Internal correspondence obtained by Just the News shows that the Biden Justice Department invited Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to apply for a lucrative, noncompetitive federal grant in 2022, the same period she was building her criminal case against Donald Trump.
Willis's office ultimately received $2 million from the Office of Justice Programs' Community-Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative grant. The grant was opened in April 2022 as a competitive award but appears to have been provided to Fulton County as the "sole source," a procurement method the Justice Department itself defines as "noncompetitive."
That wasn't all. The DOJ's Office of Justice Policy funneled more than $18 million to the Fulton prosecutor's office from the time Willis took office in 2021 through 2024.
In a December 2022 letter to DOJ Senior Policy Advisor Scott Pestridge, Willis made the arrangement remarkably explicit:
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.
Read that again. The local prosecutor pursuing criminal charges against the sitting president's chief political rival wrote to the Justice Department, asking to "document" that the DOJ invited her to apply for a non-competitive grant. She wasn't applying through normal channels. She was confirming a handshake.
The correspondence surfaced after Just the News and America First Legal sued Willis's office and obtained a trove of thousands of pages of documents.
Willis became Fulton County District Attorney in January 2021. Trump left office at the end of that same month. By February 10, 2021, Willis announced she was opening a probe into Trump for alleged violations of Georgia state law, including solicitation of election fraud, racketeering, conspiracy, and violation of oath of office. Trump had claimed the election in the state was marred by fraud and urged state officials to intervene in the process.
So within weeks of taking office, Willis launched what would become a more than two-year investigation into the man who would become the eventual GOP competitor to President Joe Biden. And during that investigation, Biden's Justice Department invited her office to apply for a sole-source grant worth $2 million.
Nobody is alleging a signed quid pro quo memo. They don't need to. The arrangement speaks clearly enough on its own.
The financial entanglements didn't stop at the grant. In 2023, Willis and Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she assigned to lead the Trump case, faced intense scrutiny after their romantic relationship was exposed in court. Willis had paid Wade more than $600,000 in legal fees while they were involved.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan demanded documents from Willis and Wade in January 2024 and issued a subpoena the following month. Jordan's letter to Wade laid out the concern in plain terms:
The FCDAO reportedly compensated you using a concoction of comingled [sic] funds, including monies confiscated or seized by the FCDAO and monies directed from Fulton County's 'general' fund.
Jordan pressed further:
The Committee has information that the FCDAO received approximately $14.6 million in grant funds from the Department of Justice between 2020 and 2023 and, given the enormous legal fees you have billed to the FCDAO, there are open questions about whether federal funds were used by the FCDAO to finance your prosecution.
That's the question that matters. When federal dollars flow freely to a local office prosecuting the federal administration's political opponent, and when that same office is paying its lead prosecutor through a murky blend of seized assets and public funds, the burden of proof shifts. The public deserves a clear accounting. It never got one.
Willis indicted Trump and eighteen others in August 2023, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump's former lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Days later, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a similar indictment in Washington.
Neither case survived contact with reality.
A Georgia judge ruled that Wade had to step down from the case in March 2023 as a condition of allowing Willis to remain. Wade complied. Willis was ultimately removed as the prosecutor overseeing the Georgia case against Trump. The case itself was dismissed by a Georgia judge in November. Meanwhile, Jack Smith dropped his own federal case after Trump won his second non-consecutive term in the White House.
What these memos reveal is not a single corrupt act. It's a system that operated exactly as its architects intended. A local prosecutor targets the opposition party's leading candidate. The federal government opens the money spigot through a "noncompetitive" grant process. The prosecutor pays her boyfriend six figures from a slush of comingled funds. Congress asks questions. The prosecutor stonewalls until sued. Thousands of pages of records finally surface, and they confirm what critics suspected from the beginning.
Every institution involved had a duty to maintain the appearance of impartiality. Every institution failed.
The left spent years insisting the Trump prosecutions were independent, apolitical, and driven solely by the evidence. The memos tell a different story. When the Biden DOJ "invites" a prosecutor to collect a sole-source grant while she's building a case against Biden's rival, independence isn't the word. Coordination is.
Willis put it in writing. The documents are public. The case collapsed. The money flowed anyway.
