Replying the same day, a state investigative office in Georgia rejected a push this week from a right-wing state legislator to go after Fani Willis, the district attorney in the state’s Fulton County currently handling one of Donald Trump’s four criminal cases. The legislator, GOP state Sen. Brandon Beach, suggested government monies were used for personal expenditures of Willis and a member of her team.
Before even getting to the substance of Beach’s complaint, the state office that he contacted — Georgia’s Office of the State Inspector General — informed the legislator that Willis was outside their actual jurisdictional reach. The letter, signed by State Inspector General Nigel Lange himself, indicated that jurisdiction extended to matters in the executive branch — not elected members of the judicial branch like Willis. You’d think that Beach or anyone making a similar demand for action would look a little closer at jurisdictional powers of the office they’re contacting before moving forward. Lange’s reply barely even filled a page, with the problems in Beach’s demands that succinct.
State law “empowers the office to receive and investigate complaints from any source alleging fraud, waste, abuse, or corruption that has been committed or is being committed against an agency of the state,” Lange said, explaining that agencies of the state reach across the executive branch of Georgia’s state government. “As you may also be aware, District Attorneys in Georgia serve as elected constitutional officers as part of the judicial branch. This office is not empowered to conduct investigations into these members,” the letter continued.
A lot of attention currently is on Trump’s similar criminal case at the federal level, amid which a decision is looming from a three-judge panel on a court of appeals in Washington, D.C., on Trump’s claims that he has wide-ranging immunity from possible prosecution that should shut down the case. The Trump team’s vision for this immunity, drawn from mere virtue of once being president, is extensive. A lawyer for the ex-president left open in courtroom arguments the possibility of a chief executive ordering a political assassination and evading prosecution.
