ATLANTA — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ office must pay more than $54,000 in attorneys’ fees and turn over documents it withheld for months in violation of Georgia’s Open Records Act, a judge has ruled.

Marietta defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant said she was “completely stonewalled” by Willis’ office starting around September 2023 when she began looking into the DA’s relationship with a special prosecutor Willis hired to work on President Donald Trump’s election interference case.

Merchant said she requested about a dozen sets of records from the DA’s office, including nondisclosure agreements employees are required to sign, a list of attorneys hired by Willis since taking office and receipts for the DA’s contract with a New York-based “media monitoring service.”

The ruling, issued Friday by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rachel Krause, marks a rare win for those seeking access to public records held by government agencies.

Krause determined the DA’s office failed to comply with Georgia’s Open Records Act by withholding public documents and said those failures “were intentional, not done in good faith, and were substantially groundless and vexatious.”

Because the DA’s office lacked justification for denying the records, Willis’ office must pay attorney fees and litigation expenses to Merchant, her husband, John, and the attorney couple’s paralegal, all of whom worked to get the records, the judge ruled.

The judge said the DA’s office, through its open records custodian, Dexter Bond, was “openly hostile” toward Merchant. She said Bond acknowledged at a hearing that Merchant’s requests were handled differently than others.

“For example, Mr. Bond indicated that he refused to communicate by telephone with Ms. Merchant, despite testifying that his usual practice is to call a requestor to get additional information when a request is unclear,” Krause wrote.

While state law does not require records custodians to call anyone directly to clarify a request, Krause said Bond’s handling of Merchant’s requests “indicates a lack of good faith.”

In addition to ordering Willis’ office shell out more than $54,000 in fees and legal expenses, Krause said none of the records requested by Merchant are subject to open records exemptions and ordered the DA’s office to turn over any remaining documents within 30 days.

A spokesman for Willis’ office said Monday they plan to appeal the judge’s decision.

“I submitted what I thought were pretty simple records requests,” Merchant said of her Open Records Requests. “They wouldn’t give us anything. They wanted to make it as difficult as possible. ”

She said she hopes the ruling serves as a warning for other government agencies seeking to intentionally withhold public records. Merchant said she’s fortunate that her husband is a civil attorney who was willing to help her challenge the denial of records. But she said smaller media companies and everyday people looking to get their hands on public documents would have had to hire a lawyer “and then hope and pray they got attorneys’ fees back.”

“Normally, public agencies want to be transparent,” Merchant said. “But they did everything in their power to keep documents from us.”

Merchant represents Mike Roman, a longtime Republican political operative who was one of 19 people charged by Willis’ office in the sprawling racketeering indictment that accused Trump and his allies of trying to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.

It was Merchant who first accused Fulton’s DA of having an improper romantic relationship with a subordinate and benefiting financially from the case. Willis denied she did anything inappropriate in hiring Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor, but Roman’s effort to disqualify her office helped to upend the high-profile prosecution of the U.S. president.

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