Defense lawyers trying to get Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis disqualified from leading the Georgia election-fraud case against former president Donald Trump say they’ve identified two new witnesses who can back up claims that Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade have lied in court about when they started a romantic relationship.
The two witnesses are both lawyers who say they previously spoke with Terrence Bradley — Wade’s former law partner and divorce lawyer — and that he told them he had personal knowledge that Willis and Wade began a romantic relationship years before Willis hired Wade to head up the case, as they’ve both said in court and in court filings.
Their testimony, if allowed, could lend additional credence to text message exchanges Bradley made with defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant in late 2023 and early 2024. In the texts, he said Willis’s and Wade’s romance “absolutely” began before they say.
But when he was called to testify, Bradley, far from being the “star witness” that defense lawyers had touted, appeared evasive and said he was only “speculating” about when the relationship started.
According to court filings obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cindi Lee Yeager, a co-chief deputy district attorney in nearby Cobb County, and Manny Arora, a defense lawyer for Trump co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro who has already taken a plea deal, both can testify that Bradley told them last year that Willis and Wade began a romance in 2019 or 2020.
Willis hired Wade to lead the prosecution in November 2021. They say their romance began in early 2022. Defense lawyers are trying to get them both dismissed from the case against Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants due to an alleged financial conflict of interest related to their relationship and over questions about their truthfulness in court.
According to a court filing, Yeager had multiple conversations with Bradley in late 2023 and early 2024, he told her that Willis and Wade met at a conference in 2019 and “Mr. Wade began his romantic relationship with District Attorney Willis at or around this time.”
The court filing also says that last September, Yeager was present when Bradley received a phone call from Willis, who called in response to a news article about how much Wade and his law partners had been paid. According to the filing, “Ms. Yeager could hear that the caller was District Attorney Willis. . . . Ms. Yeager heard District Attorney Willis say, ‘They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us.”
Arora also has said that Bradley told him he had “personal knowledge” about Willis’s and Wade’s relationship, including that Wade had a garage door opener to access the condo Willis was renting from her then-friend and colleague Robin Bryant Yeartie, according to the Journal-Constitution. Bryant Yeartie, who has had a falling out with Willis, also testified last month that Willis and Wade began a romance, including “hugging, kissing” soon after they met in 2019.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said during a hearing on Friday that he was done hearing evidence on the motion to disqualify Willis and Wade, and that he hoped to have a decision in the next two weeks. Defense lawyers are asking him to reopen the case to include testimony from Yeager and Arora, according to the Journal-Constitution.
Defense lawyers on Friday said that Willis’s and Wade’s conduct has “put an irreparable stain on the case” and that Willis has turned her office into a “global laughingstock.”
A lawyer for the prosecutors, Adam Abbate, said the defense was simply trying to harass and embarrass Willis and Wade. He said that during hearings on the matter, defense lawyers made “material misrepresentations” of the evidence, defense witnesses gave “inconsistent” testimony, and that the defense provided no evidence that their clients’ due process rights have been “harmed in absolutely any way.”
“Ms. Willis as the district attorney of Fulton County and Mr. Wade as the special prosecutor assigned to this case should be allowed to remain on this case and continue to prosecute the case until the end,” Abbate said on Friday.