Top prosecutors in Trump Georgia case under the microscope at high-stakes hearing

by Ella Lee - 02/14/24 5:51 PM ET

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s (D) relationship with a top prosecutor in the 2020 election interference case involving former President Trump will be put under a microscope Thursday as a judge weighs whether she and her office should be disqualified from the case.

Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade acknowledged having a “personal relationship” earlier this month but insist there is no conflict of interest, asserting they were only friends when Willis hired Wade to investigate Trump in a sweeping racketeering case involving 18 other defendants.

But defense attorneys contend that’s not true, promising that Thursday’s hearing, which could bleed into Friday, will yield evidence that the state’s top prosecutor hired Wade after he was already her romantic partner and has since financially benefited from his employment.

The discordance sets the stage for a blockbuster hearing where Judge Scott McAfee will be forced to navigate the messy contours of prosecutors’ personal relationships while weighing whether ethical lines were crossed.

“If all this legal analysis turns on the definition of ‘dating,’ ‘flirting,’ a ‘situationship,’ a ‘relationship,’ a ‘committed relationship’ — that’s just a weird place to be, but that seems to be where we’re at,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.

Michael Roman, a defendant in the case, first surfaced the romance allegations against Willis and Wade last month in court filings.

FILE – Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis appears during a hearing regarding defendant Harrison Floyd, a leader in the organization Black Voices for Trump, as part of the Georgia election indictments, Nov. 21, 2023, in Atlanta. A Georgia judge who is deciding whether to toss Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis off of her election interference case against former President Donald Trump has set a hearing for Thursday that is expected to focus on details of Willis’ personal relationship with a special prosecutor she hired. (Dennis Byron/Hip Hop Enquirer via AP, File)

Roman, Trump and more than a dozen others are charged in the case over allegations they joined a criminal enterprise to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results in Trump’s favor. It is one of four criminal cases Trump faces; he has pleaded not guilty to all of his 91 combined charges.

A 2020 Trump campaign operative, Roman urged McAfee to disqualify the two prosecutors and the Fulton County district attorney’s office at large from the case — and argued for the charges against him to be dismissed. He claimed that Willis and Wade’s relationship rendered the indictment “fatally defective.”

Roman’s attorney Ashleigh Merchant said Monday that Wade’s former law partner, Terrence Bradley, would testify that the prosecutors’ relationship began before Wade was brought on to the case — a direct contradiction of Wade’s sworn statement and the district attorney’s position in court filings.

Merchant also said Bradley personally overheard conversations that could impeach a slew of district attorney’s office employees she subpoenaed if they claim otherwise.

“I will be shocked if Ms. Merchant is able to support that statement. Shocked. I don’t believe that’s true,” special prosecutor Anna Cross told the judge.

Because the hearing is beholden to rules of evidence, defense attorneys have a high bar to meet in proving their claims, meaning prosecutors will likely challenge the extent to which Bradley’s testimony is even admissible, Kreis said.

“They’re going to fight over, what is hearsay? What’s privileged materials? What calls for speculation? What does he have an actual basis of knowledge for? Is he testifying to evidence that doesn’t have a sufficient foundation to go into the record — all these things that people, your non-lawyers, don’t really think about,” he said.

Merchant subpoenaed the employees, Willis and Wade ahead of the hearing, but McAfee indicated Bradley’s testimony would determine whether they take the stand.

“That first witness is really going to show us everything,” Kreis said. “Because either that’s going to set the stage for bringing everybody else in, or there’s going to be so little there — because there’s so little admissible evidence — that the rest of the case falls apart and there will be no additional testimony.”

More Top Stories from The Hill

Melissa Redmon, director of the University of Georgia’s Prosecutorial Justice Program, told The Hill that the timeline of Willis and Wade’s relationship comes into play when determining whether Wade’s contract with the district attorney’s office was awarded with the intention of Willis benefitting.

“If [McAfee] believes the defense argument that it was awarded to Mr. Wade so that DA Willis could benefit, then of course that would go into his calculus of whether or not she should be disqualified,” Redmon said. “But if it’s shown that the relationship didn’t develop until after the contract was already awarded, then it’s less reason to believe, or he may not be as inclined to believe, that that was the reason the contract was awarded.”

At nearly the same time Roman filed his motion, lawyers for Wade’s estranged wife filed bank statements appearing to show flights to San Francisco and Miami in Wade and Willis’s names during the time the district attorney’s office investigated Trump and his allies.

Merchant later said in court filings that the pair also vacationed to Aruba and Belize, plus took two cruises to the Bahamas.

Willis has denied benefiting from her relationship with Wade, indicating they divide their personal travel expenses “rather evenly” and have no shared finances.

“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,” prosecutors wrote in a filing earlier this month.

McAfee will have to weigh not only whether there was a conflict of interest but whether there was an appearance of a conflict of interest, Redmon said.

The judge said Monday it’s “clear” disqualification can occur if evidence shows an “actual conflict of interest or the appearance of one” — and that the allegations against Willis and Wade “could result” in their barring from the case.

“I believe most people will say, ‘Well, there’s no actual conflict of interest.’ But what would amount to the appearance thereof?” Redmon said. “I still think it’s going to come back to that central issue of, ‘Does it appear that … the DA has benefited from awarding this contract?’”

The judge left open the possibility of Willis and Wade testifying but warned that he would not hesitate to step in if defense counsel sought “harassment or undue embarrassment” for the prosecutors.

Wade’s qualifications as a prosecutor — which Trump and some of his co-defendants have questioned, purporting a lack of experience in handling complex criminal cases — would not be relevant to the hearing, McAfee said Monday. He also quashed a subpoena for Wade’s bank accounts.

“[McAfee’s] got his work cut out for him in terms of keeping a tight ship, but he certainly signaled that his intentions are to do just that,” Kreis said. “He’s not going to let his courtroom turn into a circus. But at the same time, he does want to explore all good faith avenues of argumentation and potential sources of legitimate evidence.”

Tags Donald Trump Donald Trump Fani Willis Fani Willis relationship Georgia indictment Michael Roman Nathan Wade Scott McAfee