The judge overseeing the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump brought a key witness back to the stand on Tuesday afternoon, as the judge weighs whether Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor who brought the case, has a disqualifying conflict of interest.
The witness is Terrence Bradley, the former divorce lawyer and law partner of Nathan Wade, whom Ms. Willis hired to manage the case. The decision by Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court to seek more testimony from Mr. Bradley was a victory for Mr. Trump and his 14 co-defendants, who are trying to remove Ms. Willis, Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis’s entire office from the high-stakes prosecution.
At issue is whether Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis have been truthful about key details of a romantic relationship that developed between them, including their assertion that the romance began after Mr. Wade began working for Ms. Willis in November 2021.
But 90 minutes into Tuesday’s hearing, the defense had not achieved its goal of getting Mr. Bradley to contradict the two prosecutors about when the relationship began.
For weeks, the defense has suggested that Mr. Bradley could provide crucial testimony about the relationship’s timing. But Mr. Bradley testified in court on Tuesday that “I don’t know when the relationship started,” and that he “never witnessed anything.”
At a separate hearing this month, Mr. Bradley declined to answer questions on what he knew about the romance, citing attorney-client privilege and other rules that shield lawyers from having to disclose communications with clients.
But Judge McAfee told the lawyers in the case in an email on Monday that “the court believes that the interested parties did not meet their burden of establishing that the communications are covered by attorney-client privilege, and therefore the hearing can resume as to Mr. Bradley’s examination.”
The disclosure last month of the relationship between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade is threatening to derail the ambitious racketeering case, which alleges that Mr. Trump and a number of his allies sought to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. Defense lawyers are trying to convince the judge that the relationship between the two prosecutors have created a conflict of interest that should disqualify them from the case.
Mr. Trump and other defendants contend that the two prosecutors engaged in “self-dealing,” because while Mr. Wade was being paid by the district attorney’s office, he was spending money on vacations that he took with Ms. Willis to the Caribbean and Napa Valley in California, among other places. Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have denied that there was any improper financial benefit, and have testified that they roughly split the costs of their trips.
Judge McAfee appears to be scrutinizing the details of how they divided the costs. Delta Air Lines has provided records to the court that have been sealed, the judge said in an order filed on Monday. Delta was among the airlines that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade used for their private travel, previously released records have shown.
The conflict of interest accusation was first made in January, in a court filing submitted by Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer representing Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official. She has asserted that Ms. Willis began her romantic relationship with Mr. Wade before hiring him, making the conflict of interest more serious.
Steven H. Sadow, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, has also accused the prosecutors of lying about when the romance started.
Last week, Mr. Sadow presented the court with an affidavit describing phone records obtained through a subpoena that he said detailed “just under 12,000” calls and text messages between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade in the first 11 months of 2021, before she hired him. The affidavit also said that cellphone location data suggested that Mr. Wade was in the vicinity of Ms. Willis’s residence from late at night until dawn on two occasions during that period.
Ms. Willis’s office said that the data “do not prove that Special Prosecutor Wade was ever at any particular location or address.”
In court this month, Ms. Willis testified that the romance ended before Mr. Trump was indicted in August. During her dramatic testimony, she vigorously defended her conduct, and her case.
“These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020,” she told Ms. Merchant. “I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”
Source Agencies
