On Thursday, March 28 in an Atlantic courtroom, attorneys for Donald Trump tried to convince Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee that District Attorney Fani Willis' election interference/RICO case against the 2024 GOP presidential nominee should be thrown out on First Amendment grounds.
The judge did not make a decision during the hearing, but legal experts on MSNBC (including Lisa Rubin and former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade) had a lot to say about what went on in the courtroom. And some of them emphasized that the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment does not protect efforts to overturn election results.
So far, McAfee has kept Willis' prosecution going, although he has thrown out six of the charges while leaving many others in place. And the judge has resisted efforts to have Willis removed from the case, ruling that although the Fulton County DA's relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade had the appearance of impropriety, it did not constitute a full-fledged conflict of interest.
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Willis, in response to McAfee's ruling, has made it clear that she has no intention of resigning from the case. Meanwhile, Willis' battle with pro-Trump Republicans in Congress — including far-right House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — rages on.
Jordan, in February, issued a subpoena claiming that Willis' office has "misused federal funding." And Willis, according to Law & Crime's Colin Kalmbacher, has been pushing back aggressively against Jordan's claims.
"Willis wrote back in late February, seeking to contextualize the entire federal funds issue as the byproduct of a lawsuit filed by a disgruntled former employee who was 'terminated for cause,'" Kalmbacher explains in an article published on March 28. "At the same time, the (Fulton County) District Attorney's office began responding to the subpoena by producing around three dozen documents. Additionally, Willis said her office would continue producing any such relevant documents to the (House Judiciary) Committee on a rolling basis."
In a March 25 letter to Jordan, Kalmbacher notes, Willis forcefully declared that her election interference/RICO prosecution will move forward whether he likes it or not.
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The Fulton County DA told Jordan, "Let me again state this clearly: nothing that you do will derail the efforts of my staff and I to bring the election interference prosecution to trial so that a jury of Fulton County citizens can determine the guilt or innocence of the defendants."
Willis' letter also stressed that she considers Jordan's motivations strictly political — not genuinely motivated by the rule of law.
Willis wrote, "Let me be clear, while we are abiding by your subpoena in good faith and with due diligence, we will not divert resources that undermine our duty to the people of Fulton County to prosecute felonies committed in this jurisdiction. We will not shut down this office’s efforts to prosecute crime — including gang activity, acts of violence and public corruption — to meet unreasonable deadlines in your politically motivated ‘investigation’ of this office.”
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Read Law & Crime's full report at this link.
