District Attorney Fani Willis’s refusal on Tuesday to hand over records related to her prosecution of President-elect Trump suggests the Fulton County prosecutor is willing to clash with her critics on yet another front — even as she faces the possibility of disqualification from her case.

The request for documents came from a conservative legal organization, Judicial Watch, that filed a request under Georgia’s open records statute. The group sought “all documents and communications sent to, received from, or relating to Special Counsel Jack Smith,” as well as “all documents and communications sent to or received from the United States House January 6 Committee.” 

A Fulton County judge, Robert McBurney, ruled that Ms. Willis’s failure to respond to those requests meant that she was “in default and has been since 11 April 2024” with respect to its transparency obligations. Judge McBurney also determined that her “representation about not having records responsive to the request is likely false.” He ruled that she lacked “a meritorious defense.”

Now comes Ms. Willis’s response to Judge McBurney’s order to furnish Judicial Watch with the information it requested in the spring. She asserts that “no such documents or communications exist” between her office and that of Mr. Smith, who in recent weeks has closed down his prosecutions of Trump.  Ms. Willis, by contrast, has not ended her case against the president-elect. 

The court of appeals, which has been considering whether to throw her off the case due to her secret romantic affair with her hand-picked special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, has mysteriously delayed a hearing on the matter that was set for December 5.

Before Ms. Willis brought her case, in July 2023, she ventured: “I don’t know what Jack Smith is doing and Jack Smith doesn’t know what I’m doing. In all honesty, if Jack Smith was standing next to me, I’m not sure I would know who he was. My guess is he probably can’t pronounce my name correctly.”

Ms. Willis’s former paramour, Mr. Wade, disclosed in October to the House Judiciary Committee that he met multiple times with persons in the White House counsel’s office in 2022, while he was working the case for Ms. Willis. During his deposition before the GOP-controlled committee, Mr. Wade said he could not remember what happened during those meetings. His lawyer also told Fox News that his client could not recall the meetings.

The White House has consistently denied cooperating with Mr. Smith or with the state prosecutions of Trump in Georgia and New York. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claimed that all the prosecutions of the president, state and federal, were ultimately orchestrated by President Biden.

In her filing on Tuesday, Ms. Willis does acknowledge contact with the January 6 committee, which investigated Trump’s role in challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election. The work of that tribunal, dominated by Democrats and disbanded after Republicans took the House, was presented in a final report whose conclusions and evidence made their way into Mr. Smith’s investigations. Now, Ms. Willis appears to suggest that she too has worked with the committee. 

The district attorney writes to Judge McBurney that she will not turn over that correspondence because any communications are “legally exempted or excepted from disclosure,” as they are records in a “pending, ongoing criminal investigation and prosecution” — the sprawling racketeering case brought by Ms. Willis against Trump and 18 others. Judge McBurney could find that claim solid, or specious.

Ms. Willis contends that those documents are “subject to attorney-client privilege and are confidential work product,” meaning that they cannot be disclosed. Ms. Willis did release a letter — already public — that she wrote to the chairman of the January 6 committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat. That missive from December 2021 asked for “access to records that may be relevant” to Georgia’s criminal investigation.

Ms. Willis had also offered to travel to the District of Columbia to meet with Mr. Thompson’s investigators “in person.” The overlap between the committee’s work and that undertaken by Ms. Willis’s office was substantial. Both the January 6 committee and Mr. Smith’s indictments included evidence from Trump’s activities in Georgia, where he would eventually be charged by Ms. Willis.  

A focus for the lawmakers and the prosecutors was a phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Bradley Raffensperger. On that call Trump declared, “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” That colloquy appears in both Ms. Willis’s and Mr. Smith’s indictments — and also in the committee’s reports, which preceded both.