Key witness doesn't know when DA romance began
ATLANTA >> In a potential setback to former President Donald Trump and his codefendants in the Georgia election interference case, a key witness testified on Tuesday that he had no knowledge of when a romantic relationship began between the two prosecutors leading the case.
Defense attorneys are seeking to disqualify Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, claiming that her romantic relationship with the lawyer she hired to run the case, Nathan Wade, has created an untenable conflict of interest.
Willis and Wade have said that the relationship began only after she hired him in November 2021. Trump’s lawyer has accused them of lying.
For weeks, the defense had suggested that the key witness, Terrence Bradley, the former divorce lawyer and law partner of Wade, could provide crucial testimony contradicting Willis and Wade. But Bradley testified in court on Tuesday that “I don’t know when the relationship started,” and that he “never witnessed anything.”
Lawyers for Trump and other defendants hammered at Bradley’s credibility on Tuesday, reading aloud text messages he wrote in January that appeared to suggest that he knew more about the prosecutors’ relationship than he was letting on. In text exchanges, Bradley told a defense lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, that the romance between the prosecutors had begun before Nov. 1, 2021, when Willis hired Wade.
“Do you think it happened before she hired him?” Merchant asked Bradley in one text exchange, which was entered into evidence. “Absolutely,” Bradley replied.
Terrence Bradley, Special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s former law partner and onetime divorce attorney, testifies in court Tuesday,
But on the stand on Tuesday, Bradley insisted that he had been only “speculating” about the relationship in those texts, and was not speaking from personal knowledge.
It was Bradley’s third time on the witness stand this month, in a series of hearings that have threatened to upend the prosecution of Trump and his allies for seeking to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. The defense team contends that the two prosecutors engaged in “self-dealing,” because Wade spent money on vacations that he took with Willis while he was being paid by her office.
Willis and Wade have denied that there was any improper financial benefit, and have testified that they roughly split the costs of their vacations to places including the Caribbean and Napa Valley.
The extraordinary detour that the election interference case has taken, forcing the lead prosecutors to fight accusations of impropriety, may have changed it fundamentally. Even if the presiding judge allows Willis to keep the case, she is likely to face tough scrutiny moving forward, including from a new state commission that will be able to remove prosecutors and from the Georgia Senate, which has opened an investigation.
And if the case is taken from Willis and her team, more serious problems may follow.
The accusations first surfaced in a filing last month from Merchant, a lawyer for Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is among the defendants. Her effort to disqualify Willis, Wade and Willis’ entire office has appeared to rely heavily on her recent communications with Bradley.
Bradley had a falling out with Wade in recent years as their business relationship soured. In a previous hearing, it emerged that Bradley had been accused of sexual assaulting an employee of the business, an allegation that he emphatically denied.
Bradley clearly had no desire to testify about his former law partner and was a reluctant witness each time he took the stand.
In a court appearance this month, he declined to answer questions related to what he knew about the romance, citing attorneyclient privilege and other rules that shield lawyers from having to disclose communications with clients.
But Scott McAfee, the Fulton County Superior Court judge overseeing the case, said Tuesday that neither Wade nor Bradley “had met their burden of establishing that the attorney-client privilege applied” to the extent that it would shield him from answering all questions.
Bradley arrived in court on Tuesday afternoon in a plaid suit.
“I do not have knowledge of it starting, or when it started,” he told Merchant about the relationship between Wade and Willis, an assertion he made multiple times. He also testified that he had not spoken to either of the prosecutors since the allegations emerged, or any time recently.