A former longtime friend and coworker of Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis testified on Thursday that Willis started a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade in 2019, years before she hired Wade to lead the Georgia election-fraud case against former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants.
The testimony of Robin Bryant-Yeartie, who became friends with Willis in college in the early 1990s and later worked with her in the Fulton County district attorney’s office, appears to directly contradict a recent court filing Willis made in which she and Wade claimed that they didn’t start a personal relationship until 2022, well after Willis hired him to lead the case.
Bryant-Yeartie testified that Willis and Wade began a relationship shortly after meeting at a conference in October 2019, and it continued at least until Bryant-Yeartie had a falling out with Willis in 2022, when she says she resigned from the Fulton County DA’s office in lieu of being fired. When asked about what kind of conduct she observed between Willis and Wade to she believed indicated they were in a relationship, she said “hugging, kissing.”
Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney briefly took the stand Thursday morning, but answered few questions because of concerns about attorney-client privilege.
Prosecutors allege that defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant is attempting to create a “spectacle.”
Questions about Willis’s ability to continue leading the Trump prosecution first arose in early January, when Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for former Trump White House aide and co-defendant Michael Roman, filed a motion calling for both Willis and Wade to be disqualified.
The motion alleges that Willis, “without legal authority,” chose to “appoint her romantic partner,” Wade, to lead the case, and that she paid Wade a “large sum of money that was originally allotted to clear the backlog of cases in Fulton County following the Covid pandemic.” Wade then took Willis on expensive vacations and cruises, enriching Willis.
It wasn’t until early February that Willis finally acknowledged her relationship with Wade. She called the allegations against her “salacious” but “meritless.”
In an affidavit attached to the filing, Wade said that while he and Willis have been “professional associates and friends” since 2019 and that he served on her transition team, it wasn’t until 2022 — after Willis had hired him — that the two “developed a personal relationship.”
Legal experts who spoke to National Review were divided on the question of whether Willis’s conduct, if proven, would warrant disqualification from the case, but agreed that if she and Wade are proven to have lied to Fulton County superior court judge Scott McAfee about the timeline of their relationship, they would almost certainly be removed from the case.
If Willis “lied to the court, even indirectly, by submitting an affidavit that she knew to be false, I don’t see how she continues in this case,” said Emory University Law professor John Acevedo.
Cully Stimson, a former prosecutor and Heritage Foundation legal expert, agreed that it would be very problematic if Wade lied in his affidavit. “That calls into question his ability to be truthful in an official proceeding,” he said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.