Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s father testified on Friday that his daughter was dating a disc jockey named “Deuce” in 2019, not Nathan Wade, the man she eventually appointed special prosecutor to lead the Georgia election-fraud case against former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants.
The testimony from John Willis, a retired lawyer and black panther, seemed to conflict with Thursday’s testimony from Fani Willis’s former friend and colleague, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, who said she had “no doubt” that Willis and Wade started dating in late 2019.
Defense lawyers are trying to have Willis and Wade disqualified from the case, alleging that they used the legal proceedings to enrich themselves, that they lied in court filings about when their romantic relationship began, and that they have a conflict of interest.
The hearing started on Thursday.
John Willis said he moved in with his daughter in the spring or summer of 2019 after he returned to the U.S. from South Africa, and “she had a boyfriend when I first got there.” He said her boyfriend went by the nickname “Deuce” and he saw him “sometimes every day, sometimes every other day.” He said her boyfriend’s music “stuff was always in the way.”
But John Wills also testified that he didn’t meet Wade until 2023, while doing an interview with the author of a book at the district attorney’s office, though he acknowledged that he and Wade may have bantered about fraternities at his daughter’s swearing in.
He said that his daughter never informed him that she and Wade were dating or that she was taking trips with him to Belize and Aruba. And she never informed him that she and Wade were traveling to California at a time when John Willis was often in the state working on a documentary. He agreed that his daughter kept her relationship with Wade “secret.”
“I found out when other folks found out,” he said, referring to news reports about it.
Prosecutors, fighting to remain on the case, suggested the reason that John Willis was unaware of his daughter’s relationship with Wade was because he rarely saw her after she moved out of her home in early 2021 for security reasons. He said that about a month after his daughter was sworn in, people gathered outside her home “calling her the ‘B’ word and the ‘N’ word.”
“There had been so many death threats,” he said. “They said they were going to blow up the house, they were going to kill her, they were going to kill me, they were going to kill my grandchildren. I mean, on and on and on.”
John Willis also backed up his daughter’s claim that she kept large amounts of cash around her home, saying it was a practice he taught her. He said he gave his daughter her first cash box. “It’s a black thing,” he said. “Most black folks, they hide cash or they keep cash.”
While defense lawyers are arguing that Willis enriched herself by hiring her boyfriend, who in turn took her on expensive vacations, Willis and Wade contend they essentially split the costs of their trips. Although Willis appears to have paid for most of the airline tickets and cruises on his business credit card, he and Willis both testified that she paid him back in cash.
Defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant tried to have John Willis’s testimony stricken from the record after he revealed that he’d followed Thursday’s hearing in the news and on talk radio.
Prosecutors were expected to question Fani Willis on Friday after she was questioned on Thursday by the defense, but they declined to do so. In fiery testimony on Thursday, Willis accused Merchant of lying about her, being “dishonest,” and having “interests contrary to democracy.”
Their first witness on Friday was former Georgia governor Roy Barnes, a prominent attorney in the state, who was Fani Willis’s first choice to be special prosecutor. He said he met with Willis in October 2021, with Wade present, but he told her he was “not interested” in the job.
“I had mouths to feed at a law office,” he said, but adding that as governor he’d had body guards, “and I didn’t like it, and I wasn’t going to live with body guards the rest of my life.”
Wade’s former law partner and divorce lawyer, Terrence Bradley, was also expected to return to the stand on Friday, but his testimony was delayed due to a medical appointment. He briefly appeared on the stand on Thursday, but said little due to attorney-client privilege. Defense lawyers had suggested that Bradley would testify that Willis and Wade began their relationship before they said that they did in court filings.
Questions about Willis’s ability to continue leading the Trump prosecution first arose in early January, when 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.
This is a developing story and will be updated.