Fani Willis defiant on the stand during fiery Georgia hearing: Recap

McAfee adjourned at 5:25 p.m but expect this hearing to stretch well into Friday.

It will resume with Willis being cross-examined by her own team in the morning. Ashleigh Merchant, the defense attorney who first brought Willis’s romance to light, may also call additional witnesses.

Prosecutor Anna Cross said the state plans to call between three and four witnesses later in the day, which is also expected to last multiple hours.

— Zach Schonfeld

Judge Scott McAfee excused Willis from the stand after hours of fiery back-and-forth with defense attorneys.

Willis’s testimony will resume when the court reconvenes tomorrow at 9 a.m. EST, and McAfee is wrapping up a few other matters before breaking for the day.

Prosecutors said they also expect to call witnesses tomorrow, testimony they estimated would last between four and five hours.

— Zach Schonfeld

The hearing has elicited private details of Willis’ personal life.

“My 50th birthday sucked,” she told Craig Gillen, who represents former Georgia Republican Party Chair David Shafer.

Earlier in her testimony, Willis talked about a period of loneliness in her life and at another point discussed when her relationship with a top prosecutor in the case stopped being physical.

“I don’t need anything from a man. A man is not a plan, a man is a companion,” Willis said earlier.

“And so there was tension, always, in our relationship, which is why I gave him his money back. I don’t need anybody to foot my bills, the only man who ever foot my bills completely is my daddy.”

— Zach Schonfeld

Harry MacDougald, an attorney for Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, went up next.

MacDougald pulled up District Attorney Fani Willis’s (D) financial disclosure, alleging she had accepted improper gifts from special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

MacDougald’s questioning began after the judge called on an attorney for Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who had no questions.

But it quickly ended.

“You’re not listening to my answer either, so we’re done,” Judge McAfee told MacDougald.

— Zach Schonfeld

Allyn Stockton, who represents former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in the election interference case, briefly questioned Willis after Sadow.

Stockton asked a handful of questions about contracts that Willis’s office had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade and others.

The back-and-forth was far less fiery than Willis’s time responding to the previous attorneys.

— Zach Schonfeld

Trump attorney Steve Sadow finished his questioning after about a half-hour.

McAfee, the judge, says he’s hoping to allow a few more defense attorneys to question the district attorney before breaking for the day.

Saddow questioned Willis on everything from whether Wade visited her at her condo, where they went out eat and if they spoke or met up in 2020. Both Willis and Wade contend their relationship began in early 2022.

— Zach Schonfeld

The judge did not allow Trump attorney Steve Sadow to ask various questions about Willis’ speech at a church in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.

Willis during the speech insinuated race was playing a role in the criticism of her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. Sadow has repeatedly criticized the speech in the weeks since.

“Did she have notes on the speech that she read?” Sadow said he wanted to ask.

“Did she write the speech? Who was she referring to?”

— Zach Schonfeld

Trump attorney Steve Sadow homed in on his questioning over who on the prosecution team knew about the relationship, attempting to attack the district attorney’s credibility by insinuating she attempted to conceal it from her team.

“You didn’t see the need, if I understand, to tell any of the people on the prosecution team when you had established a romantic relationship with Mr. Wade…that man that was basically giving orders to others was dating or having a romantic relationship with you,” Sadow said.

— Zach Schonfeld

Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead Georgia attorney, asked District Attorney Fani Willis (D) who knew on the prosecution team about her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

After saying she was an “extremely private” person, Willis dodged the question and was directed to directly answer it by the judge.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I certainly didn’t go out telling my business to the world,” Willis said.

She later added that Wade was not her first choice in being a top prosecutor in the Trump case.

— Zach Schonfeld

An attorney for former President Trump is now questioning Willis on the stand, beginning with a question about where she has lived.

Willis said she left one of her homes due to safety concerns over cases involving police brutality.

Willis claimed that Merchant lied about her cohabitating with Wade during their romantic relationship.

“Has he ever visited you at the place you laid your head,” Merchant asked.

The question drew outrage from Willis, who claimed the defense attorney “lied” about them living together. Shaking a stack of exhibits in both hands, Willis repeated: “It is a lie. It is a lie.”

The judge then called a five-minute break.

— Ella Lee

Willis detailed a slightly different timeline regarding when her “romantic relationship” with Wade reached its end.

“He’s a man; he probably would say June or July,” she said. “I would say we had a tough conversation in August.”

“Men end relationships with the physical intimacy; women end relationships when that tough conversation takes place.”

Despite their romantic relationship running its course, she described Wade as a “good friend” and said her respect for him has grown over “the seven weeks of attacks.”

“I think, but for these attacks, it would have been a friendship that as life goes you would have stopped having,” she said. “I think that you have cemented that we’ll be friends to the day we die.”

— Ella Lee

In a line of question over flight records requested by the defense, Willis said she personally objected to her office handing over those documents.

She accused the defense of butting into her and others’ personal lives.

“You’re confused; you think I’m on trial,” Willis said. “These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial,” she said referring to aline of defense lawyers representing Trump and his co-defendants in the election case.

— Ella Lee

The cash that Willis used to pay back Wade for their trips was already kept in her home, she testified.

Defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant asked the district attorney how she accessed the cash if she did not retrieve it from an ATM, given she’s paid via direct deposit. Willis replied that her father told her growing up that, as a woman, she should always keep at least six months cash at her home at all times.

“I always have cash at the house…all my life,” she said.

Merchant pushed back that the cash must have come from somewhere, but Willis called it “fungible” and said she had collected it throughout her life.

“Nobody gives me anything; I am sure that the source of the money has always been the work, sweat and tears,” Willis said.

— Ella Lee

Willis said Thursday that she began dating Wade around April 2022, but is unsure the exact date.

“It’s not like when you’re in grade school and you send a little letter and it says, ‘Will you be my girlfriend,’ and you check it,” she said. “I don’t know the day that we started seeing each other, but it was early ‘22, is my recollection.”

The testimony is consistent with Wade’s, but contradicts testimony from Willis’s ex-friend.

— Ella Lee

Willis testified that she and Robin Yeartie, her college friend and a key defense witness, would “party together in college” but are no longer friends.

“I have not spoken to Robin in over a year; I certainly do not consider her a friend now,” Willis said.

“I think that she — you know, there’s a saying no good deed goes unpunished. And I think that she betrayed our friendship,” she added.

Yeartie testified that Willis began a “romantic” relationship with Wade in 2019, in contradiction with what Willis and Wade contend.

— Ella Lee

Judge Scott McAfee intervened in Willis’s back and forth with Merchant, telling the district attorney to answer the questions she was asked.

“I’ll ask you just listen to the answer — or excuse me, the question — and keep the answers confined to the question as best you can,” McAfee said. “I think you’ll have more than enough ample opportunity —”

“When someone lies on you — it’s highly offensive,” Willis replied, suggesting that an implication that she “slept with somebody the first day you met with him” was an “exception.”

— Ella Lee

After she was sworn in, Willis said she has been “anxious” to have a conversation with defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant over her motion to disqualify the district attorney.

Willis accused Merchant of spreading “lies” and that the prosecutor who represented her office Monday at another hearing “did an excellent job pointing out how dishonest you were with the court.”

Merchant asked whether Willis had met with Wade or discuss the motion that had been filed.

“I probably had some choice words about some of the things that you say that were dishonest within this motion,” she said.

“I don’t know that it was a conversation,” she continued. “As you know, Mr. Wade is a Southern gentleman. Me, not so much.”

— Ella Lee

Defense attorneys successfully convinced the court that Willis must clear the air on the timeline of her relationship with Wade, while district attorney’s office prosecutors claim Wade’s own testimony is “not inconsistent; it’s unrebutted.”

Willis showed up to the courtroom, where she made her way to the stand while lawyers were still arguing about whether or not her testimony was necessary as contradictions in the case were unveiled Thursday.

Read more about what to expect as she prepares to testify.

— Ella Lee

Willis arrived in the courtroom in Atlanta, where she is preparing to testify.

“I’m ready to go,” she told the judge.

Wade’s hourslong testimony in Georgia has ended.

Attorneys and the judge are now debating whether to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis take the stand.

Wade reiterated that his “dating relationship” with Willis began in early 2022, testifying that he did not date her — or anyone — in 2020 because he was battling cancer amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In 2020 and a portion of ‘21, I was battling cancer, and that prevented me from pretty much leaving environments that aren’t sterile,” Wade said.

His testimony is consistent with a sworn affidavit he filed with the court but contradicts testimony from an ex-friend of Willis’s who said they began dating in 2019.

— Ella Lee

Wade said his income shrank after joining the Fulton County district attorney’s 2020 election interference case.

He previously testified that, in 2022, half his income came from private practice and half from his work for the district attorney’s office. But “99%” of his time was spent on the election fraud investigation, Wade testified.

“As reflected in those financial affidavits, your income decreased as a result of your work in this case,” special prosecutor Anna Cross said.

“Significantly,” Wade replied.

“Are you trying to depress me,” Wade later joked.

— Ella Lee

The details and timeline of Willis and Wade’s romantic relationship is spilling out in the courtroom, where it was also confirmed that their relationship had ended in the summer of 2023.

Wade is being questioned over the details of their personal partnership, where the special prosecutor said their relationship ended before Trump was indicted on Aug. 14, 2023.

Still, Wade said they continue to be friends, and that they’re “probably closer than ever because of these attacks.”

Wade also said they kept the relationship “private” because of Willis’s public status.

“We don’t want the world asking questions or interrupting that time,” he said.

— Ella Lee

Some 60 percent of Wade’s total income came from his work with the Fulton County district attorney’s office in 2023, he testified.

In 2022, about half of his income came from the district attorney’s office, he added.

“So, the money that would be in those accounts, at least 60 percent of those, in your view, would be public funds,” defense attorney Craig Gillen said. “That those monies were then used to pay for the expenses that you had incurred for the trips that you took Ms. Willis on, the cruises, the the Napa Valley’s, the Bahamas?”

“Correct,” Wade replied.

— Ella Lee, reporting on Trump’s Georgia election interference case

Wade said he did not deposit large sums of cash Willis paid him for their trips together.

“I’m sure you probably have the deposit slips, where you took the cash and deposited the cash in your account,” Shafer attorney Craig Gillen said.

“I did not deposit the cash,” Wade said.

“And you don’t have a single, solitary deposit slip to corroborate or support any of your allegations that you were paid by Mrs. Willis in cash, do you?” Gillen pressed.

“No sir,” Wade replied.

When Gillen questioned where Wade stashed the cash if he didn’t deposit it, Wade replied that he would either “spend it or put it in my pocket or put it in the hotel’s safe.”

“The only special place that the cash would have gone would have been to one of my children,” he said.

— Ella Lee, reporting on Trump’s Georgia election interference case

Wade is back on the witness stand, being questioned by defendant David Shafer’s attorney, Craig Gillen.

Gillen pointed Wade to an interrogatory in his divorce filings where he said he did not have “sexual relations” with anyone outside his marriage, including their period of separation.

The district attorney’s office objected to the question, but McAfee, the judge, allowed Gillen to continue with the questioning.

“Did you or did you not, by May the 30th, 2023, have had sexual relations with Ms. Willis – yes or no? Yes or no?” Gillen asked.

“Yes,” Wade said, though still denying his response to the interrogatory was false because his marriage was “irretrievably broken in 2015.”

— Ella Lee, reporting on Trump’s Georgia election interference case

Judge Scott McAfee called a break in the Georgia disqualification hearing for 45 minutes.

After the break, the defense will finish questioning Wade over his relationship with Willis before prosecutors with the district attorney’s office conduct their cross-examination.

— Ella Lee, reporting on Trump’s Georgia election interference case

Wade described Willis as an “independent, proud woman” who insisted on paying her own way amid questions over their financial habits.

“She carries her own weight,” Wade said. “And it actually was a point of contention between the two of us; she is going to pay her own way.”

The special prosecutor said he booked their travel together and Willis paid him back in cash for “safety reasons,” not to obscure the transactions.

“Traveling with her is a task…So for safety reasons, she would limit her transactions,” Wade said.

“There was no there’s no attempt to conceal,” he added.

— Ella Lee, reporting on Trump’s Georgia election interference case

Special prosecutor Nathan Wade reiterated Thursday that his travel with Willis was “split roughly evenly” and that she reimbursed him for any trips they took together.

But he only has one receipt indicating such, he said, because Willis otherwise always paid in cash.

“She paid you in cash for her share of all these vacations?” Merchant asked.“Yes, ma’am,” Wade replied.

Defendant David Shafer laughed at the comment from the gallery, drawing rebuke from Judge Scott McAfee who said he’d be removed for any other outbursts.

— Ella Lee, reporting on Trump’s Georgia election interference case