Willis, the first Black woman elected to her office, is the courageous and embattled prosecutor who at one time was seen as a rising star of the Democratic Party for having the chutzpah to prosecute an ex-president she alleged had broken the law and was undermining democracy. The BlacIntellec report should be an eye-opener for anyone who wishes to understand how Willis’ treatment is perceived by African Americans: as part of a broader pattern of undermining Black accomplishments and leadership that is raising concerns about the erosion of Black progress.
Following the 2020 election, we all remember Trump’s foray into Georgia politics, making the outrageous demand that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” Trump the 11,000 votes that would overturn Joe Biden’s slim victory in the state.
The two Republicans refused to cooperate, but their party nonetheless created a slate of “fake electors” that included then-state senator and soon-to-be lieutenant governor Burt Jones, an election denier who travelled to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 2021, with a letter signed by him and 15 other Trump supporters attempting to delay the certification of Biden as president-elect. Jones himself escaped being indicted with Trump because a judge ruled that Willis’ hosting of a fundraiser for the Democratic candidate running against him for lieutenant governor constituted a conflict of interest.
Willis’ case against Trump and his co-indictees garnered a tremendous amount of national attention, so much so that she and her team of prosecutors were shortlisted as nominees for Time magazine’s Person of the Year. A successful prosecution looked promising for Willis, as political leaders and media commentators predicted that her case might be the one to send Trump to prison.
Then something happened that turned Willis’ case against Trump on its head: Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official and one of the remaining 13 defendants, alleged that Willis had financially benefitted from hiring Nathan Wade, an attorney with whom she had been romantically involved. The judge in the Trump case, a Republican appointee to a nonpartisan seat on the Fulton County Superior Court, chided Willis for what he called a “tremendous lapse in judgment” but allowed her to stay on the case. Roman appealed to the Georgia Court of Appeals, which will hear the case in December, effectively ending any chances of the case being heard before November’s election.
The BlacIntellec report, informed by a series of focus groups, documents how the way Willis underwent humiliation and ridicule was typical of how Black leaders historically have been treated when they seek to dispense or mete out justice to others outside of their race. Among the report’s key findings: Willis faces significant discrimination rooted in race, gender and political motivations; media coverage of Willis is perceived as biased, contributing to a broader narrative of undermining Black leaders; and public attacks on her personal life are seen as politically motivated, influencing potential legal outcomes and affecting community morale. Most importantly, the report states that participants believed that if Willis were removed from the case “it could symbolize a setback for Black representation and progress, affecting community trust in legal and political systems.”
This brings us to another important point: the effects of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on this and other cases against Trump. The court ruled in July that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.” Individuals close to the Fulton County case told me that this ruling will make the case against Trump even more difficult to prosecute, if it can be prosecuted at all.
If this ruling does effectively end the case against Trump, it would be a travesty of justice. There are already clear signs that the state’s charges against the former president, as has been the case in other jurisdictions, have made him appear more sympathetic to his followers and arguably stronger politically.
Polls show a tight race between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Georgia, but new state laws could affect that outcome. Kemp, who has been praised on both sides of the aisle for being a guardian of democracy in 2020, since 2022 has signed into law a slew of voter suppression bills that tend to favorite Republican voters. One of the most absurd of the new laws was even satirized in the final season of the HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The episode has star Larry David arrested in Atlanta and becoming a cause célèbre for offering water to a voter standing in a long line waiting to cast a ballot.
Joe Hudson, the founder and chairman of BlacIntellec (a group whose advisory board I sit on, although I had nothing to do with the Willis report), said one reason he wanted to conduct the focus groups was to gauge the Black community’s reaction to how the larger society was treating Willis. He concluded that many in the Black community perceive what happened to her to be similar to what has happened to a long list of African American leaders who dared to speak out for fairness and justice — they got silenced or in some cases murdered. We know that Willis’ life has been constantly under threat; she no longer can live at her home and requires around-the-clock protection.
While even some of her admirers question Willis’ judgment in how she handled the situation with Wade, who has since left the case, and her proclivity for using racketeering law against low-level criminal targets (her use of those statutes to go after schoolteachers particularly bothered me), perhaps nothing reflects the support she maintains among Fulton County’s voters of all races better than the results of this year’s Democratic primary: She won 87 percent of the vote and is heavily favored to prevail against her Republican opponent in November.
Going forward, Hudson hopes public officials and community leaders promote his organization’s findings: “We cannot let our public officials who speak out and fight for democracy to be attacked the way she’s been and we do nothing.”
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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