GETTING GOODS OF FANI
Ga. lawyer is more like a detective
The love life of Fani Willis has been under intense scrutiny since January, when it was revealed the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., had been sleeping with attorney Nathan Wade.
The revelation Willis had been romantically involved with the man she had appointed special prosecutor in the election-interference case against Donald Trump was a bombshell no one saw coming — and drew disbelief from both sides of the aisle.
On Wednesday, the lawyer who exposed them, Ashleigh Merchant, explained to a special Georgia Senate committee exactly how she did it — potentially uncovering a conflict of interest which will see Willis kicked off the case, stripped of her job or, potentially, worse.
Merchant was first tipped off about Willis and Wade’s relationship when she ran into Wade’s former law partner, Terrence Bradley, at court in Cobb County in September 2023, she testified.
“Terrence essentially went through the whole thing,” Merchant recalled, saying how Bradley — who was also briefly Wade’s divorce lawyer — was first to tip her off about Willis’ relationship.
In hearings about their relationship, both Willis and Wade have maintained their relationship did not start until spring 2022, after he had been appointed and the case was well underway.
However, Bradley was “very clear” it actually began at a judicial conference in October 2019, according to Merchant — which she has argued presents a conflict of interest and taints the case. Open records requests from both the conference hosts and the county confirmed Willis did in fact attend the conference while Wade was one of the speakers, she claimed.
From the start the pair were very careful to keep their relationship under wraps, according to Bradley, and after the initial meeting Wade and Willis met up in hotels and a secret love nest.
“[He said] ‘you need to find her bestie . . . that’s the person whose condo it was that they would meet at,’ ” Merchant said. That “bestie” was identified as Robin Yeartie, a former DA’s office employee.
After subpoenaing geolocation data from Wade’s cellphone, Merchant’s investigator was able to narrow his cellular pings down to an area very close to Yeartie’s condo in the months before he was appointed to the Trump case.