses in litigating the case.

“Fani Willis flouted the law, and the court is right to slam her and require, at a minimum, the payment of nearly $22,000 to Judicial Watch,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

“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,’” he added.

“The ORA is not hortatory; it is mandatory,” Judge McBurney said in the five-page filing. “Non-compliance has consequences. One of them can be [financial] liability.”

The judge found that”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.”

“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 wrote. “Even if the records prove to be just that — exempt from disclosure for sound public policy reasons — this late revelation is a patent violation of the ORA. And for none of this is there any justification, substantial or otherwise: no one searched until prodded by civil litigation.”

This week, Willis asked the Georgia Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that removed her from the case against Trump who has maintained his innocence. Citing an “appearance of impropriety,” the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that Willis could nop longer be on the case due to the romantic relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

Social media users reacted to the latest ruling against the Fulton County DA.

Frieda Powers
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