A former friend of Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis (D.) testified Thursday that Willis had already started dating Nathan Wade before she appointed him in 2021 to prosecute former president Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case.
Robin Yeartie, who claimed to be a “good” friend of Willis from the early 1990s to 2022, said under oath that Willis and Wade began their romantic relationship after meeting at a municipal court conference in October 2019, rather than in early 2022, as the two have claimed.
“You have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with [Willis]?” defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant asked Yeartie, to which Yeartie replied, “No doubt.” The witness said she last talked to Willis in March 2022, noting that the friendship ended after she was told to leave the Fulton County district attorney’s office.
Yeartie’s testimony directly contradicts Wade’s earlier claim in an affidavit that his romance with Willis did not start until 2022, one year after Willis hired him as a special prosecutor in the case against Trump.
The defense lawyer has also alleged that after being appointed by Willis, Wade took Willis to “Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean” on vacation using part of the $654,000 in legal fees Wade had earned in the election case against Trump.
Fulton County Superior Court judge Scott McAfee is set to determine whether the couple’s romantic involvement constitutes a conflict of interest and is grounds for Willis’s dismissal from Trump’s election case.
During a mid-January speech at a historic black church in Atlanta, Willis suggested allegations against Wade and her were racially motivated. On Feb. 2, Willis publicly acknowledged her relationship with Wade but said it would not have any bearing on Wade’s prosecution of the election case, denouncing allegations of prosecutorial impropriety as “meritless” and “salacious.”
