Accusations against prosecutors reinforce Trump’s criticism of the Georgia case

It seemed like an unusual choice when Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, turned to a suburban attorney to oversee what seemed like the biggest task of her career: building a case for election interference against former President Donald J. Trump.

Nathan Wade, who asked Ms. Willis for the job, had little experience as a prosecutor. But he was a trusted friend and mentor, she said in 2022, and willing to take on the job when more seasoned prosecutors were not.

Now the relationship between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade is at the center of the Georgia case against Mr. Trump, who along with 14 co-defendants is awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to overturn the former president’s 2020 election defeat in the state to make.

On Monday, the lawyer for one of the co-defendants, Michael A. Roman, charged in a lawsuit that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade were romantic partners who “benefited significantly from this prosecution at the expense of taxpayers.” Without providing any evidence, the two were accused of taking vacations along with money Mr. Wade earned while working for Ms. Willis’ office as a special prosecutor. In total, the office paid Mr. Wade $653,881, according to county records.

Neither Ms. Willis nor Mr. Wade have commented publicly on the allegations. A spokesperson for Ms. Willis said Monday that her office would “respond appropriately in court.”

Mr. Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh B. Merchant, argued that it all amounted to a conflict of interest that should disqualify Mr. Wade, Ms. Willis and the entire Fulton County district attorney’s office from prosecuting the case.

“As the layers unfold,” Ms. Merchant wrote in her filing, “it becomes clear that the District Attorney and the Special Prosecutor personally benefited from this prosecution at the expense of Fulton County.”

Whether the filing has the power to derail the case remains to be seen, although a number of legal experts said this week that some of Ms. Merchant’s efforts to have the case dismissed were unlikely to succeed.

But the case has already become an embarrassing one for Ms. Willis, putting it under a cloud of suspicion and reinforcing Mr. Trump’s years-long efforts to delegitimize the case and portray Ms. Willis as corrupt.

According to a court filing obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Willis was served with a summons on Monday in Mr. Wade’s ongoing divorce case from his wife, Joycelyn Wade. In the document, a bailiff confirms that he left the subpoena with an assistant to Ms. Willis in her office in downtown Atlanta.

Andrea Hastings, a lawyer for Ms. Wade, said she sent the subpoena requesting that Ms. Willis testify at a Jan. 23 deposition. News of the subpoena was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.

In arguing for the dismissal of the case, Mr. Roman’s legal team wrote that Ms. Willis had failed to obtain the Fulton County Commission’s approval before hiring Mr. Wade. But on Tuesday, Pete Skandalakis, a Republican who heads the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia — a state agency that provides services to prosecutors — said district attorneys in Georgia were not required to seek approval from county commissions before making such appointments.

Ms. Merchant also claims that the district attorney’s office failed to properly file Mr. Wade’s oath of office. But a similar argument has been made before by another co-defendant in the case turned down by the chairman.

It is also unclear whether there will be evidence of a romantic relationship between the two accusers. Ms. Merchant said Monday night that she believed Mr. Wade’s sealed divorce proceedings contained evidence that the couple had traveled together; she tries to make the divorce file public.

But the accusations have already been seized upon by Mr Trump, who made them in August an unsubstantiated claim that Ms. Willis was having an affair with a gang member, which she strongly denied. On Tuesday evening, he sent a fundraising email to his supporters, saying the matter should be “THROWN”! and said that Ms. Willis “allegedly used the bogus case against me to enlist her ‘lover’ in a self-enrichment scheme worth over half a million dollars!”

Some law and ethics experts who reviewed the new motion were skeptical that it would blow the case, although some said the issues it raised warranted further investigation and would undermine public confidence in the prosecution. can damage.

Renee Knake Jefferson, an ethics expert and law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said she thought the filing contained serious allegations but that they were unlikely to affect the indictment.

“A personal relationship between two prosecutors does not change the facts and evidence on which the indictment was based,” Ms. Jefferson said.

Ms Jefferson said it was important to get to the bottom of the nature of the relationship between Ms Willis and Mr Wade to determine whether one or both should be removed from the case.

Ms. Willis has hired a number of outside lawyers to help her with the sprawling Trump case, which centers on a complex racketeering indictment that initially named 19 co-defendants. Four have pleaded guilty since charges were filed in August.

In addition to Mr. Wade, the outside lawyers include John Floyd, a soft-spoken man with binders and deep expertise in racketeering law, and Anna Cross, a veteran trial lawyer who subdued Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief. from staff and a defendant in the case, to a scathing cross-examination during a related hearing in federal court in September.

In her 2022 interview, Ms. Willis said she chose Mr. Wade for the job because he was a trusted friend and contemporary (she is 53, Mr. Wade 54) who she thought had a thick skin to not only attack Trumpland but her own criticism.

“Sometimes with this new generation, you can’t yell at them, and they’re kind of weak, right?” Ms Willis said, adding: “I need someone I can go to and they can, like, wipe their wounds and we can get back to work.”

Still, Mr. Wade’s appointment to head the criminal prosecution of a former president has raised eyebrows among Atlanta’s legal community, given his limited work handling serious criminal cases. His only known full-time job as a prosecutor between October 1998 and May 1999 was as an assistant U.S. attorney in Cobb County, in suburban Atlanta, according to Ross Cavitt, a county spokesman. That job usually involves handling felony cases.

(Mr. Wade advertises that he has been appointed “Special Assistant Attorney Generalfor the state, but Kara Richardson, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said in August that she could find no record of any cases he worked on for that office.)

Mr. Wade, who could not be reached for this article, earned a law degree from John Marshall Law School in Illinois, which eventually merged with the law school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He exudes confidence during hearings related to the Trump case, typically entering courtrooms in well-tailored suits, surrounded by a gaggle of fellow prosecutors.

Although he occasionally speaks with the chairman, he also seems comfortable letting various team members take the spotlight during oral arguments.

In private practice he appears to have been a legal jack-of-all-trades. The website of his law firm, Wade & Campbell, states: “Whether you need representation after a serious car accident or are experiencing a change in your personal life that requires representation in a family law matter; Whether you have a contract dispute or are involved in a civil lawsuit, Nathan J. Wade will be a zealous advocate for you.”

In the future, Mr. Wade may be able to add words about prosecuting a former president to that list — but only if he survives the current storm.