A hearing before members of the Georgia Senate on Wednesday brought new details over the effort to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from Donald Trump’s election subversion case, including information about her meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who first raised allegations about Willis’s relationship with a special prosecutor on her team, Nathan Wade, testified before a state Senate hearing about what she has learned about the prosecutors seeking to indict her client, Mike Roman, in the sweeping racketeering case. The hearing panel comprised six Republicans and three Democratic state lawmakers.
Merchant shared publicly available White House records during the hearing that showcased Willis’s meeting with Harris took place on Feb. 28, 2023, just months before a special grand jury handed up an indictment to Willis’s office in August of that year.
During the roughly three-hour hearing, Merchant noted that the Mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, was present for the meeting at the White House.
“My understanding is that it’s highly regulated who can access the White House … so you have to apply ahead of time,” Merchant said, adding the White House records showing the meeting are open to the public.
A screenshot that Merchant showed regarding Willis’s logged visit revealed she was among a group of 455 other people and was located at the “side lawn/tent” at the vice president’s residence. A spokesperson for Willis told CNN that she was attending a Black History Month event and that Willis only saw Harris on stage from a distance.
Wade previously billed Willis’s office $2,000 for an interview he had with “DC/ White House” attorneys on Nov. 18, 2022, according to his billing records. Willis has denied ever traveling with Wade the Washington, D.C. while the pair have worked together.
Willis has been facing allegations of impropriety from several attorneys in the Trump election interference case, which initially charged the former president and 18 others with conspiring to overturn the election results in the Peach State.
Merchant first revealed that Willis and Wade had a romantic relationship in a January motion to dismiss the district attorney from the case. Wade has been paid more than $650,000 for his work on the case, and Merchant emphasized that Wade often capped his monthly billing limit and listed vague details about the work he was billing for, such as eight-hour team meetings for $2,000 each meeting.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor and political scientist at Georgia State University College of Law, indicated that Wade’s pattern of billing was concerning.
“I remember doing draft billing exercises in a civil procedure legal writing course in law school and if I tried to bill like Nathan Wade did, I would have failed the class,” Kreis posted to X.
The crux of Merchant and other defense attorneys’ complaint against Willis is that she improperly benefited financially from the relationship because Wade made travel expenses for trips the pair partook in together using the money he earned from his salary. Willis has said she paid him back in cash but did not have any records proving she paid back Wade for the expenses.
At one point, Democratic state Sen. Harold Jones asked Merchant, “How is your client harmed?” after Merchant suggested that Willis would have avoided a conflict of interest had she come forward about her relationship with Wade before defense attorneys raised their complaint in January.
“How much does Ms. Willis make?” Jones asked.
Merchant responded that Willis is paid roughly $200,000 per year.
“Your argument is that a person who makes $200,000 a year is setting up prosecutions to go on a trip that costs $3,500,” Jones said. Merchant responded, “That’s not our argument,” saying there were additional payments that she did not include in her brief, such as purported Uber rides that Wade paid for during his recreational travels with Willis.
Jones also mentioned that Roman, Merchant’s client, was offered misdemeanor probation for a plea in the case. Notably, Roman turned down the offer of probation to make his motion alleging impropriety by Willis and Wade, and sources close to Roman previously told the Washington Examiner Roman would never take a plea
Nothing during the committee’s hearing on Wednesday is admissible for the record in the Fulton County Superior Court proceedings over whether to remove Willis from the case. However, the committee could look to subpoena Willis or other prosecutors as they investigate whether the district attorney misused taxpayer funds.
Both Willis and Wade contend now that they were in a relationship but that it started in 2022, after she hired him for the Trump case, and ended in the summer of 2023, before the special grand jury handed up the indictment.
Willis issued a court filing on Tuesday telling Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee that defense attorneys have failed to prove an actual conflict in the case. Defense attorneys say that there are still other witnesses that they can bring forward that they say can show Willis and Wade lied about the origins of their relationship, suggesting there are witness accounts that their romantic relationship sprouted at the very least before 2020.
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McAfee said during a hearing last Friday that he would need up to two weeks to decide whether to remove Willis, Wade, or the entire district attorney’s office from the case. If they are disqualified, the case could be reassigned to a different prosecutor.
Trump and several of his allies, including Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, are accused of joining a criminal enterprise to undo President Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the 13 counts he faces.
