Like Donald Trump, Fani Willis ran for elective office in 2020.
Unlike Trump, she won her contest.
Willis defeated her former boss, Paul Howard Jr. (D), in the August primary election (runoff: 72% to 28%) for Fulton County District Attorney. She was unopposed in the general election. Howard had held that post for six terms.
The synopsis for a Fani Willis biopic would probably go something like this: In Fulton county, the first Black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case. Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney and Black Panther. Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.
From 2001 to 2018, Willis was a Fulton County Deputy District Attorney. After her election, she began investigating Trump after news organizations reported Trump had called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) on January 2, 2021. Trump pressured Raffensperger to help reverse Joe Biden’s electoral win.
“She is a pit bull,” said Vince Velazquez, who served for 17 years as a homicide detective in Atlanta, working frequently with Willis. “If I committed a crime, I would not want to be prosecuted by Fani Willis.”
In January 2023, jury selection began in the trial of Grammy award-winning Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams (Young Thug) and 13 others “described by authorities as a violent street gang.”
“It does not matter what your notoriety is, what your fame is. If you come to Fulton County, Ga., and you commit crimes and, certainly, if those crimes are in furtherance of a street gang, you are going to become a target and a focus of this district attorney’s office,” Willis said at a news conference during the announcement of the indictment.
The Georgia RICO law is at the heart of that case.
In 2014, Willis prosecuted 12 public school educators for “widespread, cleverly disguised” operation “to cheat on standardized test scores in an effort to protect their jobs and win favor and bonuses from administrators.” In so doing, Willis relied on the same Georgia statute for conspiracy that she has applied in the Trump indictment.
A jury found 11 of the 12 educators guilty in the six-month long racketeering case. One defendant died before the trial began. It was the longest trial in Georgia history. Willis was one of three lead prosecutors throughout the trial, where 21 people had “accepted plea deals.”
Willis made her way to Fulton County from her home in Inglewood, CA, to Howard University in Washington, DC, and then on to law school at Emory University in Atlanta, where she graduated in 1996.
Featured image: Fulton County, Georgia
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com