Jonathan Turley, a well-known expert in constitutional law and a professor at Georgetown University, emphasized in a recent interview on Fox News that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis may be facing more serious consequences than what is commonly perceived. Turley specifically discussed the allegations that Willis and Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor enlisted by Willis to assist in the case against former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants accused of RICO violations related to the 2020 election aftermath in Georgia, may have provided inaccurate information to the court regarding the timeline of their romantic involvement.
“The astonishing thing about this is that you have two prosecutors who stand accused of filing false statements in court,” said Turley. “Mr. Wade is accused of answering interrogatories falsely. And Willis is accused of making false statements in her filings. That’s what they’re prosecuting defendants in the case for.”
“My question is, will he refer these two to the bar? There are allegations of false statements being filed. Their testimony did not help in that respect. And so will [Judge Scott McAfee] say, ‘Look, I’m going to suggest that one or both of you remove yourselves or maybe even order it, but I am also going to ask the bar to look into these allegations’?”
In a recent court filing, the legal team representing Michael Roman, the co-defendant, asserted that they possessed a witness whose testimony directly contradicted the denials made by Willis regarding the timeline of her relationship with Wade. Willis had previously claimed that their relationship began after she appointed him as a special prosecutor in the investigation into Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election results in Georgia.
Following the motion filed by Roman’s attorneys on January 8, requesting Willis’ disqualification from the case, she acknowledged her relationship with Wade in a comprehensive 176-page court filing on February 2.
NEW: In a new filing, Mike Roman alleges that Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade misrepresented details about their personal relationship and Wade's appointment as special prosecutor.https://t.co/gA3sj1Qoz4
— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) February 9, 2024
Roman’s lawyers mentioned in their submission a person who is a friend of Wade’s and can provide evidence that the relationship started prior to Willis becoming the district attorney. This contradicts the statement made by Wade in an affidavit attached to Willis’s submission on February 2, where he claimed that the relationship did not commence before 2022.
“Willis and Wade claim they did not have a personal, romantic relationship before Willis appointed Wade as a special prosecutor, but Terrence Bradley (‘Bradley’) will refute that claim,” Roman’s attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, said in the filing, according to the Daily Caller.
“Bradley is an attorney and a member of the Georgia Bar. Bradley and Wade were friends and business associates. Bradley has non-privileged, personal knowledge that the romantic relationship between Wade and Willis began before Willis being sworn as the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, in January 2021,” the filing continued, per the outlet.
In the filing submitted on Friday, Merchant also disclosed two previously undisclosed trips that Wade and Willis took together: a Bahamas cruise in December 2022 and a trip to Belize in March 2023. This week, a private investigator working for Trump’s legal team revealed that newly discovered cellphone data is raising doubts about previous sworn statements made by Willis and Wade.
The Epoch Times reported that Trump’s legal team in Georgia enlisted the services of a private investigator to access communications between the DA and her special counsel. This investigation reportedly uncovered that the couple had exchanged over 2,000 calls and 12,000 texts in 2021, leading to questions about the timeline of their relationship, as per a court filing.
As per the private investigator’s report by Charles Mittelstadt, he utilized CellHawk, a geo-mapping and analysis program, to identify that “more than 2,000 voice calls and just under 12,000 text messages [were] exchanged over the 11-month period in 2021” between the two. Furthermore, the report contained a heat map that “highlights the interaction patterns which demonstrate a prevalence of calls made in the evening hours.”
According to the affidavit presented to the court, Willis and Wade seemed to be in frequent communication before they claimed their romantic relationship began. Despite both stating it started in 2022, a witness and former friend of Willis, Robin Yeartie, has contradicted that. Yeartie contended that she saw them romantically involved in 2019, around two years before Wade was hired to work on the case.
