House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Thursday threatened to hold Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in contempt of Congress over her failure to comply with the Committee’s subpoena for documents and communications.
🚨 #BREAKING: @Jim_Jordan threatens to hold Fani Willis in contempt pic.twitter.com/2XLt3eOPYN
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) March 14, 2024
The Republican-led Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into the DA’s indictments of former president Donald Trump and his associates last August, saying the charges appeared to be politically motivated.
In December, the Committee also announced that had launched an inquiry into her office’s coordination with the partisan January 6 Committee, and in January 2024, the Judiciary Committee announced it was launching an inquiry into her boyfriend Nathan J. Wade, the special prosecutor she hired to lead the Georgia election interference case against Trump and his co-defendants.
On February 2, 2024, the Committee issued a subpoena requesting documents and communications after several attempts to obtain voluntary compliance failed.
The subpoena compelled the production of “documents and communications relating to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office’s (FCDAO) receipt and use of federal funds and documents and communications relating to any allegations of the misuse of federal funds by the FCDAO.”
The Committee said Willis “produced a narrow set of documents on February 23, 2024,” but failed to produce the bulk of materials requested.
“On February 23, 2024, you responded to the Committee’s subpoena with a letter in which you smeared a former employee of yours who spoke out about your misuse of federal grant funds,” Jordan wrote in a letter to Willis.
We will not dignify your attacks on this brave whistleblower, or your continued attempts to distract from your conduct through misdirection and personal insults. The allegations in the public realm about your misuse of federal grant funding are concerning, and the Committee has an obligation to examine them.
Multiple whistleblowers within the Fulton County DA’s office have reportedly come forward alleging “misuse of federal and state funds.”
In her Feb. 23 letter to Rep. Jordan, obtained by American Greatness, Willis accused the Judiciary Committee of trying “to interfere with a Georgia criminal proceeding and advance partisan misrepresentations.”
She added that Jordan’s Feb. 2 letter was an attempt to “harass” her and “meddle with that same criminal case.”
Willis identified the whistleblower as Amanda Timpson and characterized her as a “holdover employee from the previous administration who was terminated for cause.”
Willis fired Timpson for “poor work performance” in January 2022 after she blew the whistle on the alleged abuse of taxpayer funds in the DA’s office. However, before Timpson came forward with the allegations, Willis sang her praises, emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.
Timpson disputed Willis’s claim that she was a “holdover” from former Fulton County district attorney Paul Howard’s administration.
“I’m not a holdover. There were no holdovers,” the whistleblower said. “She elected me after she and her people interviewed me in front of a nine-member panel.”
Indeed, emails reported by the Free Beacon show that Willis named Timpson to her 2021 Executive Leadership Team in December 2020, saying she had bested 400 applicants to secure a role in the select group of employees tasked with playing “a critical role of changing and rebranding the culture in [the district attorney’s] office.”
Timpson said her troubles in Willis’s office began in March 2021, when she stopped one of the district attorney’s top aides, Michael Cuffee, from dipping into a $488,000 federal grant earmarked for the creation of a Center for Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention to pay for “swag,” computers, and travel. Timpson said Cuffee claimed the proposed purchases were part of Willis’s “vision.”
The center never opened, and the county-owned building meant to house it is closed to the public behind padlocked gates. And though budget documents for the federal grant show no money was earmarked for equipment or supplies, Willis’s office in November 2022 pulled $1,245 from the grant to purchase items from Dell, county spending records show.
Willis claimed in her letter to Jordan that Timpson has “filed repeated, meritless lawsuits advancing similar assertions” that have been dismissed by several different courts.
“The House Committee on the Judiciary should not afford Ms. Timpson a forum to air erroneous claims merely because it seeks to continue its partisan efforts to target and interfere with this Office,” Willis wrote.
The Committee said Willis did not produce any of the following categories of documents:
All documents and communications referring or relating to any allegations of the misuse of federal funds by the FCDAO;
All documents or communications between or among the FCDAO and the Justice Department, including its OJP and OVW components;
All communications between FCDAO employees about the receipt or use of federal grants;
All documents that fall within the scope of the subpoena, such as the FCDAO’s Applications, Proposal Abstracts, Grant Agreements, Financial Management and System of Internal Controls Questionnaire, and Consolidated Budget Summary documents; and
All documents and communications relating to the FCDAO’s Grant Performance Measurement and Progress Reporting Information.
“While you have indicated that additional documents may be forthcoming in response to the Committee’s subpoena, the Committee has yet to receive any additional responsive materials in the three weeks since your initial response,” Jordan wrote in the letter. “Accordingly, the Committee expects that you will produce all responsive documents to the subpoena in the categories prioritized by the Committee no later than 12:00 p.m. on March 28, 2024. If you fail to do so, the Committee will consider taking further action, such as the invocation of contempt of Congress proceedings.”
Trump and the co-defendants are seeking to remove Willis from the Georgia election interference case based on allegations that she and Wade engaged in an improper romantic relationship which financially benefitted the district attorney.
A misconduct hearing over whether to disqualify Fulton Willis from the case concluded on March 1. Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee has pledged to issue a ruling on the case by the end of the week.