House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) has slapped a subpoena on Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis for failing to comply with document requests related to allegations that Willis fired a whistleblower who tried to stop a top campaign aide from misusing federal funds.
A former employee in the DA's office told Willis that she was demoted after she warned one of Willis' campaign aides against misusing federal grant funding earmarked for a youth gang outreach program, according to a leaked recording of the call reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
As the Beacon's Andrew Kerr reported on Wednesday:
"He wanted to do things with grants that were impossible, and I kept telling him, like, 'We can't do that,'" he told Willis in a Nov. 19, 2021 meeting. "He told everybody … 'We're going to get MacBooks, we're going to get swag, we're going to use it for travel.' I said, 'You cannot do that, it's a very, very specific grant.'"
The subpoena, first reported by NBC News, is part of a broader probe by Jordan and his House Republican colleagues into whether Willis used federal funds while investigating former President Donald Trump, who she indicted last year on charges of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
In a Friday letter, Jordan accuses Willis of failure to comply with two earlier document requests pertaining to her office's use of federal grant funds, and demands that she provides said documents, plus communications, "referring or relating to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office’s receipt and use of federal funds," and "referring or relating to any allegations of the misuse of federal funds."
According to Jordan, "Instead of using these federal grant funds for the intended purpose of helping at-risk youths, your office sought to use the grant funds to ‘get Macbooks … swag … [and] use it for travel,’" adding "Moreover, the whistleblower’s direct supervisor stated that these planned expenditures ‘were part of [your] vision.’"
"These allegations raise serious concerns about whether you were appropriately supervising the expenditure of federal grant funding allocated to your office and whether you took actions to conceal your office’s unlawful use of federal funds."
When will it end with Fani? Who will get to the bottom of this?