Fani Willis hearing struggles to dent Trump prosecutor’s credibility
Lawyers for Donald Trump’s co-defendants charged over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia struggled on Friday to undermine the credibility of the Fulton county district attorney and her top deputy, with whom she had a romantic relationship, in order to disqualify them from bringing the case.
The district attorney, Fani Willis, and her deputy, Nathan Wade, both previously testified there was no financial conflict of interest (the defendants alleged Willis hired him to benefit financially) because the relationship started after Wade was retained as a special prosecutor.
At an extended hearing, the defendants called Terrence Bradley, a former divorce lawyer for Wade, on the expectation that he would testify that the romantic relationship started before Wade started work on the Trump case on 1 November 2021.
The objective, in essence, was to have Bradley to contradict under oath the testimony of Willis and Wade. Had that happened, that could lead the presiding Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee to discredit, or at least give less weight to, the narrative advanced by the prosecutors.
But the lawyers for the defendants were not immediately successful in their approach. Bradley was a particularly reluctant witness and testified he had privileged information about when the relationship started, but not personal knowledge he obtained separate from him representing Wade.
That proved to be important because it meant Bradley provided little new evidence to help the defendants as they attempt to have Willis and Wade disqualified from prosecuting them on alleged conflict of interest grounds.
The eventual outcome of the hearing – expected to continue potentially next Tuesday for arguments over what legal standards should be applied for disqualification – could have far-reaching implications for the viability of one of the most perilous criminal cases against Trump.
If the defendants are able to meet their burden to show a conflict of interest that leads to the disqualification of Willis, it would also mean that the entire district attorney’s office would be disqualified. That would cast into disarray the already complicated racketeering prosecution.
After a morning during which Willis did not return to the stand for further testimony – the state told the judge it had no further questions – and two additional witnesses gave evidence that tracked Willis’s narrative from the day before, the defendants called Bradley to testify under subpoena.
Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant wanted Bradley to say on the witness stand what he had texted her in January: the relationship between Willis and Wade had started after they met at a judicial conference, long before Wade was hired to work on the Trump case.
But the judge restricted the line of questioning to include information that Bradley learned independent of his legal work representing Wade in the divorce case, because that would be protected by attorney-client privilege protections.
That led Merchant to try to overcome the privilege by invoking the so-called crime-fraud exception, which pierces privilege if legal advice is used in furtherance of a crime. The judge ruled that did not apply, but allowed the defendants to contest his decision with a sealed filing after the hearing.
In a further twist, Merchant appeared to win a partial victory when Bradley testified that the relationship allegations as initially filed by Merchant earlier this year were accurate.
That raised the dueling situation that crediting Bradley as a witness meant Willis and Wade had committed perjury, but not crediting Bradley meant he had lied about his former client and committed perjury himself for seemingly no clear reason.
The allegations first surfaced in an 8 January motion filed by Merchant, who complained about a potential conflict of interest arising from what she described as “self-dealing” between Willis and Wade as a result of their then-unconfirmed romantic relationship.
Roman’s filing, in essence, accused Willis of engaging in a quasi-kickback scheme, in which Wade paid for joint vacations to Florida and California using earnings of more than $650,000 from working on the Trump case. The filing also alleged the relationship had started before he was hired.
Whether Willis will be disqualified remains uncertain.
Legal experts have generally suggested the evidence to date – there has been almost none, bar Wade’s bank statements showing he paid for a couple of trips – does not show an
actual conflict of interest.
The potential problem for Willis is that she was previously disqualified from investigating the Georgia lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, over a lower legal standard of “appearance of impropriety”, after she publicly endorsed Jones’s political rival in Jones’s re-election race.
The allegations have also threatened to turn the case into political theatre. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has derided the prosecution as scandal-plagued in addition to his usual refrain that the criminal charges against him are a political witch-hunt.