Lawyers in Fulton County, Georgia, will deliver their final arguments on Friday over whether District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from the election interference case she brought against former President Donald Trump.
Judge Scott McAfee will oversee the hearing, which will take place at 1 p.m. and be livestreamed, following a string of contentious hearings in February that was capped off by a surprise dump of text messages that shed last-minute light on the case.
Defense attorneys for Trump and other co-defendants have argued Willis should be disqualified because the case has been irreversibly tainted by a conflict of interest. Their arguments came after one of the co-defendants revealed in January that Willis was romantically involved with Nathan Wade, a private sector attorney she hired to help prosecute Trump and 18 others.
Willis and Wade have since admitted to the previously undisclosed relationship, but both have claimed that the relationship began in early 2022, after Willis hired Wade, and that it had ended in the summer of 2023. They also both said they roughly evenly split the costs involved in vacations and meals they shared. While financial records show Wade paid for a significant share of these costs, Willis has said she reimbursed him in cash.
Defense attorneys are expected to make the case on Friday that Willis and Wade, who both testified from the witness stand in February, did not evenly split costs as they attempt to show Willis personally benefited from hiring Wade, who is paid a lucrative hourly wage with public funds.
The attorneys are also expected to argue that the pair were dishonest about when they became romantically involved.
Ashleigh Merchant, the attorney who has been leading the defendants’ arguments, had called Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former divorce lawyer, to testify in the case. While Bradley expressed uncertainty about the start of the relationship from the witness stand, text messages, many of which were leaked to the media on Wednesday, painted a different picture.
Bradley told Merchant in the messages that Willis and Wade became romantically involved well before she hired him in November 2021. When confronted with the messages, he muttered “oh dang” and testified that he had only been speculating.
But hundreds of additional messages, which surfaced after Bradley testified, showed Bradley coordinating with Merchant to help her bring the conflict of interest claim against Willis and Wade.
This evidence came after other new evidence, in the form of cellphone data, had just revealed that Wade may have spent more time at Willis’s condo prior to her hiring him than he acknowledged under oath. It also revealed that the pair exchanged thousands of messages and calls in 2021. Willis argued in a filing that the data were not decisive and could prove nothing.
The closing arguments on the matter may conclude Friday or stretch beyond it if necessary, and a ruling from McAfee is unlikely to come right away, given the enormous stakes.
McAfee could rule to disqualify Willis and her office or dismiss the case entirely because of a conflict of interest, but state prosecutors have aggressively argued on Willis’s behalf that the relationship had no impact whatsoever on the case and that no hard evidence has shown otherwise.
McAfee’s threshold for what constitutes a conflict of interest, and whether he will consider an “appearance” of a conflict of interest in the matter sufficient for disqualification, is unclear.
While the trial schedule has already been derailed and could now be pushed beyond the November presidential election, Willis’s disqualification could be a death blow to it.
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Phil Holloway, a longtime Atlanta-based attorney who has been heavily engaged in the case, said he could see McAfee taking weeks to make a decision on the matter.
“He’s gonna have to give this some time and consideration. This is a very, very, very big decision for him. He understands the historical nature of this case,” Holloway said.
