On Thursday, a fiery hearing was held to determine if the district attorney’s office in Fulton County should be barred from indicting former US President Donald Trump and his associates for alleged 2020 election tampering due to a relationship between key prosecutors, Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, involved in the case.
Fani Willis, the District Attorney for Fulton County (D), suddenly took the witness stand to defend her close relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.
Willis, comprehending that her reputation was at stake, did not hold back in her attempt to convince Judge Scott McAfee that no ethical boundaries had been surpassed.
Pushed by a motion that Trump campaign operative Michael Roman filed last month, the defense has sought a Georgia judge to pull Willis and Wade from the case because their relationship makes the 98-page racketeering charge “fatally defective.”
Here are several takeaways from the theatrical disqualification hearing:
Fani Willis denounces allegations as a ‘lie’
The district attorney’s office stayed quiet for weeks following the disclosure of alleged romantic involvement between the prosecutors. However, Fani Willis put on her gloves and went to the witness stand on Thursday.
She first slammed Roman lawyer Ashleigh Merchant for submitting the “dishonest” move to remove the district attorney from office. She called Merchant a “liar” for implying that she had slept with Wade “the first day [she] met with him.”
After McAfee asked her to keep the questions on the subject, Willis remarked, “When someone lies on you — it’s highly offensive.”
She told the defense counsel that she was not on trial and accused Merchant of interfering in her personal life.
She gestured to the audience and stated, “These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”
Willis and Wade made different claims about how their relationship ended
When asked for specific dates of the start and ending of their relationship, Willis and Wade both testified that it began in early 2022, sometime between February and April.
Willis said, “It’s not like when you’re in grade school and you send a little letter and it says, ‘Will you be my girlfriend,’ and you check it.”
“I don’t know the day that we started seeing each other, but it was early ‘22, is my recollection.”
During his testimony before Willis, Wade made light of the fact that, as a male, he wasn’t very good at going on dates.
The duo, however, made unlike claims about when their relationship ended.
Wade said in court that they broke up in the summer of 2023—perhaps in June, though he couldn’t identify the exact month. In her deposition, Willis delivered a somewhat different timetable, saying that by August, she thought their relationship had ended.
Robin Yeartie counters Willis and Wade’s statement
Testimony from one of Willis’s former colleagues endangered the relationship timeline that both Wade and Willis provided.
Robin Yeartie, a college friend of Willis’, stated in her testimony on Thursday that the district attorney and Wade got into a romantic connection in 2019, just after a meeting in municipal court — three years before the prosecution claimed they started dating.
Although they used to “party together in college,” Willis informed the judge that she and Yeartie were no longer pals.
“You have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with her?” The merchant asked Yeartie who testified that she saw Wade and Willis hugging and kissing before November 2021.
“No doubt,” she replied.
Willis funded joint trips
The Roman’s disqualification motion centers around whether Willis hired Wade during their romantic connection and has since benefited financially from his work.
Defense lawyers quoted Willis and Wade’s visits to Aruba and Belize, two Bahamas cruises, and other visits in court filings, asserting Wade paid for the trips. According to Willis and Wade, they separated their travel costs “rather evenly.”
Wade, however, said that Willis had always made his payments in cash, and he only had one receipt to support this claim. One defendant in the gallery, David Shafer, laughed at the comment, which initiated the judge to chastise him and jeopardize removing him if he made any more outbursts.
Willis was distinguished by the special prosecutor as an “independent, proud woman” who urged to cover her expenses and only used cash for “safety reasons,” not to conceal the transactions. He added that he failed to deposit the money Willis gave him for their joint trip expenses.
When questioned about the money, Willis vowed that she had always kept a cache because, as a child, her father had taught her that a woman should always have at least six months’ worth of cash.
“I always have cash at the house … all my life,” she said.
Following the conclusion of their deposition, a defense lawyer observed from the gallery claiming that Willis and Wade’s cash system failed to “pass the smell test.”
Wade denies that he lied in divorce filings
Wade allegedly said under oath in divorce documents that he had no outdoor relationships during his marriage, according to Merchant, who initially uncovered the romantic allegations between Willis and Wade in court filings. This is in stark contrast to the affidavit Wade filed earlier this month admitting his relationship with Willis.
Merchant claimed Wade later changed the interrogatory in his divorce case to state a right to privacy.
Wade, however, claimed that his marriage was “irretrievably broken” by 2015 and that any relationship with Willis did not go against his sworn declarations.
“Because my marriage was irretrievably broken, I was free to have a relationship,” he said.
