A judge has ordered Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis to pay more than $54,000 in attorneys’ fees and to turn over documents after finding that her office violated Georgia’s Open Records Act, the Associated Press reports. Attorney Ashleigh Merchant represents former Donald Trump campaign staffer Michael Roman, one of the 18 people indicted in August 2023 along with Trump on allegations that they illegally tried to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. Merchant sued last year, alleging that the district attorney’s office had failed to turn over public records she requested. Judge Rachel Krause found that the failures to comply with the records law “were intentional, not done in good faith, and were substantially groundless and vexatious.” Because Willis and her office “lacked substantial justification” for not complying, Merchant is entitled to attorneys’ fees and litigation expenses totaling just over $54,000, Krause found. Krause ordered Willis to search for and turn over all records responsive to Merchant’s requests. Willis plan an appeal.
Merchant said she filed the lawsuit as a last resort after Willis’ office repeatedly failed to produce documents. “We definitely didn’t want to file suit,” she said. “They were just ignoring it and telling us that documents didn’t exist that we knew existed and resisting at every move, so we really didn’t have a choice.” Willis’ office was “openly hostile” to Merchant and testimony showed that Merchant’s requests “were handled differently than other requests,” Krause wrote. Open records officer Dexter Bond said during a hearing that he refused to communicate by phone with Merchant, even though it was his regular practice to call the requester if a request was unclear. Treating Merchant’s requests this way “indicates a lack of good faith,” Krause wrote. Among the records Merchant sought were reports provided to Willis’ office by companies hired “to track the impact of Willis’ statements to the media and whether such statements were viewed favorably by the public,” according to a court filing. The filing says Willis began contracting with those companies just before she and her office sought to indict Trump, Roman and others.
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