Fani Willis spent Thursday morning pacing in her office.
Nearby, in courtroom 5A in the Fulton county justice center, Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor, was testifying about their romantic relationship as part of a high-stakes hearing over whether or not Willis should be disqualified from handling the wide-ranging election-interference case against Donald Trump and 14 co-defendants.
After Wade finished testifying, a little before 3pm, Willis entered the courtroom herself. As her lawyers began to toss out arguments about why she should not have to take the stand, Willis waved them aside.
“I’m ready to go,” she said.
After weeks of salacious accusations, this was the equivalent of a prizefighter eager to get into the ring and throw a punch. This was Willis, the longstanding pugilistic prosecutor, determined to win back her credibility and control of the case. Over the next two hours, Willis made it clear she was there to fight for the years-long case against Trump she has spent nearly her entire time as district attorney working on.
She cut into defense lawyers when they tried to ask her simple questions (“It’s highly offensive when someone lies on you,” she said at one point). Court briefly moved to a recess as she shouted “it is a lie” at defense attorneys. Most significantly, she forcefully rebutted the allegations against her and categorically denied that she and Wade had begun their relationship before he was hired in November 2021. She laid out how she had repaid Wade in cash for travel he had purchased on her behalf. She unequivocally rebuffed the allegation that she and Wade lived together.
At the end of the first day of a two-day hearing, defense lawyers had failed to produce any bombshell allegations demonstrably proving that Willis financially benefitted from her relationship with Wade.
While that may allow Willis to survive the disqualification hearing and continue on the case, it may also be beside the point by the time Judge Scott McAfee rules. In the court of public opinion,Trump’s defense lawyers may have already won. Just as they have done for weeks, they used Thursday’s hearing to undermine Willis’s judgment and give the impression that Willis and Wade had been trying to conceal their relationship.
“I think it was a lot of mud-slinging with too little clarity,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
Defense lawyers used the hearing to draw attention away from the anti-democracy issues at the heart of the case, and focused on a romantic relationship. It’s the kind of muddying of the waters that Trump has mastered in political life. Unsurprisingly, Trump sent out a campaign email in the middle of the hearing with the subject line “Fanni [sic] Willis Bombshell – Corrupt as Hell!”
There isn’t sophistication to this strategy: a romantic relationship is more interesting and entertaining than a legal debate about a conflict of interest. That’s why defense lawyers pressed Wade to testify about when exactly he was having sexual intercourse with Willis. It’s why they repeatedly brought up a court filing in his divorce case when he said he hadn’t been with anyone during his marriage (Wade testified he believed his marriage to be over in 2015). It’s why Scott Sadow, Trump’s attorney, repeatedly pressed Willis on why she didn’t disclose to anyone on the prosecution team Wade was leading that the two of them were dating. Willis said that she doesn’t discuss her personal life openly. “Our relationship wasn’t a secret. It was just private,” Wade said.
For all of the innuendo thrown around at Thursday’s hearing, two issues seem likely to stick.
The first is testimony from a former friend of Willis’s, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, who testified she had “no doubt” that Willis and Wade began dating before Willis hired Wade in November 2021. Willis’s team plans to introduce witnesses on Friday to undercut Bryant-Yeartie’s credibility, and has already suggested that Willis and Bryant-Yeartie, who worked at the district attorney’s office, had a falling out that may have been related to something at work.
The second issue is the repayment system Wade and Willis had for travel they took together. Even though Wade paid for trips on his credit card, Willis said she would repay him for travel in cash or pay for activities and other expenses that roughly equaled the travel. The two would rotate paying the bill at restaurants. It’s an arrangement familiar to many couples and friends, but defense lawyers highlighted that it was unusual for the district attorney of Fulton county, who is required to disclose certain gifts.
Willis tried to remind the American public that the proceedings were a distraction from the core issues in the case: an attempt to overthrow democracy. “Ms Merchant’s interests are contrary to democracy your honor, not to mine,” she said, referring to Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for one of Trump’s co-defendants.
“You’re confused ... I’m not on trial,” Willis said at another point. “These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020.”
Like it or not, Willis has moved to the center of the case. It’s unclear whether she’ll be able to successfully leave the witness box and return to the prosecutor’s table.
