'Increasingly tense exchanges' show Willis favors prison sentences in Georgia election case: emails

07 December 2023

Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is known for her aggressive prosecution of RICO cases, and she is using the RICO playbook against former President Donald Trump and a long list of co-defendants in her expansive election interference case.

Willis alleges that Trump and his allies violated racketeering laws when they tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia despite the fact that now-President Joe Biden clearly won the state.

Some of those co-defendants have agreed to plea deals in order to avoid prison time, including former Trump attorneys Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro. But Willis' office, according to reporting by The Guardian's Hugo Lowell on November 28, has no intention of offering plea deals to Trump, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani or former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

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Additional reporting from The Guardian's Hugo Lowell, published on December 7, indicates that Willis' office is pushing for prison sentences for those who might be convicted in the case.

According to Lowell, "previously unreported e-mails" exchanged between "Willis and defense lawyers…. open a window onto the endgame envisioned by prosecutors on her team."

In one of the e-mails, Lowell reports, Willis wrote, "We have a long road ahead. Long after these folks are in jail, we will still be practicing law."

"The e-mails also underscore the increasing breakdown in trust with a growing number of defense lawyers who have regarded prosecutors' tactics — including Willis assuming she will win — as inappropriately aggressive and presumptuous given the case remains months from a potential verdict," Lowell explains. "The district attorney raised the prospect of defendants in prison in a 29 November exchange, which started with Trump's lawyer Steve Sadow complaining about an incomplete Giuliani transcript the defense received in discovery, according to two people with direct knowledge of the e-mails."

Lowell adds, "Willis responded that the defense lawyers would receive the full transcript in the next production of discovery and, in increasingly tense exchanges, took offense that she was not being referred to by her formal title as well as the implicit accusation that they were withholding evidence."

Read The Guardian's full report at this link.

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