Two new witnesses say Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis lied under oath about when she began her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.
Attorneys for two of former president Donald Trump’s co-defendants on Monday filed motions to subpoena the witnesses and present their testimony to the court. The witnesses—Cobb County co-chief deputy district attorney Cindi Lee Yeager and former Georgia State School of Law adjunct professor Manny Arora—say Wade’s former law partner, Terrence Bradley, divulged information about Wade’s relationship with Willis during private conversations in 2023, months before the press picked up on the scandal.
Both witnesses say Bradley told them he had personal knowledge that Wade had “definitely begun a romantic relationship with Willis” in 2019 and detailed how Wade even had a garage opener to access Willis’s apartment at the time.
The timing of Willis’s relationship with Wade is central to Trump’s effort to boot the district attorney from his election interference case. Trump and his attorneys say Willis should be dismissed from the case for tapping Wade, her then-clandestine lover, to lead the prosecution. Wade has earned at least $654,000 in legal fees from Willis’s office since joining the team in November 2021, funds he used to finance several vacations for the pair.
Willis and Wade testified in February that their romantic relationship began in early 2022 after the district attorney hired him to serve as special prosecutor. Willis said she repaid in cash her share of the vacation expenses Wade fronted.
Bradley’s loose lips about Wade and Willis’s relationship landed him on the witness stand as Judge Scott McAfee weighs whether to dismiss the district attorney. Bradley also informed Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, in private text messages in 2023 that Willis’s relationship began in 2019.
But last Tuesday, Bradley testified that he was merely speculating in his conversations with Merchant, and that he had no direct knowledge of the timeline of Willis and Wade’s relationship. Yeager and Arora’s claim that Bradley told them he did have direct knowledge of the timeline would severely undercut his previous testimony.
It’s unclear if McAfee will accept testimony from Yeager and Arora. McAfee said he hopes to rule on Willis’s disqualification within the next two weeks.
