Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade lied under oath about when their romantic relationship began.
However, a former associate of Wade has now also been caught lying under oath to protect his friend and former partner.
Fellow attorney Terrence Bradley is now accused of lying in court about the timeline of the relationship between Wade and Willis.
Such was the accusation put forward during a Tuesday hearing in an Atlanta courtroom by Steve Sadow, an attorney for President Donald Trump.
Sadow is seeking to have Willis and Wade disqualified from the criminal racketeering prosecution case they’re leading against Trump and others, ABC News reported.
Bradley, who briefly served as Wade’s divorce attorney, had claimed attorney-client privilege during a previous hearing.
He sought to avoid answering questions about the relationship between Willis and Wade.
However, he was called back in to testify again after Judge Scott McAfee determined the claimed privilege was not applicable in this particular case.
ABC News reported that Bradley was considered a “star witness” for the defense.
However, Bradley was “evasive” on the stand as he continued to try to avoid potentially incriminating Wade regarding details of when his romantic relationship with DA Willis began.
Both Wade and Willis asserted under oath that they didn’t become a couple until after Wade was hired in November 2021 for the Trump investigation.
Meanwhile, the defense claims that Wade was hired because of the romantic relationship that began earlier, as well as that Willis improperly benefited financially from the arrangement.
Other evidence, including testimony from a former colleague of Willis plus Wade’s cellphone records, strongly suggests that the relationship began before Wade was hired.
It was expected that Bradley’s testimony would help nail down the timeline of when, exactly, the pair first started seeing each other romantically.
The Hill reported that defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who first raised the allegations in January, pressed Bradley on text messages he’d previously sent her which said that the Willis-Wade relationship began as early as 2019.
“When you told me that their relationship started when she left the DA’s office and was a judge in South Fulton, where did you obtain that knowledge from?” Merchant asked.
Bradley replied, “I was speculating,” and reiterated when asked again, “No one told me. I was speculating.”
Despite repeated attempts from Merchant to elicit an affirmative response, Bradley would only say again, “I never witnessed anything.
“So, you know, it was speculation.
“I can’t tell you anything specific, if that’s what you’re, you’re asking.”
The Washington Examiner reported that later in the hearing, when Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow got an opportunity to question Bradley, he revisited the earlier testimony about the text messages in which Bradley initially said he “absolutely” knew the relationship began before Wade was hired but now claimed he was only “speculating” about when it started.
Asked why he didn’t just initially tell Merchant “I don’t know” when the relationship began, Bradley responded, “I have no answer for that.”
Sadow then interjected, “You don’t want to testify to that in court. …
“That’s the best explanation.”
Noting that if Bradley now admitted he knew the relationship began in 2019 it would prove Willis and Wade lied under oath, Sadow said:
“Mr. Bradley, you realize that if you were to testify under oath that you knew from Mr. Wade that the relationship between him and Ms. Willis existed before the contract on Nov. 1 of 2021, that if you testified that you knew that from Mr. Wade, that would show that both Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade had lied under oath.
“You know that, don’t you?”
To the outside observer, it certainly looks like Willis, Wade, and likely also Bradley have all lied while under oath and penalty of perjury about when, exactly, the romantic relationship began between the two prosecutors.
Whether that is enough to convince Judge McAfee of the existence of a conflict of interest worthy of their disqualification from the case remains to be seen.
Such disqualification would reassign the case to another prosecutor, as the allegations have little bearing on the underlying charges against Trump.
While the case would not be shut down, it would scupper the Democrats’ plans to pursue charges against frontrunner Trump ahead of the 2024 election.
