The crux of Fani Willis’ disqualification ruling is this: did the Fulton County district attorney and the man she eventually hired as a special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, engage in a secret romantic relationship, including a possible extramarital affair on Wade’s side, muddying the professional workplace water while building Willis’ case to prosecute former President Donald Trump? If so, will Willis be disqualified from her election interference case against Trump?
Willis and Wade testified that their romantic relationship began between February and April 2022, at least a year after Willis launched an investigation into Trump in 2021 for allegedly trying to improperly influence Georgia election officials during the 2020 presidential vote that he lost to President Joe Biden.
But a former Trump campaign official, Michael Roman, one of 18 indicted along with Trump in August 2023, alleged last month that Willis and Wade were having an improper relationship and sought to have them removed from the case. That launched an evidentiary hearing in which a host of defense attorneys have tried to prove the two were romantically involved well before that — as early as 2019, according to the testimony of one of Willis’ former friends, Robin Bryant Yeartie.
Were Willis and Wade romantic in 2019?
When Yeartie took the stand, she testified that she saw Willis and Wade hugging, kissing, and being affectionate shortly after they first met in 2019. But because Yeartie also worked in the DA’s office for a short time, it opened the door for Willis’ lawyers to paint Yeartie’s testimony as the words of a disgruntled former employee who resigned instead of getting fired for doing her job poorly.
The defense attorneys have also tried to get Terrence Bradley, a former law partner of Wade’s, to bolster Yeartie’s timeline testimony. But because Bradley also represented Wade in a divorce case, he is bound by an attorney-client privilege that Wade has steadfastly refused to waive. So, it has been hard for the defense attorneys to pin him down.
The interactions got heated when Willis was on the stand; she is far more accustomed to prosecuting than being prosecuted, to putting somebody else on the defensive rather than defending herself. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee had to warn her about outbursts.
But the courtroom fireworks notwithstanding, the timeline is crucial: If Willis and Wade were involved romantically before the case was lodged against Trump and his co-defendants, that alone could create enough doubts about the prosecutors’ motivation in pursuing the case. They could paint it not as a quest for justice but as a get-rich scheme with no merit.
Willis denies wrongdoing, in spirit or in deed
Willis and Wade contend they’ve done nothing wrong nor violated either the spirit or policies against nepotism. Still, the mere appearance of impropriety can be as damaging as if the evidence were to prove there were misdeeds. These are things that McAfee has to weigh, and he acknowledged that it would be a consideration — “if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one” — before the hearing started.
Willis has already run into the appearance-of-impropriety standard once before, in July 2022. Before Jones became Georgia’s lieutenant governor, she tried to investigate then-candidate Burt Jones as part of her probe into Trump. Willis was barred from doing so by another Fulton County Superior Court judge, Robert McBurney, because she had participated in a fundraiser for Jones’ Democratic opponent, Charlie Bailey — creating a conflict of interest.
“The district attorney does not have to be apolitical, but her investigations do,” McBurney said in ruling against Willis.
The defense attorneys are after a similar ruling in this hearing. The stakes are high: McAfee could decide to remove Willis from prosecuting Trump, which would effectively pump the brakes on any effort to hold the former president accountable for trying to “find” 11,780 votes in Georgia — enough to swing the state’s electoral votes in his favor.
