Justice Department seeks information on Fulton DA Fani Willis’ travel history
The Department of Justice has issued a subpoena for records related to the travel history of Fani T. Willis, the Georgia district attorney who charged President Donald Trump in a sweeping election interference case, according to a federal grand jury subpoena reviewed by The New York Times.
The scope of the investigation is not yet clear. Also unclear is whether Willis is the target of the inquiry and whether she will ultimately face charges. Grand jury proceedings are secretive by law.
But the document reviewed by the Times is an indication that the Justice Department under Trump may be investigating another one of his old foes. On Thursday, the department indicted former FBI Director James Comey over the objection of career prosecutors who found insufficient evidence to support the charges.
Days earlier, Trump criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi for not moving more aggressively to prosecute Comey, as well as Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
In Georgia, federal investigators are seeking records related to travel they believe Willis took abroad around the time of last year’s election, but it was not immediately clear why. The inquiry is being led by the office of Theodore S. Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
Jeff DiSantis, a spokesperson for Willis, said Friday that “we have no comment beyond the fact we have no knowledge of any investigation.”
Hertzberg’s office did not have any immediate comment.
The case that Willis brought against Trump and his allies, which accused them of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and subvert the will of voters, is in limbo. Last year, a state appeals court disqualified her from overseeing the case after revelations that she had a personal relationship with the lawyer she had hired to run it, Nathan Wade. Defense lawyers accused Willis of “self-dealing” by going on vacations with Wade that he had paid for, at least in part.
Those travels took place in 2022 and 2023. But the current subpoena is seeking details of travel in the fall of 2024.
Last week, the Georgia Supreme Court declined to take up her appeal on the disqualification matter, leaving the case against Trump and his allies unlikely to proceed anytime soon, if at all.
After the ruling, Trump said in a social media post that Willis and others who brought or tried to bring criminal or civil cases against him “are now CRIMINALS who will hopefully pay serious consequences for their illegal actions.” He has put increasing pressure on the Justice Department, shattering the agency’s tradition of keeping the president at arm’s length. On Friday, he predicted more indictments of “corrupt radical left Democrats” were coming.
“There’ll be others,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House to attend the Ryder Cup golf championship on Long Island, New York.
Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia case include Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff; Rudy Giuliani, the president’s onetime personal lawyer; and David Shafer, the former head of the Republican Party in Georgia.
The original multicount indictment, which was handed up in August 2023, accused Trump and a number of his allies of organizing a criminal racketeering enterprise to reverse the election results in Georgia, which Trump narrowly lost in 2020. Part of the basis for the indictment was a phone call Trump had made in January 2021 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, asking Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results.
Trump had to go to Atlanta to get booked in the city’s jail in 2023.
Willis is a Democrat who won reelection in November. She has said repeatedly that she did nothing wrong.
In one 2024 court filing, she argued that “personal relationships among lawyers — even on opposing sides of litigation — do not constitute impermissible conflicts of interest.” In a court hearing that year, she said she had paid her share of the cost of the trips she had taken with Wade.
“I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial,” she said at one point, while being questioned on the stand by a defense lawyer.
The Trump administration has sought to install political allies in a number of federal prosecutors’ offices, in several cases circumventing established rules for such appointments. But Hertzberg is a longtime employee in the federal prosecutor’s office in Atlanta whose interim appointment was made permanent earlier this month by local federal judges.
He pledged at the time that the “prosecutors under my charge will act decisively and aggressively to excise dangerous offenders from our community.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
