On what some are calling the night the lights went out in Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged former President Donald Trump with 13 felonies in response to his efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, including racketeering, conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree, filing false documents, false statements and writings, and conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer.
Not content with just targeting the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, Willis also charged a number of Trump’s associates, beginning with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and attorneys Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, who represented Trump at the time.
The Trump campaign responded to the charges by sending out an email titled “The Truth About Fani Willis,” exposing the prosecutor as little more than “a Democrat activist.”
The Trump campaign has sent out an email with the subject line: “The Truth About Fani Willis.”
Among the sub-sections: “Fani Willis Is The Daughter of a Former Black Panther.” pic.twitter.com/4ZuMuqCp15
— Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 15, 2023
The email included the subheadings, “A Family Steeped In Hate” and “Fani Willis Is The Daughter Of A Former Black Panther,” and referenced a 2021 Time magazine article about her father being a Black Panther and included a passage from the Fulton County website where the prosecutor admitted as much in her own words: “My name is actually Fani (fah-nee), Taifa is my middle name, and my last name is Willis. So, my father was a Black Panther, so he was very Afrocentric… my name is Swahili.”
The Trump campaign also claimed that Willis hid “a prior relationship with a member of a gang she was prosecuting,” this being something Trump has said at a rally as well: “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. And this is a person that wants to indict me.”
Fox News host Howard Kurtz looked into the allegation and said that it originated with a Rolling Stone article noting that Willis was prosecuting a criminal gang in 2019 known as Young Stoner Life, which was co-founded by a guy named Mondo.
More from the Rolling Stone article:
Mondo says that Willis was a “great attorney” for him, getting his aggravated assault charge dropped to a lesser one and having him sentenced to “a program” in lieu of prison time. He says that even after his sentence, she worked to get him an early release from the program due to COVID. And beyond her casework, he says that the two shared a “cool relationship,” with her being aware of his rap career and even using it in her defense. That’s why the YSL indictment is surprising to Mondo. “That’s not her character,” he contends. “She’s almost like, not really street, but she understands what goes on, bro. She understands life to a certain degree. She ain’t trying to take all these little Black dudes down. She ain’t that type of woman, man. I’m telling you, she’s not.”
Kurtz concluded that Mondo “never said they had a romantic relationship.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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