Fani
Willis Ordered to Turn Over Anti-Trump Collusion Records to
Court

Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis will face more
accountability thanks to Judicial Watch’s persistence.
She was
just ordered to turn over 212 pages of records to a state court judge.
The court also ordered Willis to detail how the records were found and the
reason for withholding them from the public.
The records were
belatedly found in response to our request and lawsuit for communications
with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6
Committee.
The court order was issued on March 7 in our lawsuit
filed after Willis falsely denied having any records responsive to our
earlier Georgia Open Records Act (ORA) request for communications with
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and/or the January 6 Committee (Judicial
Watch Inc. v. Fani Willis et al. (No. 24-CV-002805)).
The
order follows a
February 28 hearing in which Willis’ lawyers admitted to finding the
records after what is believed to be a fifth search of her office.
The court
order reads as follows:
ORDER RE: IN
CAMERA REVIEW OF RECORDS
In August 2023, Plaintiff
Judicial Watch Inc. submitted an open records request to Defendant District
Attorney Fani Willis seeking “[a]ll documents and communications sent to,
received from, or relating to Special Counsel Jack Smith” and “[a]ll
documents and communication sent to or received from the United States
House January 6th Committee.”1 Defendant claimed to have
no responsive records. Doubting this, Plaintiff sued and has since secured
a default judgment against Defendant, who, it turns out, does have
responsive records. After several non-searches, one court order, and at
least one actual search of unknown thoroughness, Defendant revised her
answer to, in essence, “I do have records, but you can’t have them
(except this one record you already had and gave
me).”
Unsurprisingly unsatisfied with this
post-adjudication response, Plaintiff on 17 December 2024 petitioned the
Court for the appointment of a Special Master to (1) conduct her own search
of Defendant’s files for responsive records and (2) review the documents
Defendant has determined fall outside the ambit of the State’s Open
Records Act (ORA), O.C.G.A. § 50-18-70 et seq. On 28 February 2025, the
Court held a hearing on Plaintiff’s motion at which both sides presented
argument and made various factual representations, to include an assertion
that the universe of responsive records consists of 212 pages (some of
which may be duplicative). From those presentations and representations —
and a review of the parties’ pleadings — the Court rules as
follows:
1) No Special Master
will be appointed — for
now.
2) Defendant
shall, through counsel, deliver to the Court within five business days of
the entry of this Order all records Defendant has identified as being
responsive to Plaintiff’s ORA request but which are being withheld
pursuant to one or more of the exemptions set forth in O.C.G.A. §
50-18-72(a). These records should be Bates stamped for ease of
reference.
3) Along
with the documents, Defendant shall provide a list indicating which
documents arguably fall under which exemption(s).2 For any records for
which an attorney-client privilege is being asserted, counsel shall also
identify the attorney and the
client.
4)
Defendant shall additionally provide, along with the documents, an
affidavit, sworn out by someone in Defendant’s employ with direct
personal knowledge, that includes the
following:
a.
A detailed description of the search that was conducted that yielded the
212 pages. This description should identify what was searched and how
(e.g., manually versus electronically) and by
whom.
b.
The search terms used to search e-mail accounts and, if not every e-mail
account in the office was searched, the universe of accounts that were
searched. (These accounts need not be identified by employee name, but
should at least indicate employee role (e.g., Assistant DA #2,
Administrative Assistant #3,
etc.).)
c.
An answer to the question of whether cell phones were searched. If the
answer is “no”, that should be explained. If the answer is “yes”,
it should include a list of whose phones (again identifying them, for now,
simply by employee role) and how the search was
performed.
The
Court will review all these submitted materials and determine if any are,
despite Defendant’s claimed exemptions, subject to disclosure under the
ORA. Should any of the submitted records be deemed disclosable, the Court
will notify counsel for Defendant so that Defendant may file an ex
parte pleading justifying the exemption. Any such pleadings will be
filed under seal in this case, as will all the submitted
materials.
SO ORDERED this 7th day of March
2025.
1 Plaintiff’s request also extended
to employees of Smith and the Committee. 2 Defendant has
asserted as bases for non-disclosure open investigation (subsection
(a)(4)), attorney-client privilege (subsection (a)(41)), and work product
(subsection (a)(42)).
Fani Willis can’t be trusted.
Every time we go back to court there are new excuses and new documents that
she said never existed.
Thanks
to this lawsuit, Willis finally admitted
to having records showing communications with the January 6 Committee
but refused to release all but one document in response to the
court order that found her in default. She cited a series of legal
exemptions to justify the withholding of communications with the January 6
Committee. The only document she did release is one already-public letter
to January 6 Committee Chairman Benny Thompson (D-MS). The court
also awardedJudicial
Watch $21,578 in “attorney’s fees and costs.” (Willis’ operation
made the payment to Judicial Watch 10 days after the court-ordered
deadline.)
We subsequently filed a
motion, asking the court to conduct a private inspection of any records
found.
We had argued:
Willis by her own admission
conducted at least three searches before finding any responsive records not
already supplied by [Judicial Watch]. She did not even bother to conduct a
search until the Complaint was filed. Her records custodian says he does
not know the Cellebrite [digital
investigations] equipment he apparently had a hand in ordering can be
used to search cell phone texts and other data…. Moreover, the custodian
had no standard practice for conducting searches and keeps no records of
the methods used in a given search.
Judicial Watch has
several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits on the lawfare targeting
Trump:
In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice asked
a federal court to allow the agency to keep secret the names of top
staffers working in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office that is targeting
former President Donald Trump and other Americans.
(Before his
appointment to investigate and prosecute Trump, Special Counsel Jack Smith
previously was at the center of several controversial issues, the IRS
scandal among them. In 2014, a Judicial Watch investigation
revealed that top IRS officials had been in communication with Jack
Smith’s then-Public Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal
investigations into conservative tax-exempt groups. Read more here.)
In
January 2024, we filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, for
records regarding the hiring of Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor by
District Attorney Fani Willis. Wade was hired to pursue unprecedented
criminal investigations and prosecutions against former President Trump and
others over the 2020 election disputes.
In October 2023, we sued
the DOJ for records and communications between the Office of U.S. Special
Counsel Jack Smith and the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney’s
office regarding requests/receipt of federal funding/assistance in the
investigation of former President Trump and his 18 codefendants in
the Fulton
County indictment of August 14, 2023. To date, the DOJ is refusing to
confirm or deny the existence of records, claiming that to do so would
interfere with enforcement proceedings. Judicial Watch’s litigation
challenging this is continuing
Through the New York Freedom of
Information Law, in July 2023, we received the engagement
letter showing New York County District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg paid
$900 per hour for partners and $500 per hour for associates to the Gibson,
Dunn & Crutcher law firm for the purpose of suing Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in
an effort to shut down the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight
investigation into Bragg’s unprecedented indictment of former President
Donald Trump.
Judicial Watch Sues California to
Stop Counting of Ballots Received after Election Day – Lawsuit Filed on
Behalf of Congressman Darrell Issa
Judicial Watch filed an
important federal lawsuit
against California on behalf of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa to prevent state
election officials from extending Election Day for seven days beyond the
date established by federal law (Darrell
Issa v. Shirley N. Weber, in her official capacity (No.
25-cv-00598)).
Federal law requires an Election Day – not an
“Election Week.” California’s counting of ballots that arrive a full
seven days after Election Day is unlawful, encourages fraud, and undermines
voter confidence in election outcomes.
We argue that California’s
election law violates federal law, which defines Election Day as “the
first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of every even-numbered
year.”
This lawsuit against California builds on an October 25,
2024, Judicial Watch landmark victory against Mississippi,
in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found counting
ballots received after Election Day contrary to federal law.
The
California lawsuit states:
Despite Congress’
unambiguous and longstanding statement regarding a single and uniform
national Election Day, California modified and extended Election Day by
allowing seven additional days after Election Day for receipt of
vote-by-mail ballots.
The lawsuit alleges that ballots
arriving after Election Day “change electoral outcomes in
California:”
This change to electoral outcomes has been
publicly acknowledged by the Office of Secretary of State. Defendant
Weber’s predecessor issued a press release advising the public not to
rely on initial results from Election night because late-arriving VBM [vote
by mail] ballots and canvassing may mean the “outcomes of close
contests may take days or weeks to
settle.”
During the 2024 federal election,
two of Plaintiff’s Republican colleagues in Congress lost their
reelection campaigns due to late-arriving VBM [vote by mail] ballots.
Congresswoman Steel (45th Congressional District) and
Congressman Duarte (13th Congressional District) were both
leading in their respective races immediately after Election Day on
November 5, 2024, but ultimately lost reelection due to late-arriving VBM
[vote by mail] ballots.
California Governor Gavin
Newsom recently
said it was “right” to criticize the extended post-Election Day
counting in his state, which he called “ridiculous.”
“I am
grateful to have Judicial Watch’s support in this important lawsuit,”
Rep. Issa said. “California voters need all the help they can get to
ensure fair elections.”
In an Illinois “Election Day” lawsuit
Judicial Watch in November 2024 filed
a petition for a writ
of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court challenging the
decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case
filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors from
Illinois to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day
for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law.
Judicial
Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part
of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights
attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up
voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other
achievements.
In May 2024, we sued
California under the National
Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) to force it to clean up its voter
rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian
Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a
reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants
from the voter rolls” as required by federal law.
In February 2023,
Los Angeles County confirmed
the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year,
under the terms of a settlement
agreement in a federal lawsuit
we filed in 2017.
Supreme Court
Asked to Review California’s Retaliation against Judicial Watch over
Election Integrity Video
We can never forget the massive and
unprecedented schemes of abuse, propaganda and censorship over the last
several years. Judicial Watch won’t forget, because we were directly
affected.
You can find details on this in a petition for a writ
of certiorari in the United States Supreme Court concerning our
lawsuit asserting that the California Secretary of State retaliated against
Judicial Watch because of an accurate election integrity video posted to
YouTube just before the 2020 Election (Judicial
Watch, Inc. v. Shirley Weber, in her official capacity as Secretary of
State of the State of California (No. 2:22-cv-06894)). The
California Secretary of State used its well-established working
relationship with Big Tech to have YouTube remove and censor Judicial
Watch’s video.
We filed the lawsuit
in September 2022.
On September 22, 2020, we posted on our YouTube
channel a video titled “**ELECTION
INTEGRITY CRISIS** Dirty Voter Rolls, Ballot Harvesting & Mail-in-Voting
Risks!” The 26-minute video featured me discussing the vote-by-mail
processes, changes to states’ election procedures, ballot collection
(sometimes referred to as “ballot harvesting”), and states’ failures
to clean up their voter rolls, among other topics.
My comments were
informed by successful lawsuits we brought against Los Angeles County and
Weber in 2017 to compel the county and State to comply with the National
Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA)
voter list maintenance requirements. For instance, in
June 2019, we were informed that Los Angeles County had sent notices to
1.6 million inactive voters on its voter rolls after a settlement
agreement had been reached.
We uncovered
that the California Secretary of State monitored our videos for months
leading up to the 2020 election with the help of a public relations firm
closely connected to the Biden presidential campaign.
Contrary to 11
other appellate circuit courts in the country, the Ninth Circuit has made
it more difficult for citizens and groups trying to hold government
agencies responsible for retaliating against those citizens or groups for
First Amendment-protected speech:
Until this case, every
regional circuit had held that an adverse action in the First Amendment
retaliation context is one that would chill a person of ordinary firmness
from continuing to engage in protected activity. The Ninth Circuit strayed
from its sister circuits, excising the “chilling effect” inquiry from
the universally accepted standard. It ruled that the Secretary’s course
of action was not adverse, and therefore not actionable, without defining
“adverse action” or analyzing whether her course of action would chill
a person of ordinary firmness.
The Supreme Court should
not give a green light to California or any other government to retaliate
against Americans for exercising their free speech rights. California’s
retaliation against us led to YouTube removing and censoring our accurate
election integrity video just before a presidential election.
Through
the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other direct litigation, we
continue to investigate and litigate the broad range of censorship that had
been imposed upon tens millions of Americans.
In November 2024,
we uncovered
records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealing
an extensive effort by government and non-government entities to monitor
and censor social media posts on fraud during the 2020 election.
In
August 2023, 23 filed two FOIA lawsuits
against the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for
communications between the agencies and Facebook and Twitter regarding the
government’s involvement in content moderation and censorship on the
social media platforms.
In June 2023, we sued
DHS for all records of communications tied to the Election Integrity
Partnership. Based on representations from the EIP (see here
and here),
the federal government, social media companies, the EIP, the Center
for Internet Security (a non-profit organization funded
partly by DHS and the Defense Department) and numerous other leftist
groups communicated privately via the Jira
software platform developed by Atlassian.
In February 2023,
we sued
the U.S. Department Homeland Security (DHS) for records showing cooperation
between the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and social
media platforms to censor and suppress free speech.
In January 2023
we sued
the DOJ for records of communications between the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and social media sites regarding foreign influence in
elections, as well as the Hunter Biden laptop
story.
Judicial Watch Sues New
York for Records on Killing ‘Peanut the Squirrel’
In
late October 2024, 10 government agents from the state departments of
Environmental Conservation and Healthreportedly
showed up at Mark Longo’s home in Pine City, New York, where he operates
an animal sanctuary, and took his pet squirrel Peanut and raccoon Fred,
later euthanizing them.
“They treated me like I was a terrorist.
They treated this raid as if I was a drug dealer. They ransacked my house
for five hours,” Longo told the New York Post. Peanut, also
known as P’Nut, was popular on social media.
The event sparked
public outrage, being an example of the overreach of government.
We
filed a lawsuit
against the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for
records about the seizure, testing and euthanizing of a squirrel named
“Peanut” and a raccoon named “Fred” (Judicial
Watch Inc. v Sean Mahar, Interim Commissioner, New York State Department of
Environmental Conservation (No. 902596-25)).
We sued in the
Supreme Court of the State of New York, Albany County, after the Department
of Environmental Conservation failed to comply with two Freedom of
Information Law requests for written and video records related to Peanut
and Fred. The first, filed on November 6, 2024,
seeks:
All New York State Department of Environmental
Conservation (“NYSDEC”) records related to the seizure, testing, and
euthanasia of animals, including a squirrel named “Peanut” and a
raccoon named “Fred,” belonging to a Pine City, New York resident named
Mark Longo on or about Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2024. Such records shall include,
but not be limited to, complaints filed with NYSDEC, internal NYSDEC
communications, including emails and text messages, communications between
NYSDEC and the Chemung County Department of Health, investigative reports,
incident reports and laboratory reports.
The second,
filed on November 6, 2024, seeks:
All body-worn camera
audio and video footage, and dashcam audio-video footage, captured by the
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) and its
partner agencies related to the seizure, testing and euthanasia of animals,
including a squirrel named “Peanut” and a raccoon named “Fred,”
belonging to a Pine City, NY resident named Mark Longo on or about
Oct.30-Nov. 1, 2024.
Since November, the New York state
agency has granted itself two 30-day extensions and then a 60-day extension
to respond to our request.
The heartless killing of “Peanut the
Squirrel” by New York State bureaucrats shocked America. And now these
same bureaucrats don’t want to turn over one document about Peanut’s
death and their abusive raid on Peanut’s home. Our lawsuit aims to get to
the bottom of this abuse of government
power.
USDA Spent $600k to Study Menstrual
Cycles in Transgender Men
Far-left gender ideologies are an
obsession of the Left and they were at the heart of the Biden-Harris
administration. Our Corruption Chronicles blog has one
unbelievable example.
In
a flagrant example that demonstrates the urgency to crack down on reckless
government spending, the federal agency that runs the nation’s scandal-plagued
food stamp program gave a public historically black university over
half a million dollars to study menstrual cycles in transgender men and
people with masculine gender identities. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA), long rocked by fraud and corruption in its $112.8 billion food
stamp program, awarded the $600,000
grant to Southern University A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana last
spring and the money is scheduled to flow through the spring of 2027. After
explaining that a woman will have a monthly menstrual cycle for about 40
years of her life, the USDA grant document states that “it is also
important to recognize that transgender men and people with masculine
gender identities, intersex and non-binary persons may also
menstruate.”
The outrageous trans
menstrual cycle study was uncovered by a conservative nonprofit that
recently published adatabase
of government-funded programs to promote gender ideology. The
Virginia-based group, American Principles Project (APP), documents $174
million in federal spending on programs advancing far-left gender ideology
under the Biden-Harris administration. The money was used to fund projects
that promote radical ideas on gender both domestically and abroad, the
group reveals, adding that agencies involved in the spending spree also
include the departments of Defense, State and Health and Human Services
(HHS) as well as the famously corrupt U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID), which the Trump administration is working swiftly to
clean up after determining that “waste
and abuse runs deep.” With a massive budget of around $40 billion,
USAID has for years come under fire for the egregious programs it funds
with public money and fortunately for American taxpayers, President Trump
froze USAID disbursements on day one while his administration identifies
problems.
If there was any doubt about the
need for the commander-in-chief’s new Department
of Government Efficiency(DOGE) to clamp down his predecessor’s
carefree spending spree, the APP database eliminates any uncertainty. Among
the highlights are three State Department grants totaling $5.8 million to
universities in Arab nations—Lebanese American University, American
University of Beirut, and American University in Cairo—to “increase
participation in gender studies.” USAID awarded the American Bar
Association nearly $2 million to “shield the LGBTQI population in the
Western Balkans,” and north of a million dollars to the Bangladesh-based
Bandhu Social Welfare Society to “support gender diverse people” in the
South-Asian Islamic country well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist
groups such as Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The Department of
Education, which Trump is working to dismantle, awarded nearly half a
million dollars last year to a Catholic university in Massachusetts so it
could build an “empowerment program” for LGBTQ+ students in school
gay-straight alliances. HHS gave a public university in San Diego,
California around a million dollars to create a “trans-safe patient
safety learning lab” that aims to improve “patient safety for
transgender individuals.” The Department of Defense (DOD) doled out
$850,000 in contracts to explore “racial, ethnic, and gender disparities
in the military justice system.” The Department of the Interior (DOI)
gave the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation
a million dollars to convert men’s and women’s bathrooms into gender
neutral bathrooms at Letchworth State
Park.
The list of scandalous awards goes on
and on, illustrating the need for an entity like DOGE. The National
Institutes of Health (NIH) allotted a private research university in
Massachusetts $700,000 to study “social media and substance abuse risk
and resilience among gender minority emerging adults.” The DOD disbursed
nearly $350,000 in contracts to research reports on undermining
authoritarian regimes using gender. The USDA also doled out around $230,000
to a “Brazil forest and gender consultant” and the State Department
spent nearly $25,000 to premier a play in which women speak about their
vaginas in the Gujarati language in India as well as nearly $22,000 to
train 50 LGBTQI refugees in Kenya on “barbering, hairdressing, beauty
therapy and cosmetology, food production, and computer programming.” The
agency also spent $2,315 to teach English to “professional transgender
women makeup entrepreneurs” in Nepal.
Until
next week,
