Fani Willis' Other Scandal
Four days before the January 6 insurrection, then-president Donald Trump infamously told a state official to “find” the votes needed to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden in the key state of Georgia. News of Trump’s put-me-in-jail-please phone call broke just as Fani Willis took the reins as the newly elected district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia. And she was hoping that Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, hadn’t been in her county (which includes most of Atlanta) when he received Trump’s call, but he had. “I’m stuck with it,” she realized. And for the past three years, Willis has aggressively pursued the case against Trump and 18 others, so far securing guilty pleas from four of them. But now that momentum appears to have come to a screeching halt.
“You come at the king,” Omar famously warned in The Wire, “you best not miss.” Yet as Willis took aim at a former and possibly future president, she let her guard down. Despite knowing that the world’s eyes would be on her, Willis tapped her boyfriend to lead the case. Willis and Nathan Wade claim their relationship started after his appointment, but that’s questionable. Regardless, Wade had never led a high-profile criminal investigation before. And as outside counsel, he’s been paid handsomely, taking in over $650,000 to date. During that time Wade paid for vacations the couple took, leading Trump and some co-defendants to claim Willis has a conflict of interest because she financially benefited from money her office paid Wade. Willis and Wade claim she paid for her share of the vacations in cash, so there’s no record. This is the context in which Willis is making headlines today. It’s not, however, her first time making headlines.
The other scandal
Fani Willis. The name is distinctive, and rang a bell when it started popping up in the news. Doesn’t she play a not-so-starring role in a book sitting on my shelves? Sure enough, there’s Willis, making a name for herself prosecuting Atlanta public school educators for cheating on standardized tests a decade ago. The youngest of the educators was Shani Robinson, who, along with journalist Anna Simonton, wrote the book now in my hands: None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators.
In 2014/15, Fani Willis, then assistant district attorney for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, led the prosecution of 35 Atlanta educators – 34 of them Black, none white. (Willis is herself Black.) While only Atlanta educators were criminally charged and sentenced to years behind bars, various studies showed cheating on standardized tests was widespread throughout Georgia and across the country. In the wake of boneheaded education reforms pushed by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, schools faced enormous pressure to show progress on standardized tests – improving schools got financial carrots, struggling schools (and their students) got the stick. Not surprisingly, this triggered a rash of cheating. (Including right here in DC, where the Washington Post swept a cheating scandal under the rug to protect chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose anti-union, pro-charter school zealotry the paper loved.)
The disparate outcome in Atlanta was the result of a scary prosecutorial tool. Created by Congress in 1970 to go after the mafia, RICO’s use has exploded in recent years, and Willis “may be RICO’s number-one fan.” Thirty-three states now have their own versions of RICO, and Georgia’s is particularly broad, as Willis demonstrated with the teachers. “As nonviolent first-time offenders, the Atlanta educators would not likely have received any jail time but for prosecutors' unprecedented use of RICO,” Van Jones and Mark Holden wrote in a USA Today op-ed entitled “Atlanta’s cheating teachers are not mobsters.”
To make it seem like the educators were part of a mafia-like conspiracy, Willis painted them as having reaped financial windfalls for cheating, which was absurd. Among the dozen educators who didn’t take a plea deal and went to trial, they “garnered a total of only $1,500 in bonus money, and some never received any at all,” Simonton, the co-author, wrote in the Washington Post. Nevertheless, the longest criminal trial in Georgia history ended with eleven of the twelve educators convicted.
The defendants were unlucky to draw Judge Jerry Baxter, who called the cheating “the sickest thing to ever happen in this town” – apparently, write Robinson and Simonton, “forgetting about things like slavery and Jim Crow.” The educators were also unlucky to draw a talented young prosecutor, whose love for RICO would only grow in the years ahead.
The Trump case
Fast-forward a decade and Willis – now district attorney, having dropped “assistant” from her title – is once again using RICO against a bevy of defendants, only this time it’s Trump and his co-conspirators in the docket. But Willis’ case has hit a snag, owing to a potential conflict of interest over the $650,000-plus her office paid her boyfriend as they vacationed together.
Willis rejects any notion of wrongdoing regarding the alleged gifts, although she can’t credibly prove she didn’t receive them. What’s more, the alleged gifts amount to a comparative fortune when contrasted with the teachers’ tiny-to-nonexistent bonuses, which Willis used to paint them as part of a mafia-like conspiracy.
Of course, as rich as Willis’ hypocrisy is, it doesn’t follow that Trump and his gang should get away with far worse – which may well happen if they succeed at removing her as prosecutor. And the grounds for removing her are not as strong as salacious media reports indicate. For starters, any benefit Willis got from vacationing with Wade is incidental (yes, the same can be said for the teachers). And while Wade’s pay, $250 an hour, sounds high, it's in line with what other special counsels are paid. Meanwhile, Wade’s work speaks for itself: his team has secured four convictions, the case against Trump has proceeded apace (until now), and it’s hard to see these things happening if Wade wasn’t a capable leader, write legal eggheads Norm Eisen, Joyce Vance and Richard Painter.
For Willis, remaining on the Trump case is shaping up to be the political fight of her life. As she asks for understanding, saying nobody is perfect, maybe she can show a little grace as well. Jail sentences still hang over the head of six Atlanta educators (including Shani Robinson, who may well be innocent). As the educators continue to appeal their convictions while out on bond, Willis can end this years-long nightmare for them at any time. Maybe grace can be a two-way street.
