A new witness could testify Fani Willis warned lover Nathan Wade’s former business partner to stay quiet about their affair, an explosive new court filing claims.
“They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us,” Willis is alleged to have warned Terrence Bradley in a September 2023 phone call.
The call was overheard by Cobb County, Georgia, prosecutor Cindi Lee Yeager, according to court papers filed Monday by David Schafer, a co-defendant of former President Donald Trump.
Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, is battling to stay in her post overseeing the election interference case in which Trump and 18 others are charged.
She stands accused of carrying on a relationship with Wade, whom she appointed special prosecutor, but hiding it from the court, presenting a conflict of interest.
Willis and Wade have said under oath they were only romantic between 2022 and 2023, long after the case started.
At a hearing over whether to disqualify Willis last week, Bradley claimed on the stand that he had no “knowledge” of when the two prosecutors started dating.
But the filing says Yeager would swear under oath that that was at odds with what Bradley told Yeager in person — that the romance began in 2019, during Willis’ DA campaign.
Bradley also texted a lawyer for another Trump co-defendant that the pair were “absolutely” dating before Willis hired Wade to manage the Trump prosecution in November 2021 — and he muttered, “Oh, dang” when confronted with that evidence on the stand.
Yeager is willing to testify that Bradley told her Wade “had definitively begun a romantic relationship with Ms. Willis during the time that Ms. Willis was running for District Attorney in 2019 through 2020,” Monday’s filing says.
After watching Bradley’s testimony, Yeager “became concerned as a result of the fact that what Mr. Bradley testified to on the witness stand was directly contrary to what Mr. Bradley had told Ms. Yeager in person,” Monday’s filing says.
Willis testified that she began dating Wade in 2022, after she hired him. The timeline is important because if it can be proved that Willis lied on the stand, it would likely result in her being booted from the case.
But Willis’ office has argued that Bradley — who testified that his claims about Wade and Willis were “speculation” — is an unreliable witness who “had every motive to lie” after he’d left Wade’s law practice under suspicion of sexual assault.
Judge Scott McAfee has said he hopes to rule on whether Willis can stay on the case in the next two weeks.
It was not immediately clear Monday whether the court would reopen the hearing to receive additional evidence.
Reps for Willis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
