Georgia DA Fani Willis tells staff to ignore Trump’s ‘derogatory and false’ attacks

The district attorney of Fulton County issued a memorandum to her office staff denouncing a new lie being told about her by Donald Trump and his allies while instructing them to not comment publicly on the matter.

Fani Willis issued the memo after the Trump campaign began running an ad spot in the state suggesting falsely that she had been engaged in an extramarital affair with a rapper who was the target of a racketeering probe launched by Ms Willis’s office, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reported on Wednesday.

There’s zero evidence for such an affair occurring, and neither of the parties alleged to have been involved have claimed as much. But that hasn’t stopped the former president and his team from making the outright dishonest assertion at least once during public campaign rallies with his followers in recent weeks, or from running ads claiming that Ms Willis “got caught hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting”.

“I guess they say that she was after a certain gang and she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member,” Mr Trump said of Ms Willis at a rally in New Hampshire.

In her response, Ms Willis instructed her staff: “You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in the coming days, weeks or months.” She also described the ads and statements of Mr Trump as “derogatory and false”.

The source of the Trump campaign’s newest lie appears, according to the AJC, to be an article in Rolling Stone which examined Ms Willis’s handling of the YSL Mondo case. The article itself does not make any reference to an affair, however, and there’s no other apparent reason (other than sexism and desperation) for the Trump campaign to suggest that she had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Mondo either during that investigation or previously when she served as a defence attorney and briefly represented him on an unrelated case.

In general, the situation is a perfect representation of the Trump camp’s continued addiction to fact-free conspiracies that rile up their most hardcore loyalist supporters but fail to hold any water when brought before actual authorities. Much like the Trump campaign’s failed efforts to prove claims of election fraud in court after their 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the Trump legal team has thus far been unsuccessful in their attempts to discredit Ms Willis or her team before any authority in the state of Georgia that actually matters.

A judge tossed out a lawsuit by Mr Trump seeking to disqualify Ms Willis from participating in investigations against him and scrap the evidence her office has gathered in late July; as a result, her office is expected to issue an indictment or indictments related to his scheme to overturn the election results within days.