Left: Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, June 22, 2024 (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP). Right: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis arrives during a hearing on the Georgia election interference case, Friday, March 1, 2024, in Atlanta (AP Photo/Alex Slitz, Pool).
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis recently asked a court in Georgia to put the kibosh on subpoenas issued by state legislators intent on quizzing the prosecutor about her and her office’s efforts to investigate and prosecute President Donald Trump.
Peach State Sen. Bill Cowsert, a Republican who represents the college town of Athens, is the chair of the Senate Special Committee on Investigations. That committee has been looking into Willis for years. Cowsert has been aiming to force Willis to talk on the record about her long-frustrated Trump crusade since last summer.
The locus of the committee’s investigation into the election interference investigation is how, exactly, Willis spent public funds — and whether any earmarked funds were improperly diverted.
The prosecutor was slated to appear and speak under oath at a public hearing in September 2024 — but ultimately she was a no-show.
Around the same time, Cowsert moved to enforce years-old subpoenas for documents and testimony. In turn, Willis and her office filed for a permanent injunction to stop the subpoenas from being enforced. In December, attorneys for the parties argued the general issues in the case as well as for and against the possibility of Willis being held in contempt. The judge overseeing the matter then ruled in the committee’s favor on the basic question of the subpoena power.
Now, the embattled DA says the subpoenas are moot and should be quashed or dismissed entirely. That is, the procedural posture is now different but the hoped-for result is the same: Willis wants the judge to render the subpoenas dead letter.
“[Willis] respectfully requests that the Court dismiss the Former Special Committee’s Application as moot and dismiss this case entirely for lack of jurisdiction,” the motion reads.
In her motion to quash filed late last week, Willis notes that the recent general election necessarily resulted in a new General Assembly being sworn in. the state Senate, for their part, quickly made sure to reauthorize Cowert’s committee. But, Willis says, the details of how that reauthorization occurred preclude the subpoenas from having any real staying power.
“This reauthorization plainly contemplates and creates a new committee, not a continuing one,” the motion reads. “First, the Resolution notes that the Special Committee is ‘recreated and reauthorized’ — not that it is the same committee as the prior one. Next, the Committee members are to be appointed by the Senate Committee on Assignments pursuant to its usual procedures — meaning the committee members will not necessarily be the same (and thus at least hypothetically might not take the same actions as the prior committee). At least one member will be different due to the retirement of a former member.”
Willis does not, however, rely on the novel nature of the committee.
The motion also argues that the rules under which subpoenas can be issued in the new iteration of the committee vary substantially from the older version. Key here, Willis argues, is a new restriction that requires a majority vote before a member can issue a subpoena. The old version of Cowsert’s committee had no such provision in its founding charter, the motion says.
Willis goes on to say that the new committee is also somewhat emboldened — because it is allowed to meet more often.
“In other words, the old Special Committee no longer exists — and therefore lacks the power to enforce its Application or its subpoenas,” the motion goes on. “The new Special Committee possesses whatever powers the former one had — and it has new powers, and restrictions on old ones.”
The DA’s filing offers a hypothetical to argue her point:
Imagine that a prior committee was formed to investigate a policy issue, but some of its members were defeated in their reelection campaigns. Plainly the prior committee could not continue to seek to issue and enforce subpoenas, compel testimony, demand documents and so on after a new General Assembly was sworn in, when at least some of its members (and perhaps the policy goals of the prior committee) were rejected by the electorate.
The motion says the new committee can issue new subpoenas if members are intent on getting the long-ago requested testimony and documents about Fulton County’s Trump-focused investigations — but insist the time has passed on the extant subpoenas.
“The prior General Assembly did not issue its subpoenas until late August of 2024,” the motion concludes. “The deadline for compliance with them was September of 2024. This Court heard and resolved the matter in roughly three months. Should the new Special Committee seek to issue and enforce subpoenas as to Petitioner, it has plenty of time to do so before it expires.”
Read the full Willis filing here.
