Fani T. Willis faced hiring challenges, threats, a judge’s reproach and a series of legal obstacles over her two-and-a-half-year investigation of Donald J. Trump.
Fani T. Willis was barely three days into her new job as district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., when a potential case caught her attention.
A recording had emerged of Donald J. Trump, in his waning days as president, telling Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state and a fellow Republican, that he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse his narrow 2020 election loss there. The call fell squarely in Ms. Willis’s new jurisdiction, since Fulton County includes the State Capitol building in Atlanta where Mr. Raffensperger works.
Ms. Willis had inherited an office with a deep backlog of cases exacerbated by the pandemic, and had limited staff. But she knew almost immediately that she would investigate.
“When allegations come about — about anything that would hamper society’s ability to believe in fair elections, or if there is even conduct that rises to the level of suspicion, I don’t think that I have a choice,” Ms. Willis said in February 2021, shortly after announcing that she had opened a criminal inquiry into the matter.
Over the next two and a half years, what began as an examination of a single phone call became a sprawling investigation stretching across multiple counties and states and into the federal government. On Monday, Ms. Willis announced that a grand jury had indicted 19 people on 41 felony counts, including Mr. Trump and a number of his former top aides and allies, on charges that they had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election in her state.
That the most expansive case against Mr. Trump and his associates would emerge from a local prosecutor’s office in the Deep South was never a given.
Her office faced frequent security concerns and threats as the investigation played out, many of them racist, leading Ms. Willis to have staff members outfitted with bulletproof vests.
There was a parade of legal challenges from witnesses reluctant to testify in her investigation — including from Senator Lindsey Graham and Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff — though most eventually did so after losing court battles.
Ms. Willis’s own political judgment became a sticking point when a judge berated her for headlining a fund-raiser for a Democrat rival of a state lawmaker who was one of the investigation’s potential targets.
Through it all, she made clear that she would not be deterred. When she and a lawyer for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, got into a disagreement over the terms of Mr. Kemp providing testimony in her investigation, Ms. Willis wrote to the lawyer in an email: “You have taken my kindness as weakness,” adding, “Despite your disdain, this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”
While Ms. Willis has been depicted by Mr. Trump and his allies as a left-wing zealot, she is actually a centrist, law-and-order prosecutor. Only a few months before taking office, when she was facing a primary against her old boss, an anonymous flier circulated that superimposed a photograph of Ms.
