How allegations of an office romance complicated case against Trump

ATLANTA – Fani Willis ran for district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County in 2020 with the slogan “Integrity matters!” and frequently pummeled the incumbent, her former boss, with accusations of ethical lapses. Soon after her victory, she set up a group to interview job candidates called the Integrity Transition Hiring Committee.

One of its members was Nathan Wade, a lawyer and municipal court judge from the Atlanta suburbs whom she counted as a longtime friend and mentor. Indeed, it was the personal bond they shared that Willis has described as a key to her decision to hire him to lead the criminal case of a lifetime: her office’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

“I need someone I can trust,” she said in a 2022 interview.

But in recent days, allegations have surfaced that Wade was not only a mentor to Willis but also a romantic partner.

The allegations first appeared publicly in a court motion filed this month by Michael Roman, one of Trump’s 14 co-defendants in the Georgia case. That same day, according to court documents, Willis received a subpoena to testify from Wade’s wife in their divorce case. In an interview with the New York Times, a person familiar with the situation said Willis and Wade had grown close after meeting in a legal education course for judges in 2019 – some two years before Willis hired Wade as special prosecutor in the Trump case.

The two lawyers had at times been affectionate with each other in public settings, the person said.

Willis, who has been divorced since 2005, has not addressed the allegations of a romantic relationship, nor has Wade. Willis’ office said it would reply to Roman’s motion in court filings.

On Friday, credit card statements included in a filing in Wade’s divorce case show that he purchased airline tickets for himself and Willis on April 25, 2023, for a trip from Atlanta to San Francisco, and on Oct. 4, 2022, for a trip to Miami. They appear to partially support the contention in Roman’s motion that Wade and Willis had made trips to numerous vacation spots together, with Wade paying for some of the travel.

Whether these new revelations will disrupt the Trump case – or Willis’ and Wade’s role in it – remains unclear. Roman’s motion argues that Willis and Wade violated the state bar’s rules of professional conduct, the county code regarding conflicts of interest and, possibly, federal law. It calls for the case against Roman to be dismissed and for Wade, Willis and Willis’ entire office to be disqualified from the case.

In a letter to Willis on Friday, the county commissioner who chairs the board’s audit committee, Bob Ellis, demanded documents from her in an effort to determine whether county funds paid to Wade “were converted to your personal gain in the form of subsidized travel or other gifts.”

On Saturday morning, Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, who has been vocal in supporting the Georgia prosecution, called on Wade to step down, saying the recent allegation of an affair “had become a distraction,” although it was not legally required.

At the very least, the revelations have raised questions about Willis’ motivation for hiring Wade, a legal generalist who appears to act as a sort of player-manager for the prosecution’s multilawyer team.

A review of Wade’s more than two decades as a lawyer by the Times also raises the issue of his qualifications and whether they were sufficient to justify his appointment to a job that has made him more than $650,000 in taxpayer money and catapulted him to the top of one of the highest-profile criminal cases in the country.

As a fixture on the legal and political scene in suburban Cobb County, Wade spent years handling low-level criminal cases, first as a prosecutor and then a judge. And while he defended clients in a number of serious felony cases, his dream of being elected a Superior Court judge was repeatedly denied to him by voters.

Wade’s publicly available record as a lawyer shows scant evidence that he prosecuted major criminal cases, with no evidence he has handled a major political corruption case or one involving the state’s complicated racketeering statute, known as RICO, under which all of the defendants in the Trump case have been charged.

“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.

Several former Georgia prosecutors say 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.

Speaking recently at a historically Black church in Atlanta, Willis said the questions raised about her hiring of Wade were racist. She praised Wade’s “impeccable credentials” and said they were being questioned because she and Wade were Black.

Wade could not be reached for comment. But his defenders point to the measurable successes the prosecution team has notched so far under his stewardship. Prosecutors have obtained four guilty pleas from the original cast of 19 co-defendants and beaten back, so far, an effort to have the case moved to the federal court system, which would offer some advantages to the defendants.

Wade, according to an old job application, was born in Houston, studied at Texas State University, then went on to attend John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. By the late 1990s, Wade was in Cobb County, where he spent some time as an assistant solicitor, a prosecuting job that handles traffic cases and minor crimes. He moved to private practice to focus on civil matters but continued to do some prosecution work for local municipalities.

Wade’s civil cases have ranged from divorces to paternity matters, child support, car accidents, small claims and personal injury issues. The criminal cases he handled as a defense lawyer included clients charged with aggravated assault and battery, armed robbery, rape, cocaine trafficking and financial fraud.

Wade made history in 2011 as the first Black man to be appointed to a judgeship in the city of Marietta, Georgia. As an associate judge for the Marietta Municipal Court, he dealt with small-bore matters like traffic stops. He set his sights on more.

According to the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration, Wade ran four times for Superior Court judge between 2008 and 2016. He lost each time.

When Willis won election in 2020, she instilled high hopes for a fresh start at the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, which is the largest such office in Georgia and handles most of the criminal cases in Atlanta. Her predecessor, Paul Howard Jr., who had been in office for more than 20 years, was burdened with a recent ruling against him from the state ethics commission; a sexual harassment complaint (of which he was later found not guilty); and questions, raised by Willis, about whether he had played politics in his handling of a high-profile police shooting.

Willis, who had been one of Howard’s courtroom stars, handily defeated him in a Democratic primary runoff in August 2020. She would become the first woman to hold the job.

“Y’all, we made herstory,” she said in her victory speech. “You have my word, during my tenure as district attorney in Fulton County, we will be a beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation.”

She took office in January 2021. The next month, she opened the criminal investigation into Trump and his allies and began building a team to prosecute the case.

Some of them were experienced prosecutors. She also contracted for outside expertise, bringing in John Floyd, a lawyer widely considered Georgia’s premier expert on racketeering law. She hired Anna Green Cross, a former prosecutor with extensive experience trying murder cases who has been a key player for the DA’s office in federal court, where some co-defendants in the Trump case have been arguing, so far unsuccessfully, to have the case moved.

Willis said she also needed a special prosecutor to lead the growing team and turned to Wade to help her find one.

“The truth is – and I mean it in no way disrespectful to Mr. Wade – he was not my first choice as special counsel,” she said in 2022.

She said she had told a number of more experienced or well-known lawyers about the job first. But they turned her down. At least one of them was concerned that trying Trump could open the door to personal security threats. Eventually, she and other advisers turned to Wade and encouraged him to take the position.

Wade’s first day under contract with the district attorney’s office was Nov. 1, 2021. He was to be paid an hourly rate of $250 per hour, the same rate as Cross. Records show Floyd has charged between $150 and $200 per hour.

In court, many of the complex legal issues that have arisen have been argued by prosecutors other than Wade. But much of the work of the Trump prosecution team occurs behind closed doors, which makes Wade’s full contribution difficult to discern.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.