Her case against Donald Trump got chopped up, her former boyfriend looked anything but in a recent video, and now Fani Willis has defied a state Senate committee subpoena. That's quite a week for any prosecutor, not to mention a politician aiming for re-election in a few weeks. 

And yet, Willis seems determined to defy everyone, including the legislative body investigating her for misconduct in the Trump case:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump, did not appear Friday at a hearing held by a Republican-led state Senate committee that has been investigating her.

Willis has challenged the legality of the subpoenas she received from the committee, a spokesperson for her office previously told ABC News.

The hearing today was set to include "sworn testimony" from Willis, according to a press release from the committee.

Willis and her attorney claim that the committee can't enforce their subpoena. For their part, the committee indicated that they would sure give it the ol' college try:

Legislative counsel Stuart Morelli and former Secretary of the Senate David Cook testified before the committee, outlining what they believe are the relevant laws and cases related to the committee's desire to question Willis and her unwillingness to be questioned.

After hearing from Morelli and Cook, Chairman Bill Cowsert sent someone to check if Willis had arrived for the hearing. When it was confirmed she was not present, Cowsert announced that the committee had already hired Josh Bellinfante to enforce the subpoena. He then asked if the committee wished to go into executive session to discuss the matter further. Once the committee indicated it did, the regular meeting was adjourned. ... 

"She'll be required to attend, and she'll be required to produce certain requested documents. It may require a court order for her to obey them, but that's where we're headed," Cowsert said. 

Regardless of whether Willis likes it or not, the state legislature has the authority to provide a check on the executive functions in the state. Authorized committees can issue subpoenas that carry legal force, especially in dealing with executive officials and investigations into misconduct. Willis herself invited this level of scrutiny by attempting to prosecute federal officials as well as state officials on the basis of her jurisdiction as a county DA, and then proceeded to hire her boyfriend at rather unusual rates to run the case. 

What exactly did the committee want? They have subpoenaed the text records of her communications with Nathan Wade, the man Willis claims she stopped dating before she hired him for the job. The court didn't dig into that claim too much, but the state legislature wants to know whether that hiring process was corrupt and whether a DA lied under oath when caught -- which seems pretty reasonable. 

Willis disagrees:

Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis is refusing to hand over five years of texts she exchanged with ex-boyfriend Nathan Wade, the attorney she hired to prosecute Donald Trump election fraud allegations.

In a court filing, Willis' lawyer states that a Georgia senate committee has subpoenaed the texts, regardless of subject, and collecting them would be an "immense" burden on Willis' office.

The Republican-led committee has also subpoenaed five years of emails between the pair, to assess if Willis improperly hired Wade to prosecute the former president.

If the documents and her testimony were exculpatory, Willis wouldn't fight it. The fact that she's still trying to hide the processes that created the mess in Fulton County speaks volumes about her resistance to legislative subpoenas. Nor does this video released last week add much to her credibility:

As I wrote in the Headlines at the time, Wade's presence here raises questions about whether Willis testified truthfully that their dating relationship had come to an end "years ago." Maybe they started dating again recently -- hey, it happens -- but given Willis' issues with the truth, one has to wonder whether she and Wade lied in court about it. And it adds to the reasons why the state legislature feels compelled to find out what the hell is happening in Fulton County.

Nor is that the only bad news for Willis. Yesterday, Judge Scott McAfee threw out two more charges in Willis' indictment, bringing the total number dismissed to five -- so far. He also noted that the recent Supreme Court ruling on immunity had not yet been argued in this case, and that may impact even more of the charges, especially relating to Trump. McAfee still has more motions on which to rule as well, but nearly half of Willis' case against Trump has already disappeared.

Legal analyst A.R. Hoffmann writes at the NY Sun that Willis' case "is in freefall":

The judge’s ruling is a validation of Trump’s contention that he is protected from state and federal prosecution by the prerogative of the office he once held. Another one of Ms. Willis’s defendants, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, has made a similar argument to the Supreme Court in an effort to remove his case to federal court. Trump and Mr. Meadows both maintain that the district attorney’s case encroaches on federal power.

Now Judge McAfee has determined that Ms. Willis has, with respect to at least some of her charges, acted crosswise with the Constitution. Trump, Meadows, and the other defendants will likely attempt to leverage this finding to whittle down the case further. Expect the 45th president to soon mount a challenge on the basis of the Supreme Court’s landmark immunity ruling in Trump v. United States, which granted presumptive immunity for all official presidential acts. ...

The district attorney is seeing her indictment shrink as her own role in the case comes under growing scrutiny. The Georgia Court of Appeals has set a date in December for oral arguments to determine whether Ms. Willis ought to be disqualified for her secret romance with her handpicked special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. Trump et al. also argue that her accusation that her opponents are “playing the race card” amounted to a poisoning of the jury pool in majority-minority Fulton County, which comprises much of downtown Atlanta. 

Perhaps the case is in freefall. Willis' re-election probably isn't, though; she won the primary in May and should easily defeat Republican Courtney Kramer. However, Kramer is also giving it the ol' college try, citing another case in Fulton County that has grown nearly as controversial for alleged prosecutorial and judicial misconduct:

Courtney Kramer, the Republican challenger to Fani Willis in the race for Fulton County District Attorney in Georgia, is vowing to end the long-running YSL RICO trial involving Young Thug if she’s elected, according to a statement issued by her campaign on Friday (Aug. 16). ...

Kramer goes on to blast prosecutors in the case, noting that they were recently “condemned” by new judge Paige Reese Whitaker “for not following the ethical and legal duty to disclose exculpatory evidence that could prove fruitful for the defense, one of the most basic requirements in the courtroom.” She further contends that the case “was brought to bring fame” to Willis, “not to bring justice to the community,” and that it’s resulted in “endless amounts of taxpayer dollars” being spent “on a prosecution that is based almost entirely on witnesses with little to no credibility.”

“If I am elected as the next District Attorney of Fulton County, I promise to end this prosecution immediately,” said Kramer. “I challenge my opponent to do the same thing, the right thing, and end this prosection and release the accused in this case who are being held without bond.”

Maybe this is enough to shake Fulton County out of its Democrat grip and back into reality.