Fulton County DA urges staff not to respond to Trump campaign ad
Written by ABC AUDIO on August 10, 2023
(ATLANTA) — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has responded to a recent attack ad from former President Donald Trump, writing in an internal memo sent to staff urging them not to respond and reminding them that “we have a job to do,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by ABC News.
“We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any,” Willis wrote in the memo on Wednesday. “This is business, it will never be personal.”
The memo came in response, Willis wrote, to an attack ad taken out by Donald Trump to run in the Atlanta area to run through Sunday.
In the memo, Willis told her staff not to “comment in anyway on the ad or the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in the coming days, weeks or months.”
“In this office, we prosecute based on the facts and the law. This law is non-partisan. You should feel no need to defend me,” she wrote. “I am not concerned with the calls, emails, or ads and you should not concern yourself with them.”
The Trump Campaign recently released an ad which attacked Willis with a number of unproven or exaggerated allegations.
In her memo, Willis did not specifically name which ad she was referring to, but the Atlanta Journal Constitution — which first reported the memo — reported that the Trump campaign paid $79,000 for that ad to run on cable news channels in metro Atlanta between Aug. 9 and 13, according to Medium Buying.
In her memo, Willis said the ad contained “derogatory and false information about me as the District Attorney of the Atlanta Judicial Circuit.”
ABC News previously reported that Willis, who for over two and a half years has been investigating Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, is expected to bring her case before the grand jury next week, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Willis also reminded staff of a policy not to comment on matters “on social media or any public forum.”
“No employee of this office may make any public comments related to the noise,” Willis continued. “You instruction from me is to ignore all the noise and keep doing your job with excellence.”
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