Defense lawyers contend that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade have not been truthful to the Georgia court about when they began a romantic relationship.
An analysis of Georgia special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s cellphone data revealed that he had thousands of phone calls and text exchanges with Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis in 2021 and appears to have spent the night at or near her home months before they say they began a romantic relationship, according to a new court filing.
The filing by lawyers for Donald Trump was made on Friday morning as part of their ongoing effort to have Willis and Wade disqualified from leading the election-fraud case against the former president and more than a dozen other co-defendants.
Defense lawyers argue that Willis’s and Wade’s secret relationship constituted a conflict of interest, and that they are lying when they say it began in early 2022, after Willis hired Wade to lead the election-fraud case against Trump and others.
According to the filing, which was obtained by National Review, the analysis of Wade’s cellphone data was conducted by Charles Mittelstadt, an investigator working for Trump’s lawyers, Steve Sadow and Jennifer Little.
As part of his investigation, Mittelstadt said he requested Wade’s cellphone data from most of 2021 from AT&T’s Subpoena Compliance Center, and used a tool called CellHawk to analyze the data he received, according to an affidavit included with the filing.
Mittelstadt said he generated a report that found that Willis and Wade had exchanged more than 2,000 voice calls and 12,000 text messages from January through November in 2021, with a “prevalence of calls made in the evening hours,” according to his affidavit.
To determine when Wade’s phone was at or near Willis’s condo in Hapeville, Ga., Mittelstadt isolated two cell towers within a mile of her home to construct a “very conservative geofence,” he wrote in the affidavit. The analysis “revealed a minimum of 35 occasions when Mr. Wade’s phone connected for an extended period to either one of those towers in closest proximity to” Willis’s condo, Mittelstadt said.
On September 11, 2021, before Willis hired Wade to be the special prosecutor on the high-profile case, Wade’s phone arrived within the geofence at 10:45 p.m. and remained there until 3:28 a.m., at which point it traveled to the East Cobb area where Wade lived.
And on November 29, 2021, after Willis hired Wade but before they say their romantic relationship began in 2022, the analysis found that Wade received a call from Willis’s phone at 11:32 p.m., that his phone left the East Cobb area just after midnight, and that it arrived in the geofenced location about 12:43 a.m.
“The phone remained there until 4:55 A.M.,” Mittelstadt’s affidavit said.
The filing comes after a two-day hearing last week before Fulton County superior court judge Scott McAfee. Willis and Wade testified during the hearing that their romantic relationship didn’t begin until early 2022, backing up claims they previously made in a court filing.
But while Sadow was questioning Willis and Wade, he suggested he had cellphone evidence that the relationship started before then.
When asked how often Wade visited her condo in 2021, Willis said she didn’t want to speculate, but said “I don’t think often.” She said Wade “certainly has come and picked me up, gone and grabbed some food to eat,” but added that “I don’t remember him being in that condo a lot,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
She also said that no one, except maybe one of her daughters, ever spent the night with her at the condo, which she moved into after receiving threats at the house she owns.
Wade told Sadow that he didn’t visit Willis’s condo more than ten times before he was hired as special prosecutor, according to the Journal-Constitution. He said he may have been in the area for other reasons, including going to restaurants, Delta Airline’s headquarters, and the Porsche Experience Center.
Responding to a question from Sadow, Wade said that if his phone records reflected that he was making calls from the location of the condo before November 1, 2021, “they’d be wrong.”
During the hearing, Willis’s former friend, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, testified that Willis and Wade began a relationship shortly after they met at a conference in 2019. The condo that Willis was living at in 2021 was sublet from Bryant-Yeartie.
Defense lawyers also questioned Wade’s former law partner and defense lawyer, Terrence Bradley, suggesting that he had knowledge that Willis and Wade were not truthful about when their relationship began. But Bradley said little of use to the defense during the hearing, asserting attorney-client privilege. Judge McAfee has scheduled a private meeting with Bradley to determine if the information he has is protected.
In a twelve-page motion on Thursday, Wade’s lawyer urged McAfee not to “conduct the examination under any circumstance.”
“If the Court were now to disregard ‘the most sacred of all legally recognized privileges’ whose ‘preservation is essential to the just and orderly operation of our legal system,’ it would be a step too far, and Special Prosecutor Wade is constrained to object,” the filing said.