Republicans seek oversight of Georgia prosecutors
Amid Trump probe, conservatives in divided state sponsor legislation
ATLANTA — To Fani Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta, several bills in the Georgia legislature that would make it easier to remove local prosecutors are racist and perhaps retaliatory for her ongoing investigation of former President Donald Trump.
To the Republican sponsors of the bills, they are simply a way to ensure that prosecutors enforce the laws of the state, whether they agree with them or not.
Two of the measures under consideration would create a new state oversight board that could punish or remove prosecutors for loosely defined reasons, including “willful misconduct.” A third would sharply reduce the number of signatures required to seek a recall of a district attorney.
The proposals are part of a broader push by conservative lawmakers around the country to rein in prosecutors whom they consider too liberal, and who in some cases are refusing to prosecute low-level drug crimes or enforce strict new anti-abortion laws.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, of Florida, last year suspended a Democratic prosecutor in the Tampa area, Andrew Warren, after Mr. Warren said, among other things, that he would not prosecute anyone seeking abortions. The Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House voted in November to impeach Larry Krasner, the liberal district attorney in Philadelphia. And a Republicanbacked bill currently under consideration in the Indiana legislature would allow a special prosecuting attorney, appointed by the state attorney general, to step in if a local prosecutor is “categorically refusing to prosecute certain crimes.”
The debate in Georgia is unfolding amid mounting concerns over urban crime, particularly in Atlanta. But Ms. Willis has been a centrist law-and-order prosecutor who has targeted some prominent local rappers in a sprawling gang case. She is also part of the changing face of justice in Georgia: The state now has a record number of minority prosecutors — 14 of them — up from five in 2020, the year Ms. Willis, who is Black, was voted into office.
And of course, there is the Trump inquiry, the latest accelerant to the partisan conflagrations that have consumed the increasingly divided state for years. The subject of Ms. Willis’ investigation is whether Mr. Trump and his allies tried to flout Georgia’s democratic process with numerous instances of interference after his narrow 2020 election loss in the state.
Ms. Willis has said she is considering building a racketeering or conspiracy case. Anticipation is rising, particularly since the forewoman of a special grand jury charged with looking into the matter spoke publicly last month, saying that the jury’s final report, which is still largely under wraps, recommended indictments for more than a dozen people.
Ms. Willis must now decide whether to bring a case to a regular grand jury, which can issue indictments. A decision could come as early as May.
In the Republican -controlled legislature, as of Friday afternoon, the prospects seemed favorable for the bills creating an oversight committee. They were dimmer for the recall election bill, which would lower the number of registered voters required to sign a petition to prompt a recall of prosecutors from the current 30%, which is standard for local elected offices, to just 2%. The measure was introduced after some highprofile Trump supporters in Georgia promoted the idea of a recall campaign against Ms. Willis, even though such an effort would be unlikely to succeed in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold.
Those supporters include United States Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted in August that Ms. Willis was using taxpayer funds “for her personal political witch hunt against Pres Trump, but will NOT prosecute crime plaguing Atlanta!”
Ms. Willis, who first described the bills as racist in a State Senate hearing last month, repeated the accusation in an interview at her downtown Atlanta office this week, pointing out that the majority of Georgians now live within the jurisdictions of the 14 minority prosecutors.
“For the hundreds of years we’ve had prosecutors, this has been unnecessary,” Ms. Willis said, referring to the bills. “But now all of a sudden this is a priority. And it is racist.”
Lawmakers have fired back. At the hearing last month, State Senator Bill Cowsert, a Republican who is the brother-in-law of Gov. Brian Kemp, said, “For you to come in here and try to make this about racism, that this bill is directed at any district attorney or solicitor because of racism, is absurd, and it’s offensive, and it’s a racist statement on its own.”
Senator Brian Strickland, a Republican who was presiding over the meeting, told Ms. Willis, “You’re being emotional.”
Lawmakers have insisted the new legislative push is unrelated to the Trump investigation. In an interview this week, State Senator Randy Robertson, a Republican sponsoring one of the oversight panel bills, said the legislation was inspired by the case of Mark Jones, a prosecutor from Mr. Robertson’s district who was imprisoned in 2021 for public corruption.
“Leading up to that, everybody was kind of scrambling around, saying, ‘How do we — you know, this guy’s doing a terrible job, how do we get rid of him?’ ” said Mr. Robertson, adding that existing remedies were insufficient. “There was really no avenue for individuals to go to.”
But the burst of legislative support for such efforts is hard to disentangle from the Trump inquiry. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican publicly supportive of the bills, has been told by Ms. Willis’ office that he is a target of its investigation; he was among a group of bogus pro-Trump Georgia electors who were part of a multistate plot to overturn President Biden’s victory.
Mr. Cowsert, during his heated exchange with Ms. Willis last month, also indicated he had a particular case in mind. When Ms. Willis began explaining that she had been prioritizing gang prosecutions and violent offenders, Mr. Cowsert interjected, “That’s not what we’re reading in the paper you’re prosecuting.”
In a subsequent interview, Ms. Willis said: “I’m very curious. Maybe somebody wants to go ask him what one case he’s talking about. Because I have 20,000 cases in this office.”
Mr. Cowsert and Mr. Jones did not respond to requests for comment.
If the proposals the legislature is considering are successful, the new oversight commission could be in place by early next year. If Mr. Trump were to be indicted, experts say his case would not necessarily be resolved by then.
Ms. Willis’ investigation has been the impetus for other actions by the legislature. Earlier this year, state lawmakers adopted new rules seeking to grant themselves greater immunity from testifying before bodies like the special grand jury, after a judge overseeing the Trump inquiry forced some lawmakers to appear before the body.
Some observers say Ms. Willis could face scrutiny from a new oversight panel over her office’s backlog of thousands of cases.