Trump’s lawyers use phone records in case
It’s an effort to counter testimony of prosecutors
ATLANTA >> Lawyers representing former President Donald Trump are continuing to press their argument that the lead prosecutors in the Georgia election interference case are lying about when their romantic relationship began, surfacing phone records Friday that they will likely use to try to undercut the prosecutors’ testimony.
In a court filing, Trump’s lawyers in Atlanta presented an affidavit describing phone records obtained through a subpoena that they said showed more than 2,000 calls between Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, and Nathan Wade, the lawyer she hired to help oversee the case, in the first 11 months of 2021.
The original affidavit alleged that the two exchanged roughly 12,000 text messages over that period. But later Friday, the lawyers for Trump released a corrected version of the affidavit that removed the reference to 12,000 text messages and instead claimed that “just under 12,000 interactions” occurred between the two lawyers. The updated affidavit defined “interactions” as including voice calls and text messages.
There is no dispute that Wade and Willis were in contact in 2021. They are longtime friends, and after Willis was elected district attorney in 2020, she appointed Wade to a hiring committee to screen applicants for jobs in the district attorney’s office. She also consulted with Wade on a number of issues, including strategic questions about big cases, after taking office in January 2021.
His advisory role extended into the period covered by the cellphone data that Trump’s new motion cites, Jan. 1, 2021, to Nov. 30, 2021. At a hearing in the case last week, former Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia, an experienced trial lawyer, recalled that Willis and a team that included Wade met with him in October 2021 and asked if he wanted to take the job that Willis eventually gave to Wade.
Willis and Wade recently acknowledged that they had been in a romantic relationship, but they said it began after she hired him to work on the Trump case.
The affidavit of Charles Mittelstadt, an investigator hired by the Trump lawyers, also described cellphone location data that they said showed Wade’s phone, on at least 35 occasions, was connected “for an extended period” to a cell tower near a condominium where Willis was living. The investigator said the data suggested that on two specific occasions, Wade was in the vicinity of Willis’ residence beginning late at night and ending before dawn. One of those occasions was late on the night of Sept. 11, 2021.
Jeff Disantis, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, declined to comment, except to say that the office would respond to Trump’s filing with its own court filing.
Trump’s team did not release the data used by their investigator, so it was not possible to immediately verify their claims amid their shifting accounts of what the data revealed. Nor was it clear on Friday what effect Trump’s filing might have on the defense’s ongoing effort to disqualify Wade, Willis and her entire office based on allegations that the romantic relationship led to a conflict of interest. But the records will almost certainly be used by defense lawyers to argue that the two prosecutors began their romantic relationship before Willis hired Wade on Nov. 1, 2021 — and not in 2022, as the two prosecutors have insisted.