by Ty Tagami | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — After more than a year of rebuffing Republican attempts to compel her testimony before the Georgia Senate, Fani Willis went to the state Capitol Wednesday to give three hours of often combative testimony to a special committee that she deemed to be a political farce.
Senate Republicans created the committee to investigate “alleged and admitted” misconduct by Willis, whom they have been pursuing since her decision to indict Donald Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators in the wake of the 2020 election.
The hearing featured questions about her use of public funds as Fulton County district attorney, whether she had coordinated with the administration of President Joe Biden, her handling of open records requests and her payment to a subscription service she used to track the value of the media coverage of her and her office.
It also featured Georgia’s last Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, as her attorney, who frequently interrupted to advise her not to answer questions.
Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, led the committee in the place of Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, whom Dolezal said was recuperating from surgery.
When Barnes cut Dolezal off after dismissing the relevance of some of his questions, Dolezal said they were about the investigation while Barnes said they were merely to infer wrongdoing.
Willis then added, “also to divide the country.”
Each side accused the other of political grandstanding. Dolezal asked about a $10,000 a year subscription service that reported media coverage worth tens of millions of dollars, according to a projected slide of an email to Willis from her media relations staffer.
Dolezal also offered documents that indicated the same staffer had worked as a Democratic political consultant and that Willis had contributed to the political campaign of Charlie Bailey, now chairman of the state Democratic party, when he ran for lieutenant governor in 2022. (She pointed out that the money was for his primary campaign against another Democrat.)
Willis, in turn, had handed out photocopies of social media posts that showed both Dolezal, who is running for lieutenant governor, and Cowsert, who hopes to be attorney general, using the investigation for political messaging.
She repeatedly insulted Dolezal, telling him at one point that he had asked “a really ignorant question” about whether she had considered investigating Trump before his infamous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
She also insulted the premise of the panel itself, calling it a “QAnon committee.” She said white senators were pursuing her because she is Black and she had indicted white and influential people. She said repeatedly that they wanted to be “daddy.”
After the hearing, Sen. Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, the Senate minority leader and a member of the committee, questioned the purpose, as well. He said Dolezal, who by committee rules was the only one besides Jones who got to ask questions, had simply rehashed old information about billing while raising “esoteric” questions about Willis’ handling of open records requests.
He said none of the questions got to the core issue of why Willis chose to indict. He said that was because the defendants had tried to overturn the election and she had done the right thing.
Although four defendants took plea deals, the rest avoided trial. Last month, Peter Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, asked a judge to dismiss the case and the judge agreed.
Skandalakis had taken over as special prosecutor after the courts sidelined Willis on ethical grounds because of her romantic entanglement with a contract lawyer she had hired to help her with the case.
Dolezal said the committee would have to cut through the “theatrics” and name calling in her testimony to determine what to do next. He said the committee should look at Willis’ handling of state funds and open records and at her use of a special purpose grand jury to investigate the defendants before indicting them.
He also said he was glad to finally force her to answer questions on behalf of “my friends who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves against these politically motivated charges.”
