Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis issued a response Friday to allegations of impropriety during her prosecution of former President Donald Trump in Georgia, admitting to engaging in an affair with another prosecutor on the case but calling on a state judge to dismiss the motions against her without a hearing.
After weeks of silence, Willis did not deny having a personal relationship with Nathan Wade, a married man who is getting a divorce from his wife of 26 years and whom Willis hired to help prosecute the case. But Willis said their relationship did not cross the legal threshold for her to be disqualified from the Georgia election interference case, according to a 176-page court filing on Friday.
“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this Court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” Willis stated in the filing.
Mike Roman, one of 18 Trump allies indicted by a Fulton County grand jury for allegedly conspiring to subvert the county’s election results, dropped a bombshell complaint last month alleging Willis and Wade engaged in an “improper, clandestine” relationship that raised questions about whether the pair misused thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds.
Willis said that Roman’s motion, which has since been joined by Trump and another defendant, has “no merit and … should be summarily denied without an evidentiary hearing,” she wrote in the court filing, which marked the first time she directly addressed the allegations since Roman’s mid-January complaint.
Wade wrote in an affidavit attached to the filing that he developed a personal relationship with Willis in 2022 after he was hired to prosecute the racketeering case.
Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, wrote about the allegations in a Jan. 8 complaint to Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case. McAfee had already ordered Willis to respond to the allegations by Friday in court filings and has scheduled a Feb. 15 hearing to consider the complaint. Additionally, Merchant filed a lawsuit against Willis on Wednesday that seeks to subpoena her, Wade, and others in the district attorney’s office.
But Willis is hoping McAfee will cancel the Feb. 15 hearing based on the “meritless” allegations of a conflict of interest. The district attorney laid out several bullet points attempting to discredit Roman’s claims.
“To be absolutely clear, the personal relationship between Special Prosecutor Wade and District Attorney Willis has never involved direct or indirect financial benefit to District Attorney Willis,” the filing reads. “Defendants have produced no evidence to suggest that there is any circumstance that would constitute a financial incentive on the District Attorney’s part to pursue a conviction in this case through the appointment of Special Prosecutor Wade.”
The Jan. 8 motion from Roman, a former campaign official for Trump, revealed that Wade had been paid more than $600,000 from Willis’s office since 2021 for his work on the case, which included overseeing the monthslong special purpose grand jury process behind closed doors that investigated an alleged attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential results by Trump and his allies.
Roman, an experienced opposition researcher who did a majority of the legwork for his complaint, faces seven charges, including racketeering conspiracy and conspiracies to commit forgery, impersonate a public officer, commit false statements, and file false documents in the Fulton County racketeering case.
It was not until court records from Wade’s previously sealed divorce case were leaked to the media last month, which included actual credit card records, that Roman’s allegations began to carry credibility. The transactions from Wade showed he and Willis went on a Royal Caribbean cruise together in October 2022 and that he paid for at least two flights months after her office hired him that January.
Willis argued that Roman’s motion attempts to “cobble together entirely unremarkable circumstances of Special Prosecutor Wade’s appointment with completely irrelevant allegations about his personal family life into a manufactured conflict of interest on the part of the District Attorney. The effort must fail.”
Wade’s affidavit also addressed some of the questions about the travel payments. It revealed that he and Willis shared travel expenses using personal funds and that no income he gained from prosecuting the criminal case was shared in the process.
“Financial responsibility for personal travel taken is divided roughly evenly between the two, with neither being primarily responsible for expenses of the other, and all expenses paid for with individual personal funds,” according to page 15 of Willis’s response.
To demonstrate her point, Willis cited a case known as Jones v. Jones, in which a court found “no authority, and none has been cited to us, for the proposition that married lawyers who are involved in active litigation on opposing sides of a case must be disqualified,” adding that the same standard should apply to prosecutors who are working together on the same case.
Roman’s motion does “not cite to any of this controlling caselaw or any other authority that would support disqualification or dismissal under these circumstances,” Willis said, while also pointing out that a pair of attorneys representing separate defendants in the Trump case are “known to be in a personal relationship.”
The question now for McAfee is if he will agree to cancel the hearing that was slated to weigh Roman’s allegations of impropriety and questions about the use of state funds. It is possible McAfee could still consider the motion over the “appearance of impropriety” standard, which likely would prompt an additional response from Roman’s legal team.
Even if Roman’s disqualification motion is denied, he could still appeal it, which would prompt further delay in a trial that some legal experts have said might not be able to commence until after the 2024 election as Trump wages his campaign to regain the Oval Office.
Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow released a statement after Willis’s response, saying that in his view, “nothing has changed” and that Willis should still be disqualified from the case and the charges dismissed.
Roman also issued a new filing Friday afternoon, arguing that the judge should hold an evidentiary hearing on his disqualification motion, specifically so that there can be cross-examination of the claims Wade made in the affidavit, among other reasons.
One of the questions Roman’s counsel would like to ask the special prosecutor involves Wade’s denial of never cohabitating with Willis.
“In Paragraph 31 of your affidavit, you swore that you have never cohabitated with Ms. Willis but the attached documents show you shared a king size bed with her in Aruba from November 1, 2022 until November 4,” Roman’s filing stated.
“Additionally, witnesses will testify that you cohabitated with Ms. Willis at her home in South Fulton until her father moved in with her and you then began to cohabitate at the apartment of a friend of hers in East Point,” the filing continued.
Several people familiar with Roman’s background in politics told the Washington Examiner that it likely took months of research to put together the allegations that he has levied against Willis, adding that Roman is one of the best researchers in conservative political networks.
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“Roman is going to beat his foes, and he knows how to do it,” J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney who has been following the developments in Fulton County, told the Washington Examiner.
It is not immediately clear when the judge will respond to Willis’s motion to cancel the Feb. 15 hearing. If he decides to go through with it, the proceedings will be livestreamed and will likely serve as one of the most-watched courtroom proceedings in this case since Trump and 18 others were indicted last August.
