Fani Willis and Nathan Wade Have Generated A Lot Of Smoke. How Big Is The Fire?

When Even Corporate Media Won't Downplay The Allegations, There's Something To Them

At this point, one thing seems extremely likely: Fani Willis won’t be the one persecuting prosecuting Donald Trump in the Georgia RICO case against him.

How Fani Willis can remain on the Trump prosecution while being investigated for potential misconduct involving the Trump prosecution is uncertain. At some point it is likely she will be forced to step aside — which will throw the case into utter chaos, as she was the attorney who cobbled the case together.

Not only has corporate media confirmed that Nathan Wade purchased tickets for him and Fani Willis to take expensive vacations together….

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was booked on at least two sets of round trip flights purchased by a special prosecutor with whom she's accused of having a romantic entanglement, records appear to show.

Jocelyn Wade, the estranged wife of special prosecutor Nathan Wade, filed an exhibit in the couple's divorce proceedings on Friday purportedly showing the spending history of a credit card used by Nathan Wade. The document shows Nathan Wade booking tickets for himself and Willis on flights to and from San Francisco and Miami.

…but now the Georgia Senate has launched an investigation into Willis’ potential misconduct, and endowed the investigating committee with subpoena power to compel the production of both witnesses and documents.

(3) Powers and duties. The committee is hereby authorized to undertake a legislative investigation into the issues mentioned above or related thereto. For the purpose of conducting any investigation as provided herein, the committee shall have the power to administer oaths; to call any party to testify under oath at such investigations; to require the attendance of witnesses and the production of books, records, and papers; and to take the depositions of witnesses. For such purposes, the committee is authorized to issue subpoenas for any witness or to compel the production of any books, records, or papers and is further authorized to undertake such actions as may be necessary to enforce such subpoenas in cases of refusal to obey. Pursuant to Senate Rule 2-1.5(d), the committee may establish rules of operation that are not in conflict with Senate Rules or the most current edition of Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedure.

It is important to note one key aspect of the Georgia State Senate: at present there are 32 Republicans, 23 Democrats, with one seat vacant. Will there be a particular political interest in pursuing this investigation over and above the obvious interests in addressing allegations of unconscionable levels of corruption within the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office? Such a political bias would be a cynical view of the investigation, but there is no denying that corporate media has established enough substance to the allegations that Republicans would be foolish not to exploit this for any partisan political advantage possible come November.

This is an investigation with teeth, and investigators with an inherent political interest in using those teeth. That’s not a good situation for Fani Willis or Nathan Wade.

Corporate media has established there is more than a little smoke. The basic role of the committee will be to find out how big is the underlying fire?

The speed with which this story has evolved is nothing short of remarkable.

It was just on January 8—just over two weeks ago—when the attorney for a Trump co-defendant, Ashleigh Merchant, filed a bombshell motion with the court seeking to disqualify Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, and potentially secure a dismissal of the entire case.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis improperly hired and paid a private attorney to aid her office in its racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and others, according to a court filing Monday by one of the defendants in the case.

A lawyer for Trump co-defendant Mike Roman stated that Willis is “in a personal, romantic relationship” with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor in her office and a lead lawyer on the Trump case. The motion asked a judge to disqualify Willis from the case she brought against Trump and other defendants last year. Roman served as the director of Election Day operations for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

The lawyer, Ashleigh B. Merchant, said her motion wasn’t filed lightly and that she had research to back up her claims—though she didn’t provide evidence of the alleged relationship in the filing.

A few days later, Politico reported that Nathan Wade had been held in willful contempt by the court handling his divorce from his wife, Jocelyn Wade.

Just three days after Georgia prosecutors indicted Donald Trump last summer, one of the lead prosecutors on the case faced some legal trouble of his own.

The prosecutor, Nathan Wade, was held in contempt for defying a court order in an acrimonious divorce proceeding with his wife. Wade, a judge in Cobb County, Ga., ruled, had “willfully” failed to turn over documents about his income — including, his wife later said, income from his work on the Trump case.

This was particularly noteworthy because Jocelyn Wade asserted that Nathan Wade was concealing his income from the Trump prosecution.

Divorces are often acrimonious and tempestuous cases, with emotions running high on both sides. Could such emotion impair otherwise sober legal judgment and result in a blatant refusal to cooperate with a legitimate court order? Easily.

Is that what happened? Possibly.

Is there also the possibility that Wade was concealing some other improprieties that disclosing his Trump-based invoices might reveal. This possibility got an unexpected shot of credibility when Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted out images of Wade’s invoices, showing two billing entries of $2000 each for converstations with the White House before securing an indictment against Donald Trump.

Why would the Fulton County District Attorney’s office need to converse with the White House over a state prosecution? By definition the White House should have nothing to offer into evidence for a Georgia court—if the White House had such evidence that would immediately elevate the case into federal jurisdiction, simply because the White House is not in Georgia.

Almost as soon as the allegations hit the corporate media, evidences that seem to confirm at least the broad outlines of Merchant’s allegations began to leak out.

Almost as soon as Ashleigh Merchant’s bombshell motion hit the presses, it was reported that Fani Willis was being subpoenaed as a witness by Jocelyn Merchant in her divorce proceeding against Nathan Wade.

In a court filing reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, a process server said he showed up at Willis’s office in Atlanta on Monday morning with a subpoena seeking her testimony in the Cobb County divorce case of Nathan Wade, a lawyer she hired as a special prosecutor in the Trump case, and his wife, Joycelyn Wade. The process server said he left the subpoena, filed by Joycelyn Wade’s lawyer, with Willis’s executive assistant.

A Willis spokesman declined to comment Tuesday about the subpoena, but he said previously that the prosecution would be responding in a court filing to the allegations of an improper relationship with Wade. Willis’s office hadn’t filed a response as of Tuesday afternoon.

Nathan Wade didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment left on the voicemail at his law office. A lawyer for Joycelyn Wade didn’t immediately provide a comment. 

The subpoena was served Monday just hours before one of Trump’s co-defendants filed a motion laying out allegations of misconduct by Willis and Nathan Wade, including of an “improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case.” 

According to that motion, from a lawyer representing former Trump campaign official Mike Roman, the alleged relationship between Willis and Wade resulted in “in the special prosecutor, and, in turn, the district attorney, profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers.” 

At least one person appears to believe Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are lovers—Jocelyn Wade.

The problem for Willis and Wade is that now there is evidence tumbling out that gives more than a little substance to Jocelyn Wade’s suspicions.

Willis and Wade apparently traveled to a number of vacation destinations on tickets purchased by Nathan Wade.

The Fulton county district attorney prosecuting Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia had travel paid for by a special prosecutor she hired for the case and with whom she is alleged to have been involved in an improper relationship, according to a court filing submitted on Friday.

Bank records for the special prosecutor Nathan Wade attached as an exhibit to the filing, submitted by Wade’s wife in a divorce proceeding, showed that the district attorney, Fani Willis, was named as a travel companion on at least two trips while the Trump investigation was ongoing.

The records could bolster allegations in a recent filing made by Trump’s co-defendant Michael Roman – director of Trump’s 2020 election-day operations – seeking to have Willis relieved of bringing the Fulton county racketeering case against Trump and his allies.

The relationship between Willis and Wade threatens to undercut the case because it raises potential conflict of interest concerns that could see the district attorney’s office disqualified for continuing with the prosecution.

Indeed, Wade’s hiring as a special prosecutor itself appears to be filled with irregularities.

According to multiple Georgia attorneys, Wade’s resume for a RICO case of this magnitude was somewhere between thin and nonexistent.

“The realm of attorneys who handle Georgia RICO cases is a small one, and he is not someone who was in that realm before the Trump case,” said Chris Timmons, an Atlanta trial lawyer who handled white-collar cases for more than 15 years as a prosecutor.

Several former Georgia prosecutors say that Mr. Wade’s fee, of $250 per hour, did not seem excessive. But some of them also questioned whether he had the qualifications to lead such a high-stakes case.

“I can’t judge on whether it’s a legitimate hire, but I think it’s a legitimate question to ask why this particular lawyer was hired,” said Danny Porter, the former longtime district attorney in Gwinnett County and a Republican.

One reason Wade was selected over possibly more qualified candidates: at least two of those alternative candidates refused the position.

Willis initially approached Roy Barnes, the former governor of Georgia and one of the state's premier lawyers, to serve as the senior counsel on the case. But he turned her down. She then tried Gabe Banks, a former federal prosecutor and highly respected Atlanta criminal defense lawyer. Banks also wasn't interested. 

Neither Barnes nor Banks wanted to plunge into such an all-consuming case at the expense of their lucrative law practices, as laid out in the book. But the two were even more concerned about the inevitable threats that would come with such a politically incendiary case. Barnes declined to discuss his conversations with Willis, but nodded to those concerns in an interview: "Hypothetically speaking, do you want a bodyguard following you around for the rest of your life?" Banks declined comment.

The reluctance of other potential attorneys to fill Wade’s special prosecutor slot also calls attention to another seeming impropriety regarding Nathan Wade’s retention: Fani Willis may not have submitted his contracts to the Fulton County Board of Commissioners for review as required by law.

Wade’s contracts to work for the prosecutor’s office were improper, the filing claims.

Contracts like those for special prosecutors are supposed to be approved by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, but Merchant reviewed the minutes of every meeting the board held from the time Willis took office and found no record that Wade’s contract was ever discussed, she said in an interview Monday evening. 

If this is true, then Nathan Wade improperly billed Fulton County for potentially close to $1 Million.

Fulton County has paid Wade at least $653,000 and potentially near $1 million in legal fees since joining the case, according to the motion.

According to Jocelyn Wade, Nathan Wade tried to conceal all of this income during discovery in the divorce proceeding—leading to the willful contempt citation by the court.

Thus we come to the surprising juncture in the corporate media where such notably “anti-Trump” outlets such as The Washington Post are reporting calls by her friends and colleagues for both Willis and Wade to step down.

Among friends and supporters of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, a common argument has taken root in response to allegations that a romantic relationship between her and the lead prosecutor on the election-interference case against Donald Trump should disqualify them both.

The problem for Willis and Wade is that there is simply too much “there” there. There are too many oddities, potential improprieties, and instances of questionable conduct for it all to be swept under the rug. Even though Ashleigh Merchant herself provided no evidence for any of the allegations against the pair, corporate media has been more than willing to fill in the blanks, and even the appearance of impropriety in a case with significant political dimensions can be fatal to the case.

After nearly two weeks of salacious headlines, Willis has still not denied or directly addressed the accusations. Trump and other critics have willingly filled that vacuum and amplified the most sensational claims. Regardless of what Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, decides to do — and regardless of whether the accusations are true — Trump has found a new line of attack on the validity of the Georgia case and Willis’s decision-making that he is unlikely to abandon.

The allegations threaten to undermine public confidence in Willis’s prosecution of Trump. On one side, they have enflamed grievances among those who believe that Trump has been unfairly targeted by partisan prosecutors and courts. On the other, those who want Trump held accountable for his effort to reverse his 2020 defeat are scrambling to protect the case.

Even observers who are absolutely convinced of Trump’s guilt, such as Norm Eisen, who participated in the first Clown World Impeachment against Donald Trump, believe the pair need to step down.

“Any objective observer who recognizes the strong public interest in knowing one way or the other whether a jury believes Donald Trump led a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election is going to be concerned about the impact of these allegations,” said Norm Eisen, a longtime Willis ally and advocate for the case who served as special counsel to the House of Representatives’ first impeachment of Trump.

Eisen told reporters Saturday that while there is no legal basis to disqualify either prosecutor, Wade should voluntarily step away from the case. The controversy is not going away, Eisen said, and threatens to delay the case against the former president, which must be avoided. He pointedly did not recommend that Willis step aside — a reflection of the stakes of the case against Trump.

“There is an overwhelming amount of evidence justifying the decision to prosecute Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators, including Mr. [Mike] Roman,” Eisen said. “The evidence is strong. The case is powerful. It’s very likely to lead to conviction, and we mustn’t lose time on the calendar given the paramount public interest in bringing that strong case to a speedy conclusion.”

It should be noted that the impeachment in which Eisen participated was from the start a questionable interpretation of both the law and the “evidence”.

Clown World Impeachment

Eisen might not be the strongest “expert” to weigh in on what constitutes an “overwhelming” amount of evidence or a “strong” case.

When noted legal scholar and libertarian Jonathan Turley compares Willis’ case to a Jackson Pollock painting, there is good reason to suspect the case might in fact be full of holes.

Welcome to the Jackson Pollock school of prosecution. The 98-page indictment from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is the legal version of Pollock’s style of throwing paint splatters on canvas as artistic expression. It basically makes every telephone call, tweet, and meeting a separate conspiratorial act.

Turley joins with Fani Willis’ own friends and colleagues regarding her departure from the Trump case (as well as Nathan Wade’s departure) to be inevitable.

All of this leads to an inescapable conclusion: Both Willis and Wade should recuse themselves from the case. Their continuation in the case undermines the prosecution and is clearly not in the public interest.

However, as Turley also notes, Willis’ removal does not automatically mean a dismissal of all charges.

A less obvious question is how their recusal could impact the Trump prosecution. Some analysts suggest the scandal removes the threat to him in Fulton County. That, however, is not likely to be true.

The remedy in this instance for any unethical conduct, if proven, may be the removal of the prosecutors, not the dismissal of an otherwise valid criminal case. While I have been critical of Willis’ case against Trump, her conduct does not change the underlying allegations against the former president.

However, if/when Willis does recuse herself (which likely will happen any day now, at the pace this story has been evolving), there remains the logistical question of who will pick up the case to prosecute it.

One problem any other prosecutor will have moving the case going forward: this case is largely the brainchild of Fani Willis. One notable episode where she berated Wade as well as the rest of the prosecution team for not getting the charges “right” illustrates just how much of the legal theory of the indictment was generated by Fani Willis herself.

Underlying the accusation against Willis is that she showed favoritism toward Wade at the expense of her constituents interests and the administration of justice. But there is at least some evidence that Wade was subjected to Willis' same exacting standards — and even wrath — as the rest of her team.

"Find Me the Votes" recounts a scene from February 2023 when Willis asked for a presentation of the evidence in the case from her prosecutors. Wade and his deputies presented a PowerPoint of the charges they were contemplating bringing against Trump and his alleged co-conspirators.

Willis was underwhelmed and she let Wade and the others know it, letting loose with a string of profanities. "No, y'all aren't even close," she told them. "This is f****** terrible. Get the f*** out of here." She then brusquely walked out of the office by herself, leaving Wade and the rest of his team shaken. 

If this recitation of the episode is even partly accurate, Fani Willis had a clear vision of what sort of prosecution she wanted to bring against Donald Trump and his co-defendants. This case was always structured her way—even when the other lawyers might have felt the case was an overreach.

Will a different prosecutor share her vision for the case? Could even Norm Eisen, who characterizes the case as “strong” prosecute the case with the same vigor and zeal as Fani Willis? There is no way to answer this, but at a minimum the answer seems problematic.

Would a different prosecutor decline to follow certain charges, in particular the RICO charges?

The RICO charges are the glue which holds the entire case together. If a different prosecutor—and at this juncture it is certain there will be a different prosecutor—does not have confidence in the RICO charges and drops them, how much of the rest of the case holds together as a single prosecution is also problematic.

Moreover, it took Fani Willis the better part of eighteen months to pull the case together. How much time would a new prosecutor need to get up to speed on the particulars of the case, and decide how to move the case forward post-Fani Willis? Would justice demand that the charges be dismissed without prejudice, allowing the prosecution to refile at a later date when the new prosecutor is up to speed? That’s a lawyerly question that goes well outside my understanding of the law, but it seems that is a plausible question to ask.

Every defendant has a right to a speedy trial, and if the prosecution is going to need a year or more to prepare once Fani Willis’ steps down, how much does that violate Donald Trump’s Sixth Amendment rights?

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of karmic irony that the prosecutor who made the most intense and dangerous corruption allegations against Donald Trump is being proven herself to be corrupt beyond any and all measure.

Fani Willis committed one of the cardinal sins every lawyer is expected to avoid in every case: she made herself a relevant part of the case and an extremely relevant part of Donald Trump’s defense. Willis may be able to recuse herself from the case and thus avoid any ethical sanctions by the Georgia State Bar, but it seems highly unlikely she will be able to avoid becoming a witness for Trump’s defense, when she has to explain why she pursued the particular charges she did.

Fani Willis sought to use the law to destroy Donald Trump. Instead, Donald Trump seems likely to use the law to destroy Fani Willis.