The district attorney leading a criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies in Georgia accused Ohio Republican Jim Jordan of trying to obstruct her prosecution of the case in a sharply worded letter sent on Thursday.
Soon after the district attorney, Democrat Fani T Willis, announced last month that she was bringing a racketeering case against Trump and 18 other defendants for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that he was going to investigate Willis over whether her prosecution of Trump was politically motivated.
In her letter, Willis accused Jordan of trying “to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding and to advance outrageous partisan misrepresentations” and of not understanding how the state’s racketeering law works.
The letter came as the defendants and the prosecution continued sparring in legal filings over where and when the trial would take place. In a new filing, Mark Meadows, a defendant who served as the White House chief of staff under Trump, was seeking a stay of the proceedings in state court until a judge ruled on his motion to move his case to federal court.
The Georgia case is one of four criminal indictments that have been brought against Trump this year; Jordan’s investigation of Willis is the latest example of House Republicans using their power in Congress to try to derail efforts to prosecute the former president.
Willis’s response is the latest sign that she will not take attacks on her office and the investigation quietly – a strikingly different style from that of Jack Smith, the more reserved and laconic special prosecutor handling the two federal criminal cases against Trump.
In a heated email exchange in July over the terms of Republican governor Brian Kemp providing testimony in her investigation, Willis called his lawyer, Brian McEvoy, “wrong and confused” and “rude,” after McEvoy expressed frustration over mixed signals he said he received from her office and asserted there had been “leaks” associated with her investigation.
On Thursday, scores of Trump supporters gathered near the state Capitol for a news conference and rally, demanding that the state legislature call a special session to defund Willis’s office. The effort, led by freshman state senator Colton Moore, has little support among his fellow lawmakers.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times