ATLANTA — A new court filing by former President Donald Trump’s attorneys once again calls into question the relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, and when it started.
Trump’s attorneys and attorneys for the other election interference defendants want Willis and Wade disqualified from this case.
They claim the two had a romantic relationship before Willis hired Wade.
A former prosecutor told Channel 2′s Richard Elliot he doesn’t think this latest filing proves that.
The filing contains an affidavit from the investigator for attorney Steve Sadow, who is representing Trump here in Georgia, stating cellphone data from Wade’s phone shows Wade visited Willis’ Hapeville condo 35 times between April and November 2021.
He said Wade also stayed twice past 3 a.m.
The filing also claims Willis and Wade exchanged 2,000 phone calls and 12,000 texts during that time.
In her fiery testimony last week, Willis said their romantic relationship didn’t start until between February and April 2022.
But while this filing infers it may have started earlier, Willis testified that she and Wade have been friends since 2019 and that he did come and visit her at that condo.
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“Could you give us an approximation of how many times Mr. Wade visited you at the condo between the time you moved in and prior to November 1, 2021?” attorneys asked Willis.
“I don’t think often but I don’t want to speculate,” Willis said.
“The question isn’t when their relationship started, it’s when their romantic relationship started,” former DeKalb County District Attorney Robert James said.
James told Elliot that he doesn’t believe the new filing is really anything new, and only adds to the salacious nature of these allegations of an improper romantic relationship.
He said it only proves they knew each other and probably isn’t grounds to throw either Willis or Wade off the case.
“Thirty-six visits in a 10, 11-month period doesn’t establish a romantic relationship. It just establishes they knew each other, and they were friends and that he visited,” James said.
The DA’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but in a new filing obtained by ABC and shared with Channel 2 Action News, the DA’s office pushed back hard on the latest filings by Trump’s attorneys and urged Judge McAfee not to admit the phone records or analysis into evidence, saying they were improperly introduced and “do not prove anything relevant.”
“The records do not prove, in any way, the content of the communications between Special Prosecutor Wade and District Attorney Willis; they do not prove that Special Prosecutor Wade was ever at any particular location or address; they do not prove that Special Prosecutor Wade and District Attorney Willis were ever in the same place during any of the times listed,” the 48-page filing read in part.
The filing also claims that multiple times where Trump’s attorneys say Willis was with Wade, they were not in the same place, including when Willis was at the three crime scenes in the spa shootings and killings in 2021 by Robert Aaron Long.
The DA’s office told Elliot that “One instance we highlighted is where she is visiting the crime scenes and meeting with the families of the victims of the Asian Spa murders,” regarding what was in the document filed Friday.
Instead, the filing accuses the former president of “another attempt to garner salacious headlines in the media.”
Additionally, the DA’s office told Channel 2 Action News that the records provided by Trump’s defense attorneys all put Wade’s cellphone connecting to towers in multi-mile parts of the most densely populated metro Atlanta areas, and that the “coverage that claims it shows him where she was residing (even in her ‘neighborhood’) is inaccurate and misleading.”
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