Willis allegedly hired a former romantic partner to lead the Trump prosecution, a lucrative, taxpayer-funded position.
Thirty Republican state senators in Georgia are backing a plan to launch an investigation into allegations of misconduct by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is accused of hiring her under-qualified romantic partner to lead the prosecution of the 2020 election-fraud case against former president Donald Trump and 18 other defendants.
Senate Resolution 465, which was introduced by state senator Greg Dolezal on Monday, would create a special senate committee with subpoena power specifically to investigate the charges against Willis. The resolution passed out of its first committee on Tuesday.
Dolezal told National Review that he believes the committee will get approved quickly.
“I think that this committee will be formed within a week. And then, from there, the members will get appointed, probably the same day,” he said. The 30 Republican sponsors he has are already enough to pass the resolution, Dolezal said, “so this thing is going to move forward.”
The nine-member committee, which would include at least three Democrats, would be tasked with investigating “various forms of misconduct” relating to Willis’s “prosecution of cases related to the 2020 Presidential Election,” according to the resolution.
In August, Willis indicted Trump and 18 other defendants under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, or RICO, for their alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
The resolution says that if Willis spent “significant public funds” to hire a prosecutor with whom she “had, and may yet have, an ongoing romantic relationship,” it would “constitute a clear conflict of interest and a fraud” upon taxpayers. It could also “establish grounds for District Attorney Willis’s recusal from further involvement in the prosecution,” the resolution adds.
Dolezal said the committee would not have the power to discipline wrongdoing, but would make a report and recommendations. While the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office does not get most of its funding from the state, the state does allocate about $30 million annually to what is known as the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, Dolezal said.
“To the extent that those funds have been misused as has been alleged, that’s something that we have an interest in,” he said. “This is going to be a fact-finding mission. … This is a way to quickly get the answers for Georgians as to what’s going on with this expenditure of funds.”
The proposal to launch a senate investigation comes after Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Michael Roman, a former Trump White House aide and co-defendant in the Georgia case, filed a motion in court earlier this month alleging that Willis “without legal authority,” chose to “appoint her romantic partner,” Nathan Wade, to the lead the case against him.
It claims that Willis paid Wade “a large sum of money that was originally allotted to clear the backlog of cases in Fulton County following the Covid pandemic.” The motion claims that Willis and Wade then traveled to California, Florida, and the Caribbean together, and that Wade purchased cruise tickets for the two of them.
National Review has reached out to Willis’s office by phone and by email for comment. Willis previously claimed that the allegations against her are racially motivated. However, she has neither confirmed nor denied having a romantic relationship with Wade.
Credit card receipts included in Wade’s divorce records, which were unsealed this week and obtained by National Review, show that Wade and Willis traveled together to San Francisco last April and to Miami in October. He also paid over $2,600 to Royal Caribbean Cruises in October and more than $3,800 to “Vacation Express” at the same time they traveled to Miami, though those records don’t name Willis.
Merchant’s motion also claims that Wade was appointed even though he “has never tried a felony RICO case,” and “would not be qualified under Fulton County’s standards to be appointed to represent any defendant in this case.” The motion says that Willis “should be disqualified” from the case.
Attempts by National Review to reach Merchant for comment this week were unsuccessful.
Willis was elected Fulton County’s district attorney in 2020, defeating a longtime incumbent who was facing a series of ethics violations and allegations of misappropriating funds and sexual impropriety. After winning election, Willis promised to be a “beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation,” according to an August 2020 report from the Atlanta Voice. She also said that the people of Fulton County “deserve a DA that won’t have sex with their employees or put money in these pockets.”
The effort to launch a senate investigation into Willis comes five months after another Georgia state senator, Colton Moore, (R., Trenton), pushed for his Republican colleagues to call a special session to investigate, and to eventually defund and impeach her. The pro-Trump freshman senator’s plan was nixed by Governor Brian Kemp and other senate Republicans.
Moore was booted from the Georgia Senate Republican Caucus in September for misleading people across Georgia and the nation, and for “causing unnecessary tension and hostility while putting his caucus colleagues and their families at risk of personal harm,” according to a caucus statement included in news reports.
He calls his colleagues and other Georgia GOP leaders RINOS, or “Republicans in Name Only.”
“It’s taken five months for my fellow Republican senators, where I saw smoke there was fire, but now you can finally see the fire,” Moore told National Review.
Moore said his initial concerns about Willis’s handling of the case had to do with the timing of the indictments, which he said seemed political. He said he wanted to investigate Willis “to see if she’s coordinating with Jack Smith, and to see if she’s coordinating with the White House to try to be politically motivated in these charges to hinder Donald Trump.”
Moore contends that Trump and other Republicans had a First Amendment right to question the integrity of the 2020 election and to petition the government in Georgia.
Launching an investigation into Willis is a start, Moore said, though he would also like to see her defunded and impeached. Articles of impeachment have to start in the state House.
Moore said he’s already seen “enough evidence” to warrant Willis’s impeachment, though he added “that’s the process. Before you can impeach someone you have to investigate them.”
“My constituents in northwest Georgia are very upset that their tax dollars are funding this type of nonsense,” Moore said of the prosecution of Trump and the 18 other defendants.
When asked if he believed he could go into an investigation of Willis with an open mind, Moore said the question seemed to be from a different time. “We’re living in another day, a very dark day in our society, when a district attorney is taking political prisoners,” he said.
Dolezal said the senate investigation would not be about Trump.
“This is about the actions, the allegations that have emerged around the expenditure of state and county funds,” he said. “And it is the proper role of the general assembly to look into that, and I would have an interest in that regardless of who the underlying case was related to.”
Dolezal said believes it’s too early to make any determinations about Willis’s actions.
“The facts will take us where the facts take us,” he said. “It should be in the interest of everyone on both sides of the aisle to see what the facts are here. I know some Democrats have expressed concern.”
“This is something people deserve answers on.”