Welp, It Looks Like Fani Willis Torched Her Case Against Trump

Thursday was an enormously consequential day for the criminal cases against Donald Trump. First, in New York, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan rejected Trump’s attempt to dismiss charges of felony fraud relating to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, pushing ahead toward a March 25 trial date. That ruling came out this morning; the other event of consequence took much longer and turned out much better for the former president.

Some 750 miles south of New York City, in Fulton County, a dramatic hearing in his Georgia election interference case was videocast to journalists all over the country. The hearing, overseen by Judge Scott McAfee, was meant to determine whether District Attorney Fani Willis should be removed from the case because of her romantic relationship with a prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade. Trump’s team, obviously, has said it should be disqualifying; Willis has offered a 176-page filing explaining her version of events and noting that she did not break any laws (as Trump’s team has implied). In an eleventh-hour twist, Willis herself took the stand to deny allegations that her relationship is improper or unethical. During her combative testimony, the district attorney came across as outraged to the point of disgust, embarking on lengthy tangents to contest each detail of the allegations against her. Willis’ incandescent performance was gripping to witness—captivating in much the same strange way that Trump’s appearances often are.

Willis managed to put forth a set of fairly plausible rebuttals to claims that she violated any formal rules or misrepresented herself to the court. And yet none of her protestations could possibly inspire confidence in a skeptic that she should continue to lead this prosecution. Anyone bringing criminal charges against Trump is bound to face withering scrutiny of their professional and private lives; they must conduct themselves unimpeachably to avoid even a hint of bias or corruption. By failing to disclose her relationship to the court in the first instance, Willis did not live up to that standard. The consequences—for her case, for accountability, for American democracy—are already devastating.

The fireworks in Fulton County followed hours of testy but respectful interactions between Wade and Ashleigh Merchant, a renowned Georgia defense attorney. (Merchant represents Mike Roman, Trump’s co-defendant and former campaign official; the racketeering charges tie many of the former president’s associates to the same criminal conspiracy.) The question on Thursday was not whether Willis and Wade have a romantic relationship; they have admitted to that already. But they say the relationship began after Willis hired Wade to join the prosecution of Trump. Merchant, by contrast, has claimed that the romance began earlier, and that Wade lied about this fact to the court as part of an affidavit filed by Willis. Merchant has also accused Willis and Wade of misusing Wade’s public salary on lavish vacations.

Wade did his best to answer sometimes intrusive inquiries about the pair’s intimate relationship, the details of which he and Willis clearly had hoped would remain private. At one point, Merchant pointed to an expense listed on Wade’s business credit card records for a tattoo parlor on a trip that Willis and Wade took together to Belize. (“There was no tattoo parlor in Belize,” Wade responded.) Both sides’ lawyers and the judge, McAfee, continually tried to distinguish between salacious and irrelevant questions about Willis and Wade’s private life, as opposed to relevant questions about a conflict of interest. As Wade later put it, “Ms. Willis and I are private people. Our relationship wasn’t a secret, it was just private.”

Complicating matters was the testimony of Robin Bryant-Yeartie, one of the day’s first witnesses. A former friend of Willis, Bryant-Yeartie testified that she was aware of a romantic relationship between Wade and Willis before the start of the Trump investigation—a bombshell if proved true. At the same time, the prosecution’s team portrayed Bryant-Yeartie as having a possible ax to grind: She was a former employee of Willis at the DA’s office whom Willis forced out. She also could not recall any specifics of conversations with Willis about her alleged earlier-than-admitted relationship with Wade. (Later, Wade testified that he did not date, or go out at all, before the Trump case because he had cancer and was staying largely to himself for fear of COVID.)

Another complicating factor was that Willis and Wade have a convoluted and difficult-to-prove explanation for the fact that Wade appears to have paid for all of their recent vacations together with his business credit card, allegedly using funds paid to him by Fulton County for his work on the case. Wade testified that Willis paid him back in cash for her share of the expenses, something she insisted upon doing. “If you’ve ever spent any time with Ms. Willis, you’d understand that she’s a very independent, proud woman, so she’s going to insist that she’s going to carry her own weight,” Wade testified. “She’s going to pay her own way. It was actually a point of contention [between us].”

This claim may be somewhat plausible, but it’s also unproven; neither Willis nor Wade could produce documentation of the reimbursement. Willis initially had tried to quash the subpoena compelling her to testify in the trial but dramatically ran from her office to the courtroom to volunteer her testimony after Wade’s testimony ended, telling the court: “I’m gonna go.”

Willis’ combustive testimony went a lot less smoothly than Wade’s, with McAfee cautioning the witness multiple times for using her time to go on lengthy filibusters criticizing the defense attorneys for their conflict-of-interest accusations and overexplaining her side of the story. It seemed that Willis was incapable of treating herself as a witness subject to direct examination—a problem Wade did not have—acting as though she belonged not behind the witness stand but in front of it. At one point, for instance, when Merchant asked if she could approach the witness, Willis beat the judge to it, responding: “You may.” The problem grew worse when Steve Sadow, Trump’s own attorney, took over cross-examination from Merchant. After repeatedly accusing Merchant of “lying,” Willis took an equally tough line with Sadow, expressing relentless indignation over his line of questioning.

Willis’ testimony covered a broad range of topics of dubious relevance to this case. She implied that Wade’s cancer may have rendered him incapable of a romantic relationship, then she said she would not “emasculate a Black man.” Her discussion of the couple’s vacations together touched on Wade’s personal “cruise agent” and multiple cruises; the couple’s visits to Belize, the Bahamas, and Aruba; a wine tour in Napa; and even her personal preference for Grey Goose vodka. She passed along wisdom from her father about keeping large quantities of cash in the home. Willis also went into great detail about her view of gender roles and misogynistic expectations in heterosexual relationships. “A man is not a plan, a man is a companion,” she declared, later adding, “Mr. Wade told me one time that the only thing a woman can do for him is make him a sandwich.” Everyone watching got to witness this post-breakup tension, though the question of when that breakup occurred proved another point of contention: In an extended colloquy with Sadow, she struggled to say when, exactly, her relationship with Wade ended, asserting that “a man” would identify the date differently from “a woman.”

The district attorney’s embarkation upon strange tangents and rambling monologues is proof in itself that the optics of the situation are not good for her side. No matter what happens to Willis next, a huge amount of damage has already been inflicted on the integrity and legitimacy of this case. All in all, Willis and Wade are asking for an extraordinary amount of benefit of the doubt, which feels very hard to extend given the original undisclosed nature of their romantic relationship itself. Even if everything they say is true, a responsible prosecutor would have immediately informed the court about the romance and let the chips fall where they may. Concealing it from both the court and the public raises the suspicion, fairly or not, that Willis and Wade felt they had something to hide.

If this episode ends with McAfee disqualifying Willis from the prosecution, it will be a spectacular self-own and severely damage one of the most important efforts to hold Trump accountable for his attacks on democracy. The evidence against Trump, including a recorded conversation in which he tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the precise number of votes he needed to steal the election, is incredibly damning. None of it may matter, though, if Willis is disqualified. Yes, the bar is high for removal here: The defendants need to prove that Willis benefited personally from prosecuting them, or can be reasonably seen to have done so, in a way that will prejudice the case against Trump and his co-defendants. McAfee, a Republican appointee and Federalist Society member, conducted himself with great integrity on Thursday and did not tip his hand. It seems safe to say that the prosecution is already losing credibility in the court of public opinion.

If Willis is removed from the case, things get infinitely easier for Trump. Should McAfee disqualify her, it will be up to Republican Pete Skandalakis—the director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia—to select another prosecutor to take the case. While prominent state Democrats view him as “fair-minded,” there are already indications that Skandalakis may allow politics to interfere with his legal duties: He has yet to appoint a new prosecutor in a previous election interference case, that of Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. (Willis was removed from the case due to a separate conflict of interest.) This delay has given rise to fears that rather than swiftly reassigning Trump’s case to another prosecutor, he could sit on it until it effectively dies. Moreover, it is reportedly unclear whether Skandalakis could even find an attorney to take the case on the budget available to prosecutors in other counties.

Put simply, it would be extraordinarily easy for Skandalakis to make this case go away until November and beyond. Until last month, Willis’ prosecution was moving steadily forward; the district attorney had, in fact, already secured several convictions, persuading multiple of Trump’s co-defendants to take guilty pleas rather than face trial. She even appears to have flipped one of Trump’s associates, Kenneth Chesebro. Now the case has collapsed into a mess of accusations and recriminations, a soap opera with little visible connection to the former president’s alleged crimes. It is a tragedy and a farce at once. And nobody benefits from it more than Donald Trump.