Fani Willis Denies Nathan Wade Romance Began before Appointing Him to Lead Trump Prosecution, Calls Defense Lawyers ‘Dishonest’

A defiant Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis forcefully denied in court on Thursday that she had a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade before she hired him to lead the Georgia election-fraud case against former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants.

During a critical hearing that could determine if she will be able to continue with the case, a clearly aggrieved Willis lashed out and repeatedly accused defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant of lying about her, being “dishonest” and having “interests contrary to democracy.”

Willis attacked the media for printing lies “for all the world to see.”

She pushed back on testimony by a former friend who said earlier in the day that Wade and Willis started a romantic relationship soon after they met in October 2019.

And she insisted that she and Wade split expenses on trips they took together while they were dating, saying that she paid Wade back in cash for airline tickets and cruises he initially paid for with his business credit card. She said she keeps large amounts of cash at her home — up to $15,000: “It’s a very good practice. I would advise it to all women.”

At one point Fulton County superior court judge Scott McAfee warned Willis to tone down her responses to Merchant or “I’m going to have no choice but to strike your testimony.”

Willis dropped her opposition to testifying in the case, saying instead that “I’ve been very anxious to have this conversation with you today.” Her testimony came after former friend, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, testified that Willis and Wade started a romantic relationship, including “hugging, kissing,” two years before Willis hired Wade to lead the case against Trump.

Her testimony has the potential to blow apart the case, and could result in Willis and her office being disqualified from continuing prosecuting it. Defense lawyers claim that Willis enriched herself by hiring Wade, and that Willis and Wade have lied about their relationship in court filings.

Bryant-Yeartie, who became friends with Willis in college in the early 1990s and later worked with her in the Fulton County district attorney’s office, testified that Willis and Wade began a relationship shortly after meeting at a judicial conference in October 2019. She said Wade and Willis were still in a relationship in 2022 when she had a falling out with Willis and she resigned from the Fulton County DA’s office in lieu of being fired.

Willis denied that she and Bryant-Yeartie were ever “close” friends — they “hung out and partied together” in college — but she acknowledged that she sublet Bryant-Yeartie’s condo from the spring of 2021 until early 2022. Willis said she “certainly” does not consider Bryant-Yeartie to be a friend now. “I think that she betrayed our friendship,” she said.

Defense lawyers questioned Willis about when and how often Wade visited her in the condo, and if he ever visited her there when Bryant-Yeartie was present. And they suggested that Wade and Willis hid their relationship from other prosecutors on the case.

“I never tell people at work who I’m dating,” Willis said.

When Wade took the witness stand, he also insisted that his romantic relationship with Willis did not start until early 2022, after he had been hired, and that it ended last summer. He said that he met Willis at a judicial conference in 2019, and they started speaking occasionally on the phone about a month later when she would call him for advice. They began to talk on the phone more often in 2020, he said, and it became “frequent” in 2021.

Wade denied dating anyone in 2020 or 2021, when he said he was “battling cancer.” And he said he never talked about his romantic relationship with Willis in front of Bryant-Yeartie.

“We’re private people,” Wade said. “Our relationship wasn’t a secret. It was just private.”

Merchant questioned Wade about documents he’d submitted in a divorce case, suggesting that he misrepresented evidence and misrepresented how much he was being paid by Fulton County for his work on the election-fraud case.

Merchant also questioned Wade about who paid for various trips he took with Willis — including trips to California, Belize, Miami, and Aruba. Most of the expenses were paid using Wade’s business credit card. But Wade insisted that he and Willis essentially split the costs — Willis paid him back for most of it in cash, and in some cases they split expenses. The defense is arguing that Willis enriched herself by hiring Wade, who then took her on expensive trips.

Wade said that as a couple they were not “keeping a ledger.”

“There was never a time when I would say, ‘Hey, I bought dinner. Dinner cost $25. You have to give me $25,’” Wade said. “She’s a very independent, proud woman. So she is going to insist that she carry her own weight. It was actually a point of contention between the two of us.”

Wade said that he “didn’t deposit the cash into my account” after Willis gave it to him, and he conceded that he didn’t have any documents — “not a one”— to support his claim.

Willis said that when Wade would pay for trips, he would tell her how much he paid “and I give him the money back” in cash. “I don’t need anybody to foot my bills,” she said.

Willis said her testimony itself was proof that she reimbursed Wade. “The proof is what I just told you,” she said, when asked if there was any documentation of the financial exchanges.

Attempting to refute the charge that Willis enriched him, Wade also testified that his income dropped “significantly” after he agreed to lead the case, in part because of changing dynamics in his law firm — one of the three partners left the firm. Wade said that on several occasions he had to work without getting paid because his hours working for the district attorney’s office were capped.

“I was forced to lose that time. I didn’t get paid for it,” he said. “This is not the type of job you could walk away from.”

Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney, briefly took the stand Thursday morning, but answered few questions because of concerns about attorney-client privilege. He said he did not have knowledge of when Willis and Wade started a romantic relationship.

The hearing is scheduled to continue on Friday.

Prosecutors allege that Merchant, one of the defense lawyers, made “patently false” statements in the lead-up to Thursday’s hearing, that she is on a “fishing expedition,” and is attempting to create a “spectacle.”

Trump’s attorney, Steve Sadow, and Craig Gillen, an attorney for former Georgia GOP chairman David Shafer, were also among the defense lawyers who questioned Willis and Wade.

Questions about Willis’s ability to continue leading the Trump prosecution first arose in early January, when Merchant, an attorney for former Trump White House aide and co-defendant Michael Roman, filed a motion calling for both Willis and Wade to be disqualified.

The motion alleges that Willis, “without legal authority,” chose to “appoint her romantic partner,” Wade, to lead the case, and that she paid Wade a “large sum of money that was originally allotted to clear the backlog of cases in Fulton County following the Covid pandemic.” Wade then took Willis on expensive vacations and cruises, enriching Willis.

It wasn’t until early February that Willis finally acknowledged her relationship with Wade. She called the allegations against her “salacious” but “meritless.”

In an affidavit attached to the filing, Wade said that while he and Willis have been “professional associates and friends” since 2019 and that he served on her transition team, it wasn’t until 2022 — after Willis had hired him — that the two “developed a personal relationship.”

Legal experts who spoke to National Review were divided on the question of whether Willis’s conduct, if proven, would warrant disqualification from the case, but agreed that if she and Wade are proven to have lied to judge McAfee about the timeline of their relationship, they would almost certainly be removed from the case.

If Willis “lied to the court, even indirectly, by submitting an affidavit that she knew to be false, I don’t see how she continues in this case,” said Emory University Law professor John Acevedo.

Cully Stimson, a former prosecutor and Heritage Foundation legal expert, agreed that it would be very problematic if Wade lied in his affidavit. “That calls into question his ability to be truthful in an official proceeding,” he said.