Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis built her criminal case against President Donald Trump with far more help from Washington than she ever let on. Willis coordinated extensively with the Biden Justice Department and White House as well as Democrats on the House Jan. 6 investigative committee, according to a trove of more than 8,000 pages of internal communications obtained by Just the News and the nonprofit law firm America First Legal.
In a reaction to the lawsuit, Willis' office this week dropped all privilege claims and released all the documents without any redactions. The result is a paper trail that traces the connective tissue between a county prosecutor in Georgia and the highest levels of the Biden administration.
The case itself, of course, collapsed. Willis was removed over prosecutorial misconduct and conflicts of interest. The case against Trump was eventually dismissed by a Georgia judge in November following Trump's election to a second, non-consecutive term. But the story of how it was constructed matters more now than ever.
According to Just the News, the most significant revelation in the documents involves executive privilege, one of the oldest protections in American constitutional governance. The Biden White House counsel's office gave Willis' prosecution team a major gift, waiving Trump's ability to claim executive privilege and to block former administration officials from testifying.
In a letter to Fulton County prosecutors in September 2022, Biden's Special Counsel, Richard Sauber, informed Willis' deputy, Wakeford, that the White House would not invoke executive privilege for the testimony of former Trump White House officials before the Georgia grand jury. Sauber framed the decision in sweeping terms:
"In light of these unique circumstances, President Biden has determined, as he did with respect to the Congressional investigation of these events, that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the public interest with respect to efforts to thwart the orderly transition of power under our Constitution."
That language deserves scrutiny. It has been known for years that Biden waived Trump's executive privilege for the congressional inquiry and the federal prosecution of Trump led by Special Counsel Jack Smith, but the Georgia memo appears to be the first document to show how Biden extended that waiver in coordination with a prosecution at the state level.
A sitting president wielded executive privilege like a weapon, stripping it from a predecessor to fuel not one, not two, but three separate legal fronts. The federal investigation. The congressional committee. And now, we learn, a county prosecutor in Georgia.
The documents show a cozy relationship between the Biden administration and Willis' staff, one that included a meeting between her outside special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, and the Biden White House. Wade, who admitted to a "personal relationship" with Willis outside the office, billed Fulton County $2,000 for an "interview with DC/White House." There is no further explanation in the documents for that interaction, and Fulton County told Just the News and its lawyers at AFL that Wade did not keep any records of what happened at that meeting.
No agenda. No notes. No records. A special prosecutor with no background in racketeering law, hired by a district attorney he was romantically involved with, flew to Washington, billed Georgia taxpayers for the trip, and nobody wrote down what was discussed.
The coordination extended well beyond the White House. Around the same time, the communications show the Fulton prosecutors began reaching out to Democratic members of the Jan. 6 Select Committee for information related to their investigation. One of the outreaches went directly to the committee's chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson.
Willis' office wrote to Thompson's team:
"Our office is currently engaged in an ongoing investigation related to possible criminal disruptions that occurred during the administration of the 2020 general elections in Georgia."
They added: "As we discussed, my team and I would like a brief audience with Congressman Thompson related to the aforementioned subject matter." That phrasing, "as we discussed," tells you this was not a cold call. The relationship was already established.
At least one office connected Fulton County Deputy District Attorney Michael Hill with the committee's chief investigative counsel, Tim Heaphy. The records indicate that Heaphy called Hill on April 20, 2022, and their discussion was memorialized in a follow-up email. In that email, Heaphy laid out the committee's willingness to share what it had gathered:
"As we discussed yesterday, we're willing to provide an oral summary of what certain witnesses have told the committee in interviews and depositions."
Heaphy also offered Willis' team access to committee documents, "in camera in our office," in Washington. The Jan. 6 committee, in other words, was not simply responding to a formal request. It was actively funneling its findings into a state prosecution.
And the admiration flowed both ways. In December 2022, Willis' top deputy, F. Donald Wakeford wrote to Heaphy:
"Our initial review of the report confirms you all have accomplished amazing things in the past year."
That is not the language of an independent prosecutor conducting a dispassionate investigation. That is a teammate congratulating a teammate.
Before Willis even impaneled her grand jury, her office approached the U.S. Attorney's office for help accessing former Trump Justice Department officials. Willis' office approached the U.S. Attorney's office with requests to interview several former Trump Justice Department officials, including former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, and former Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, and were directed on where to get their testimony.
DOJ official Jay Macklin responded with a letter pointing to existing congressional testimony:
"For example, Messrs. Rosen, Donoghue, and Engel each participated in interviews before congressional committees, and they discussed the issues that you identified in your letter."
Willis' deputy Wakeford then pushed for more, emailing DOJ Assistant U.S. Attorney Lori Beranek to streamline the process:
"We anticipate that we might have to make a few more Touhy requests and thought it would be beneficial to have a conversation about the process. Please just let me know if that's something we might be able to work out."
The picture that emerges is not of a rogue county prosecutor acting on her own initiative. It is of a coordinated architecture: the White House removing legal barriers, the DOJ facilitating witness access, and the Jan. 6 committee serving as an intelligence-sharing partner.
Newly released documents reveal Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sought and received millions in Justice Department funding as her office advanced its election case against Donald Trump. The Biden Justice Department "invited" Willis to apply for a sole-source federal grant in 2022 while she was actively pursuing an election interference investigation.
This grant was a "sole source," meaning it was offered only to Willis's office, and no other entity competed for it. From 2021 to 2024, the DOJ gave Willis's Fulton County office over $18 million in funding.
Willis herself referenced the arrangement in a December 2022 letter to a DOJ official: "I want to document your recognition of our progress and services provided with dynamic partners, as we complete sole source steps for our new grant award, a grant in which you invited us to apply." An invitation, not a competition. A sole source, not a bidding process. Millions of dollars are flowing to the office prosecuting the sitting president's chief political rival.
AFL originally filed the lawsuit in February 2024 after Fulton County denied the existence of responsive records to Just the News's January 2024 open records request, despite later admitting in court to at least two written communications with the White House.
First, Willis' office said the records didn't exist. Then, under legal pressure, it admitted they did exist but were privileged. Then, this week, it dropped the privilege claims entirely and released everything.
That sequence tells its own story. If these documents contained nothing damaging, there was no reason to hide them. If the coordination was routine and proper, there was no reason to deny they existed. Willis, a longtime Trump nemesis, sought to hide many of the records with claims of legal privilege during a prolonged legal fight.
As AFL attorney Will Scolinos put it:
"These documents reveal that the Biden Administration and the January 6 Committee were much more involved in District Attorney Fani Willis's prosecution of President Trump than was previously believed."
The full scope of what happened is now coming into focus. Within days of President Trump announcing his 2024 presidential campaign, Jack Smith was appointed as Special Counsel. Within months, over 90 felony charges were brought against President Trump in New York by Alvin Bragg, in Georgia by Fani Willis, and in DC by Jack Smith. Senator Lindsey Graham noted that the charges came from "the most liberal venues in America" and were "not just supported by Biden's White House and DOJ."
The Democrats who spent years accusing Donald Trump of colluding with foreign powers to undermine American democracy were, according to these documents, running a multi-agency coordination campaign to prosecute a political opponent using the machinery of the federal government. The White House. The Justice Department. A congressional committee. A county DA's office. All rowing in the same direction.
Willis' case is dead. Her career as the prosecutor of this case is over. But the documents she tried to bury are alive, and they confirm what many suspected from the beginning: this was never about the rule of law. It was about removing one man from the political arena, and every institution that should have stood independent chose instead to collaborate.
The paper trail is 8,000 pages long. The cover-up lasted two years. The truth, as it tends to do, outlasted both.
