Fani Willis is scared to turn over these secret documents a court just ordered she hand over
Fani Willis is in big trouble.
She’s finally going to have to come clean.
And Fani Willis is scared to turn over these secret documents a court just ordered she hand over.
Judge rules Willis must turn over documents related to hiring of P.R. firm
Lawyer Ashleigh Merchant represents former President Donald Trump’s co-defendant Mark Roman in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ 2020 Election witch hunt.
Merchant is the lawyer who discovered Willis’ affair with special prosecutor Nathan Wade and filed the motion to disqualify her which threatens the entire case.
Now Merchant won another battle against Willis.
A judge ruled Willis’ office didn’t comply with an open records request to turn over records relating to her hiring a firm to monitor media coverage shortly before opening of her witch hunt against Trump and his co-defendants.
Merchant argued this was a matter of accountability for public servants like Willis.
“She is the elected DA. It’s her office. I think that every government agency has a duty to respond to open records requests. I think when you have an elected official that they are the ones who are held accountable by the public. They are the ones who set the policy,” Merchant stated.
She contended in court that documents turned over by Willis’ office were insufficient due to redactions and were also incomplete.
“The first one is what I would call a compilation of documents. It was 44 pages. It was clearly cut and pasted. Someone had removed dates, times, parties, subject matter, things like that. So someone had to actively take those documents and redact them. From the cut outs, it literally looked like they copy-pasted them,” Merchant continued.
The crux of the controversy
In January 2024, the Daily Caller reported on documents that showed Willis’ office paid $10,000 to a firm called Critical Mentions.
One document boasted about how Willis received the equivalent of $150 million in media coverage by announcing the investigation of Trump.
“We are getting more coverage via your name than by title,” a memo to Willis read. “This graph has the coverage value for the last week at over $150 million.”
“I ran a report for mentions of ‘Fulton County District Attorney’ worldwide for the last seven days. Critical Mention (the PR monitoring platform I told you guys about that we contract for last week) gives a ‘publicity value’ to the coverage, which is meant to reflect what it would cost to buy paid advertising equivalent to the penetration of the media coverage,” the email added.
“While it can be a bit exaggerated, it says in the last week we’ve gotten media coverage equivalent to $67 million in advertising. Even half of that value would be staggering,” the email continued.
Willis faced allegations she only opened the probe into Trump to boost her political career in hopes of mounting a future statewide run for office.
These documents suggest she wanted to know how the investigation benefited her public profile.
And Merchant believes Willis tried to hide the true extent of this scandal by not complying with the open records request.
