Fani Willis Faces Another Investigation

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is facing a new investigation into her office’s alleged misuse of federal funds, the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday.

A letter obtained by the conservative news website shows that two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, wrote to Willis Wednesday demanding information about an alleged misuse of federal grant funds by the district attorney.

The new probe would mark the second congressional investigation Willis is now the subject of, after the House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, launched a first investigation into the same allegations in February.

The accusations come from a whistleblower, former Willis staffer Amanda Timpson, who said the district attorney misappropriated a federal grant worth $488,000 and used it to pay for computers and other “ineligible expenses,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. The money was meant for the creation of a youth gang prevention center which, according to Timpson, never opened.

Newsweek has contacted the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office and Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson for comment by email outside normal working hours.

Willis, who is overseeing the racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and several co-defendants related to charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, has been under fire for months over a romantic relationship she had with a deputy she had hired to work on the case. The relationship between the two was revealed in January.

While the Fulton County district attorney has so far survived calls for her to be disqualified, an appeals court last week allowed Trump’s lawyers to challenge the order that kept her on the election interference case. That means there is still a chance she may be removed from the case.

The letter, dated May 15 and signed by Grassley and Johnson, said: “The apparent and significant discrepancy between the purpose of the federal award of taxpayer money and the actual use of that money raises alarms that it hasn’t been used as Congress intended. The waste or misuse of taxpayer funds is unacceptable.”

The senators are asking for a list of all federal grants received by the Fulton County district attorney since the fiscal year 2019; a complete accounting of all expenditures for each federal grant; and all records referring or relating to the district attorney’s planned expenditures for each federal grant her office received.

Grassley told the Washington Free Beacon: “Congress has the right to know where federal tax dollars are sent and how they’re spent. These federal funds were intended to help vulnerable youth and support important law enforcement initiatives, but the Fulton County DA’s office appears to have used them to fulfill their own whims. Any official who squanders taxpayer funds should be held accountable.”

A statement from Johnson to the news website said the two senators expected “nothing less than full transparency from District Attorney Willis.”