Fulton DA faces rare Republican challenger in re-election bid

ATLANTA (AP) — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the Democratic Georgia prosecutor who brought charges against former President Donald Trump over efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, faces a rare Republican challenger in her bid for reelection in the state’s most populous county.

Courtney Kramer, a lawyer who interned in the White House counsel’s office under Trump, said she wants to bring transparency and accountability to the office. But Willis, who easily fended off a challenge from the left in May’s Democratic primary, told The Associated Press she’s confident she’ll win.

“She’s going to lose and she’s going to lose badly,” Willis said of Kramer. Willis said voters should give her four more years because of her record in office, including a pre-indictment diversion program she started and a program in schools to encourage students to choose alternatives to gangs and crime, as well as reductions in homicides and the backlog of unindicted cases.

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Fulton County, home to about 11% of the state’s electorate, is a Democratic stronghold where no Republican has even run for district attorney since 2000. Willis has raised $2.1 million, compared to Kramer’s $278,000, and is heavily favored to win.

Kramer, 31, who grew up in Fulton County and knows the political landscape, has visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, posted photos of herself with a “who’s who” of MAGA personalities on Instagram and claims many of the former president’s staunchest allies in Georgia as friends. But she says that shouldn’t stop anyone — even Democrats — from voting for her.

Her mantra for the campaign has been: “It’s not about right versus left, it’s about right versus wrong.”

Willis, 53, became district attorney in January 2021 and shot to national prominence a month later when she announced that she was investigating whether Trump and others broke any laws while trying to overturn his narrow 2020 presidential election loss in the state to Democrat Joe Biden. She obtained a sprawling racketeering indictment against Trump and 18 others in August 2023.

She worked in the office she now leads for 17 years under her predecessor, Paul Howard, and then worked as a magistrate judge and as a defense attorney. She defeated Howard in a bitter Democratic primary fight in 2020.

She’d like to serve three terms as district attorney and then start teaching at her undergraduate alma mater, Howard University in Washington, she told the AP. She started a domestic violence prosecution unit and said, if she’s elected for a second term, she plans to focus on creating more county resources for victims of those crimes.

The Trump case has won her fans among Democrats across the country while also making her a target of the former president and his allies. She’s been criticized by friends and foes alike for a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired to lead the case. The presiding judge chided her for a “tremendous lapse in judgment.” A pretrial appeal of the judge’s ruling allowing her to continue the prosecution has effectively stalled it, frustrating some Democrats who had hoped the case against the Republican nominee for president would go to trial before the general election.

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Kramer said when she entered the district attorney’s race in March that the Trump indictment prompted her to run, accusing Willis of pursuing the case for personal political gain. While some have speculated that Kramer is running to dismiss that case, she said she would recuse herself if elected because she served in the Trump White House and has worked with two of the others indicted, lawyer Ray Smith and former state GOP chair David Shafer.

Some progressive Democrats and defense attorneys chafe at Willis’ tough-on-crime approach, saying she overuses gang and racketeering laws, unnecessarily complicating cases to get higher penalties. A high-profile example is the prosecution of rapper Young Thug and others. The prosecution’s case has dragged on for nearly a year, with scores of witnesses left to call and the judge recently suggesting that the prosecution was engaging in “really poor lawyering.”

Kramer said she would dismiss that case, arguing it has been poorly managed and a waste of resources.

Willis, known for defiance in the face of threats and fiery responses to detractors, declined to discuss specific cases but dismissed Kramer’s criticism, calling her opponent ignorant and “wholly unqualified.”

“She’s never tried a case at all. She’s never practiced criminal law,” Willis said. “All she is is a right-wing politician trying to carry right-wing politics.”

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Kramer has been extremely active in Republican political organizations. She became a lawyer in December 2020 and helped with an election challenge filed by Trump. She said her law practice in the last few years has focused on civil litigation.

Acknowledging her lack of experience in prosecution or management, she said she has good decision-making and leadership skills. She said she would be transparent about the office’s finances and would work to move cases along quickly. Asked several times about specific policies or goals, she said she’d have to wait until she gets into office to make those decisions.

Kramer criticized Willis, as many others have, for crowded conditions at the main Fulton County jail, saying people have languished there while their cases go unindicted, and also said violent crime has risen on Willis’ watch.

But since Willis took office violent crimes have mostly dropped in the biggest city in her jurisdiction. There were 157 killings in Atlanta in 2020 and 135 last year, and this year’s numbers are 13% lower than a year ago, according to police data. Robberies and aggravated assaults have also dropped, and rapes were declining steadily but are up this year.

Fulton County’s main jail remains plagued with problems, but overcrowding in the county system has improved. Three days before Trump was indicted, there were 3,571 people in county custody and 1,683, or 47%, had not been indicted. On Friday, there were 2,584 people in custody, with 638, or 25%, unindicted.

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