Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis took the stand on Thursday to defend herself against efforts to remove her from the prosecution of the former president.
Willis had initially sought to block efforts by Donald Trump and several co-defendants to compel her testimony. But she opted to withdraw her objection on Thursday after hours of testimony from special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was probed about his relationship with Willis.
Willis repeatedly slammed defense attorneys for questioning her integrity and asking deeply personal questions about her relationship and sexual history, which she characterized as “lies.” She said the effort to remove her from the case over the matter was “contrary to democracy.”
Willis has been leading the historic prosecution of Trump for his effort to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis’ decision to testify opens an explosive and high-stakes avenue of inquiry that jeopardizes the case. Willis hired Wade as a top lieutenant to run the case, which Trump’s allies allege is a conflict of interest that should lead to their removal.
Disqualifying the prosecutors would likely cause months of delays and disruptions, at a minimum.
The effort by Trump and his allies to disqualify Willis appeared to gain some traction earlier in the day after a witness — a former “close friend” of Willis — contradicted Willis’ previous claims about the details of her romantic relationship with Wade.
Willis’ testimony came after Wade testified for several hours, ordered by Judge Scott McAfee to take the stand, and answered deeply personal questions under oath about vacations he took with Willis — and who paid for them.
Trump and other defendants claim those trips show that Willis benefited from the case because Wade allegedly used the income from his work on the case to travel around the world. They say Willis and her entire office should be disqualified from the case.
Willis and Wade sharply deny any wrongdoing, and Wade testified Thursday that Willis — whom he called an “independent, strong woman” — insisted on reimbursing him for her portions of the trip. He also swore that their romantic relationship didn’t begin until March 2022, several months after Wade joined the Trump probe.
Wade took the stand after another witness testified that she observed Willis and Wade kissing before Nov. 1 2021, the date that Willis hired Wade as a special prosecutor to help run the case. That witness — Robin Yeartie, a self-described one-time “close friend” of Willis who later had a falling out with her — said she observed a romantic relationship between Willis and Wade as early as November 2019.
The testimony came during a contentious evidentiary hearing over the bid to disqualify the prosecutors — a scenario that would likely cause severe delays and disruptions to the case, in which Trump and his allies are charged with a racketeering conspiracy to subvert Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results.
In his testimony, Wade described traveling with Willis to places like Aruba, Belize and Napa Valley in 2022 and 2023. He said he couldn’t recall whether they had traveled together in 2021. He also said Willis nearly always reimbursed him in cash — an assertion that prompted one of Trump’s co-defendants, David Shafer, to laugh out loud in the courtroom, prompting a scolding from the judge.
Wade testified that he didn’t reveal to others the personal relationship with his boss, but he insisted he wasn’t trying to cover it up.
“We’re private people,” he said. “Our relationship wasn’t a secret. It was just private.”
The decision by McAfee to force Wade to take the stand was a blow for Willis and her team as they try to stave off the effort to have them disqualified.
The defense lawyers say Wade misled McAfee and committed “fraud on the court” by denying in a sworn affidavit earlier this month that he was in a relationship with Willis prior to joining the investigative team. They also have highlighted filings in Wade’s recent divorce proceedings with his wife of more than two decades, saying Wade omitted evidence of his relationship with Willis.
The hearing in Atlanta, which was livestreamed on the court’s YouTube page and broadcast on many cable networks, delved into deeply personal aspects of Wade and Willis’ lives, as lawyers pressed Wade about how often he and Willis spoke on the phone, the circumstances of his divorce proceedings and which credit cards he used to pay for travel with Willis.
Wade insisted he did not mention his relationship with Willis in his divorce proceedings with his wife of more than 20 years because the questions referred to events during the marriage and he considered that union “irretrievably broken” in 2015. He updated his divorce filings in January — after the defense lawyers sought to disqualify him and Willis from the case — to assert a privilege that he said was intended to protect his privacy.
“I didn’t want the proceedings of my divorce to bleed over into the proceedings in this case,” Wade said.
The key question at the hearing, which may extend into Friday, is whether Willis and Wade began their romantic relationship before or after Willis hired Wade as a contract attorney in November 2021.
Yeartie testified via Zoom Thursday morning that the district attorney began dating Wade in 2019, long before the investigation began.
The sworn testimony from Yeartie, who worked in Willis’ office but resigned two years ago, contradicts Willis’ and Wade’s claim in court documents that the personal relationship with Wade began in 2022, after she’d hired Wade.
Yeartie’s testimony is the first time a witness has publicly undercut Willis’ claim about the timing of her relationship with Wade. Yeartie described meeting Willis in college and developing a close friendship that resulted in Willis subletting a condo from her in April 2021. Yeartie would eventually take a job in Willis’ office, but resigned in 2022 amid internal acrimony, and the two have not spoken since, Yeartie testified.
The prosecutors had hoped to avoid having to testify about the details of their relationship, but Yeartie’s account prompted McAfee to rule that Wade had to take the stand.
Yeartie said she knew of Willis’ relationship with Wade from observing interactions between the pair, including in social settings, where she said she witnessed “hugging, kissing, just affection.” She also said Willis discussed the relationship with her.
However, the prosecution suggested Yeartie had an ax to grind against Willis stemming from Yeartie’s departure from the job in the district attorney’s office.
On cross-examination by a prosecutor, Yeartie said she worked in the district attorney’s office and resigned after being told she would be fired if she did not quit. Yeartie was vague about the circumstances of her departure. “It was a spiral of things,” she said.
The atmosphere in the courtroom throughout the Thursday hearing was tense and acrimonious.
Before the testimony began, the prosecution railed against the effort to disqualify Willis, Wade and others. Prosecutor Adam Abbate complained that the defense was trying to “create a spectacle and create harassment” for Willis and had purveyed “flagrant falsehoods that have been spread throughout the world in an effort to affect this case, and to keep it from moving forward.”
Wade said the cash reimbursements were related to dangers Willis faced due to her notoriety, apparently related to the Trump case.
“Traveling with her is a task. You can probably imagine the attention that happens. For safety reasons, she would limit her transactions,” Wade said. “There’s no attempt to conceal. … Everything is here.”
“She’s a very independent, proud woman, so she’s going to insist that she carries her own weight,” he said. “It was a point of contention because she was very emphatic and adamant about this independent strong woman thing.”
At times, the grilling of Wade delved deeply into the weeds of his travel with Willis. Merchant, for instance, pressed him on whether he booked a cabin in Tennessee.
“I book lots of cabins,” Wade responded but said he was sure he never stayed in one with Willis.
He said he would take day trips with Willis out of state because her public profile made moving around locally impossible. Merchant asked Wade about dining at the “Fainting Goat” in Jasper, Georgia, and taking a cruise with Willis and his mother.
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