Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis acknowledged in a court filing on Friday that she had a personal relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, but she claimed that the “salacious” allegations against her provide no basis for her to be disqualified from the 2020 election-fraud case in Georgia against former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants.
In a 176-page filing, Willis called the allegations against her “meritless.” While they “are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this Court any basis upon which to order the relief” sought by the defendants, she wrote.
Willis wrote that she and Wade have been friends and professional associates since 2019, but “there was no personal relationship between them in November 2021,” when Willis appointed Wade to be special prosecutor.
In an affidavit from Wade included in the filing, he wrote that in “2022, District Attorney Willis and I developed a personal relationship in addition to our professional association and friendship.” He added that he has “no financial interest” in the outcome of the case, and that no funds “paid to me in compensation for my role as Special Prosecutor have been shared with or provided to District Attorney Willis.”
In her filing, Willis says she has no personal or financial conflict of interest in the conviction of the defendants, and that she has made no public statements warranting disqualification. Instead, she wrote, the allegations against her have been “cobbled together” into a “manufactured conflict of interest.” Because of that, she wrote, “the effort must fail.”
Willis was responding to a motion calling for her disqualification filed last month by Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for former Trump White House aide Michael Roman, one of the co-defendants in the case. The motion alleges that Willis, “without legal authority” chose to “appoint her romantic partner,” Wade, to lead the case against Roman and others. It claims that Willis paid Wade a “large sum of money that was originally allotted to clear the backlog of cases in Fulton County following the Covid pandemic.” It also claims that Willis and Wade traveled to California, Florida, and the Caribbean together, and that Wade purchased cruise tickets for the two of them.
Credit card receipts included in Wade’s divorce records, which were obtained by National Review, show that Wade and Willis traveled together to San Francisco last April and to Miami in October. He also paid over $2,600 to Royal Caribbean Cruises in October and more than $3,800 to “Vacation Express” at the same time they traveled to Miami, though those records don’t name Willis.
Merchant’s motion also claims that Wade was appointed even though he “has never tried a felony RICO case,” and “would not be qualified under Fulton County’s standards to be appointed to represent any defendant in this case.”
Trump joined the motion calling for Willis’s disqualification last week. Responding to Willis’s filing, Trump wrote on Truth Social that by “going after the most high level person, and the Republican Nominee,” Willis was “able to get her ‘lover’ much more money, almost a Million Dollars, than she would be able to get for the prosecution of any other person or individual. THAT MEANS THAT THIS SCAM IS TOTALLY DISCREDITED & OVER!”
In August, Willis indicted Trump and 18 other defendants under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, or RICO, for their alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Four of them have already pleaded guilty.
In her filing on Friday, Willis wrote that there is no legal reason for her to be dismissed. For decades, she wrote, Georgia courts have held that “personal relationships among lawyers—even on opposing sides of litigation—do not constitute impermissible conflicts of interest.”
She also noted that at least four attorneys representing defendants in the case have similar “personal relationships.” Lawyers representing defendants Ray Smith and Kenneth Chesebro “are publicly known to be in a personal relationship,” she wrote, and “counsel for Defendant Jenna Ellis are married law partners.”
Willis also called the attacks on Wade’s qualifications “factually inaccurate, unsupported, and malicious.” She wrote that Wade “has long distinguished himself as an exceptionally talented litigator with significant trial experience,” and that he is a “leader more than capable of managing the complexity of this case.”
She noted that Merchant was an “enthusiastic supporter” of Wade’s candidacy during a 2016 judicial campaign. The filing includes a Facebook post Merchant made that year, which includes photos of her wearing a Wade campaign t-shirt at a Greek festival.
National Review has reached out to Merchant for comment.
Wade was compensated “just like other special prosecutors retained to work on this case and others throughout the State,” Willis wrote. “To be absolutely clear, the personal relationship between Special Prosecutor Wade and District Attorney Willis has never involved direct or indirect financial benefit to District Attorney Willis,” the filing reads.
Willis previously claimed that the allegations against her are racially motivated. An evidentiary hearing on the allegations against her is scheduled for February 15.
Last week, Georgia state senate Republicans voted to launch a probe into the allegations of misconduct against Willis. Senate Resolution 465 said that if Willis spent “significant public funds” to hire a prosecutor with whom she “had, and may yet have, an ongoing romantic relationship,” it would “constitute a clear conflict of interest and a fraud” upon taxpayers. It could also “establish grounds for District Attorney Willis’s recusal from further involvement in the prosecution,” the resolution read.
State senator Greg Dolezal told National Review that “this is something people deserve answers on.”
On Friday, the GOP-controlled House Judiciary committee subpoenaed Willis as part of an investigation into allegations that she misused public funds.
Willis was elected Fulton County’s district attorney in 2020, defeating a longtime incumbent who was facing a series of ethics violations and allegations of misappropriating funds and sexual impropriety. After winning election, Willis promised to be a “beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation,” according to an August 2020 report from the Atlanta Voice. She also said that the people of Fulton County “deserve a DA that won’t have sex with their employees or put money in these pockets.”