Nathan Wade, the Trump special prosecutor hired by Fulton County’s elected Democratic district attorney, Fani Willis, arrived at a settlement in his messy divorce case. This obviates the need for Willis to testify. In the RICO case Willis filed against former president Donald Trump and 18 others, a co-defendant has alleged, based on disclosures in the divorce file, that Willis has been romantically involved with Wade, who is married but estranged from his wife, Jocelyn Wade.
Counsel for Mrs. Wade had sought to call Willis as a witness. The settlement of the issues before the court, approved today in a “consent temporary order” issued by a Cobb County superior court judge, Henry R. Thompson, means there should be no further court hearings. Prior to the settlement, Judge Thompson had not yet determined that Willis was a necessary witness; his plan to was to hear Nathan Wade’s testimony first and then decide whether Willis should testify. Barring unforeseen disputes, that won’t happen now.
One of Trump’s co-defendants, Michael Roman, claims that Willis hired Nathan Wade with funding she’d gotten from the county by representing that it would be used to address a backlog of Covid-era cases in her office — which includes Atlanta and is the largest prosecutor’s office in Georgia. Roman alleges that Willis has paid Wade well over $700,000 since retaining him in late 2021. That would be an extraordinary amount of money (more than Willis’s own salary), particularly if it is true, as the defense alleges, that Wade has never tried a felony criminal case, much less led a complex racketeering prosecution.
It is further alleged that Wade and Willis used part of the fees paid to Wade to vacation together in Napa Valley, Florida, and the Caribbean. Meanwhile, the defense alleges that Willis did not get the county’s approval to bring Wade on as a special counsel prior to doing so, as local law requires, and that there may have been improprieties in Wade’s taking investigative actions prior to filing required information with the court.
Roman is seeking dismissal of the indictment (which seems unlikely) and the disqualification of Willis and Wade (which seems more plausible if the allegations are proven). Willis has previously been disqualified from prosecuting another subject of the investigation over ethical improprieties.
The end of the Wade divorce case in Cobb County (if this is the end) is not the conclusion of Willis’s scandal. The court in Fulton County, where the criminal case is being prosecuted, has given Willis an early-February deadline to respond to Roman’s motion. In the meantime, the Republican-controlled state legislature is investigating, and the House Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), a Trump ally, had opened a probe even before these latest allegations.
Four defendants have pled guilty in the case, all to minor charges with the promise of no jail time (see here, here, and here). This is very odd for a case in which prosecutors claim America’s democracy was hanging by a thread because of the defendants’ alleged plot.
No defendant has pled guilty to the RICO conspiracy in which all, including Trump, are charged. In a typical RICO prosecution, when defendants plead guilty and agree to cooperate, prosecutors would insist on a guilty plea to the RICO charge — that helps establish that the crime actually happened. Willis and her special prosecutor apparently have a different approach.
No trial date has been set in the RICO case.