ATLANTA — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis defied a subpoena from a state senate committee and skipped a hearing on her prosecution of former President Donald Trump on Friday.
Willis is challenging the subpoena in court. The hearing took place anyway.
The Republican investigation into Fani Willis has been criticized as a partisan exercise, and that conflict came to a head Friday with Willis’ absence despite a subpoena.
"The honorable Fani Willis. She has not appeared yet," state Sen. Bill Cowset said as a special committee on investigations concluded its meeting Friday.
When the committee chairman called her name, Willis did not respond.
"I would ask the doorman—please check the hall to see if she has appeared," Cowsert asked. Seconds later, an aide responded in the negative. Fani Willis was nowhere to be found—at least not at the state capitol.
Senators had released an image of the subpoena they sent to Willis. Her attorney signed for it, but Willis defied it—pending her legal challenge of whether this Senate committee has the power to compel her testimony in what Democrats call a partisan exercise.
"What the other side is trying to do is just serve former president Trump. And that’s what they’re actually doing. We’re not going to accomplish anything here. We’re not doing the people's business here. And those are just the facts that exist," said state Sen. Harold Jones II (D-Augusta), one of three Democrats on the GOP-led investigative panel.
Republicans want to question Willis under oath about her relationship with Nathan Wade, the well-paid freelance prosecutor her office hired to handle the election interference case against Trump. But Willis has admitted she’d had a personal relationship with Wade – and Wade exited the case.
"This committee does have the authority to do the investigation, to subpoena witnesses and to enforce those subpoenas," former Clerk of the Senate David Cook told the committee.
A legislative attorney cited an 1871 investigation by Democrats into a Reconstruction-era Republican governor named Rufus Bullock.
"The Georgia Supreme Court has never addressed legislative investigations. It just has not been an issue that has made it to the supreme court," legislative counsel Stuart Morelli told the panel Friday.
Willis’s challenge to the subpoena can linger in the courts for months. The Senate Investigative Committee legally expires at the start of the next legislative session in January -- though senators can pass a resolution next year to create another one.