U.S. President Donald Trump reacts, as he attends a ceremony held to dedicate a 4-mile stretch of road from West Palm Beach Airport to his Mar-a-Lago estate as 'President Donald J. Trump Boulevard', at the Mar-a-Lago est
President Donald Trump has a history of trying to use the White House as a battering ram to demand exorbitant legal fees from offices that have investigated him. And a Georgia judge’s decision now allows Trump to shake the Fulton County Georgia’s DA down with bankruptcy-inducing fees, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“The Atlanta judge overseeing the scuttled 2020 election interference case against President Donald Trump and others has barred Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from fighting their request for almost $17 million in defense costs,” reports AJC.
A new law, passed by Georgia’ majority-Republican legislature, gives Trump and his cohorts an opening to recoup expenditures from cases where the lead prosecutor has been disqualified. And when Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee denied Willis’ request to be allowed back into the case to defend her office against the defendants’ unfettered invoices from Trump and his co-defendants.
Trump, by himself, is seeking more than $6.2 million in attorney fees and litigation costs tied to his defense in the election interference case.
The DA called the defendants’ combined request for nearly $17 million a “suitably preposterous sum for a surreal and unprecedented legal proceeding,” which she believes could have been prosecuted to conviction had Trump not won the 2024 election.
“The District Attorney has no intention of allowing Fulton County taxpayers to pay such an absurd amount for such an absurd reason,” Willis added, complaining that the former chief of staff’s lawyers “have essentially said ‘just trust us’ and asked this court to ignore its duty to assess reasonable fees.”
Trump’s attorney Jennifer Little, for example, is billing Georgia for “$1,000-a-night luxury hotels in Florida, after Willis herself was criticized for staying at a Doubletree,” reports AJC.
Additionally, one defendant billed $820 to prepare a cover letter and drop it off at the Fulton County courthouse. Another asked for $2,000 for delivering “a blank hard drive” to co-counsel in Atlanta, according to the filing.
And some of the expenses filed were duplicative, said Willis.
“John Eastman, a now-disbarred lawyer who led efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and elsewhere, sought compensation for a $100,000 retainer for his defense attorney in the prosecution,” reports AJC. “But he also sought expenses that were charged against that retainer, essentially double-dipping for the same costs.”
Additionally, Willis argued that when Georgia Republican legislators passed the new law allowing Trump and his friends to demand fees, they did not apply the law to all prosecuting attorneys in the state, making the new law is unconstitutional.
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