Lawyers for Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, and the Georgia legislature clashed in court on Tuesday as Republican lawmakers seek to force Ms. Willis to testify and turn over records as part of their review of her prosecution of President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies for 2020 election interference.
Since the U.S. Justice Department dropped its two cases against Mr. Trump after his election in November, Ms. Willis has the last active prosecution of the president-elect. While Mr. Trump was convicted earlier this year of 34 felonies in a Manhattan case related to falsifying business records, the judge recently put off the sentencing and prosecutors have signaled a willingness to freeze the case for four years while Mr. Trump holds office.
Ms. Willis charged Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies in August of last year as part of a racketeering case related to his efforts to cling to power despite his 2020 election loss. The case was upended after revelations in January that Ms. Willis had a romantic relationship with the private lawyer she hired to run the case. Mr. Trump and other defendants are seeking to disqualify Ms. Willis and her entire office.
Mr. Trump is not expected to be tried on the Georgia charges while he is in office. While the Justice Department has a policy against federal prosecutions of sitting presidents, the issue has not been tested at the state level. Most legal experts believe he will ultimately be shielded from prosecution, perhaps even by the United States Supreme Court, leaving his 14 co-defendants to face trial. (Four others have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate.)
Mr. Trump could still face trial after he leaves the presidency.
Republican lawmakers in the State Senate have seized on the revelations about Ms. Willis’s relationship and are seeking to force her to testify about it as part of their own review, even though she has already testified about it in court.
Ms. Willis is fighting to avoid that. During a hearing Tuesday, she was represented by one of Georgia’s most formidable, if affable, lawyers, former Gov. Roy Barnes.
“I told somebody, Now, if the General Assembly is going to start investigating sex, they ain’t going to be able to have a quorum,” he said during the hearing, adding that the Senate Republicans were simply trying to “chill the prosecution of Donald Trump.”
Mr. Barnes argued that both houses of the legislature, not one committee in one house, could issue a subpoena. He also argued that even if the subpoena of Ms. Willis is valid, it would expire when Georgia’s legislature adjourned in late March, just as a congressional subpoena expires when Congress finishes out its term.
“This rump committee, created by one body of the General Assembly, says, wouldn’t it be fun for us to just drag the district attorney down here and see what she’s got on old Donald Trump,” Mr. Barnes said, raising his hand in an arc and pitching his voice.
Josh Belinfante, an attorney for the special Senate committee investigating Ms. Willis, argued that a high burden of proof was required to invalidate Senate subpoenas and argued that there was a legitimate legislative purpose for a Senate committee to look into a district attorney.
“Personalities shouldn’t matter — politics shouldn’t matter,” he said, adding, “the General Assembly has an express authority to look at and therefore legislate over issues of district attorney’s offices and their practices.”
Judge Shukura L. Ingram, who is presiding over the dispute in Fulton County Superior Court, did not immediately rule. Her colleague, Judge Scott McAfee, is presiding over the elections case itself and has already rejected an effort to disqualify Ms. Willis. Mr. Trump and other defendants have appealed that decision to the state Court of Appeals.
The hearing Tuesday came as Ms. Willis’s office lost a ruling in a lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch; Ms. Willis’s office was ordered to comply with a public records request for communications with the office of Jack Smith, the special counsel, and with the House committee that investigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It’s unclear how much of the material will be turned over, though, since some of the documents could still be exempt from disclosure, according to the ruling.
Georgia is one of five states that has brought criminal cases related to efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election, though it is the only one of those states to have charged Mr. Trump himself. The cases are likely to last through much of Mr. Trump’s term in office.
During the hearing Tuesday, Mr. Barnes also lamented the endless squabbling over the 2020 election, with a nod to the South’s fraught relationship with history.
“Judge, I once said that I was in high school before I knew the South had lost the Civil War,” he said. “With the way that everybody talked, I thought they had won. I wonder how long we will go on with the 2020 election? Is that going to last another 150 years where everybody is complaining about something?”
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