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    Heirs of Jews Who Fled the Nazis Return Art to Heirs Whose Family Could Not

    An Egon Schiele drawing was returned on Friday at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The heirs said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do.”“Seated Nude Woman,” a drawing by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, was returned on Friday to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish art collector and Viennese cabaret performer who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.The drawing had been held by the heirs of a Jewish couple who fled the Nazis just before World War II and later unknowingly bought the work, which investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office say were among dozens looted from Grünbaum by the Third Reich.The return took place at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan. The grandchildren of the couple, Ernst and Helene Papanek, said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do” in the face of evidence it had been looted.Since September, five museums and four private owners have handed back 11 works once owned by Grünbaum in what has become the largest Holocaust art restitution case in the United States.One museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, has challenged an order from investigators to turn over a 12th Schiele, “Russian War Prisoner,” that was once owned by Grünbaum, who died in a concentration camp in 1941. The museum has contested the evidence cited by investigators and a legal battle over the work is proceeding in New York State Supreme Court.A Grünbaum descendant, Timothy Reif, responded to Friday’s return in a statement that said the recovery of the work sends a message “that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Manhattan Prosecutors Agree to Delay Trump’s Sentencing

    Donald J. Trump’s lawyers want to argue that a Supreme Court decision giving presidents immunity for official acts should void his felony conviction for covering up hush money paid to a porn star.Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday agreed with Donald J. Trump’s request to postpone his criminal sentencing so that the judge overseeing the case could weigh whether a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling might imperil his conviction, new court filings show.It is up to the judge to determine whether to postpone the sentencing, though with both sides in agreement, it seems likely he would do so.Mr. Trump, who was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his cover-up of a sex scandal during his 2016 presidential campaign, was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He faces up to four years in prison, though he could receive as little as a few weeks in jail, or probation.On Monday, the Supreme Court granted Mr. Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official actions taken as president, dealing a major setback to his federal criminal case in Washington, where he is accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss.Although the Manhattan case does not center on Mr. Trump’s presidency or official acts — but rather personal activity during his campaign — his lawyers argued on Monday that prosecutors had built their case partly on evidence from his time in the White House. And under the Supreme Court’s new ruling, prosecutors not only cannot charge a president for any official acts, but also cannot cite evidence involving official acts to bolster other accusations.In a letter to the judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the conviction should be set aside. They also asked Justice Merchan to postpone the sentencing while he considered their request.In response to the letter from Mr. Trump’s lawyers, the district attorney’s office wrote that prosecutors did not oppose Mr. Trump’s request to delay the sentencing.“Although we believe defendant’s arguments to be without merit, we do not oppose his request for leave to file and his putative request to adjourn sentencing pending determination of his motion,” wrote Joshua Steinglass, one of the assistant district attorneys who tried the case against the former president.Mr. Trump’s lawyers proposed filing their court papers on July 10, and the district attorney’s office said it would respond two weeks later.This is a developing story and will be updated. More

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    Ex-Philadelphia Officer Pleads Guilty in Fatal Shooting of Boy, 12

    Edsaul Mendoza, a former Philadelphia police officer, could face up to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to third-degree murder.A former Philadelphia police officer pleaded guilty on Friday to third-degree murder in the shooting of a fleeing 12-year-old boy in 2022, according to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.The former officer, Edsaul Mendoza, 28, also pleaded guilty to possession of an instrument of crime in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County before Judge Diana Anhalt, court records show.Mr. Mendoza, who is scheduled to be sentenced on July 22, could face up to 40 years in prison.Mr. Mendoza fatally shot the boy, Thomas Siderio, during a foot chase on the night of March 1, 2022, after Thomas shot at an unmarked police vehicle that Mr. Mendoza and three other Philadelphia police officers were in, according to prosecutors.Mr. Mendoza had initially been charged with first-degree murder, third-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and possession of an instrument of crime, according to prosecutors.A jury trial had been scheduled for May 13, court records show.Charles Gibbs, a lawyer for Mr. Mendoza, declined to comment on Friday.A lawyer for the Siderio family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“Justice must be evenhanded,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement on Friday. “Everyone must be accountable under the law.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Prosecution of Trump in Georgia Hangs in Balance at Hearing

    Lawyers will sum up their arguments on Friday about whether Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has a conflict of interest and should be disqualified.A judge in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump is scheduled to hear final arguments on Friday on a motion to disqualify the prosecutor who brought the case, Fani T. Willis, on the ground that a romantic relationship she had with a subordinate created a conflict of interest.The presiding judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, is not likely to rule on the matter on Friday. Rather, the hearing, which is scheduled to start at 1 p.m., will allow lawyers from the two sides to sum up their arguments over a salacious subplot to the election case — one that has already caused significant embarrassment and turmoil for Ms. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Details of her personal life have been spilled out in the Atlanta courthouse where she had hoped to put Mr. Trump and 14 co-defendants on trial as soon as this summer.The stakes are high: If Ms. Willis is disqualified from the case, her entire office would be, too, and the case would probably be turned over to a district attorney from another jurisdiction. The new prosecutor could choose to continue the case as planned, modify the charges or drop them.Disqualification would reduce the chances that a trial would begin before the November presidential election, in which Mr. Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee.The relationship between Ms. Willis and Nathan Wade, an Atlanta-area lawyer she hired in November 2021 to manage the prosecution team, first came to light in January, in a motion filed by a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants.The presiding judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, is not likely to rule on the matter on Friday.Pool photo by Brynn AndersonWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    With Everything on the Line, Fani Willis Delivered Raw Testimony

    Ms. Willis, the district attorney overseeing the Georgia prosecution of Donald J. Trump, searingly refuted allegations that she had a disqualifying conflict of interest.Fani T. Willis walked unaccompanied through the front door of a Fulton County courtroom on Thursday afternoon in a bright magenta dress and announced she was ready to testify. She was interrupting her lawyer, who at that very moment was trying to convince a judge that she should not have to testify at all.“I’m going to go,” Ms. Willis said.And so she did.For roughly three hours on Thursday, Ms. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., engaged in the fight of her life from the witness stand to try to salvage the case of her life, the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump. In a raw performance, Ms. Willis, 52, presented herself as a woman in full — by turns combative and serene, focused and discursive (at one point she declared her preference for Grey Goose vodka over wine). Her language toggled between casual (a thousand dollars was “a G”) and precise: On numerous occasions, she prefaced her statements with variations on the phrase, “I want to be very clear.”She upbraided Ashleigh Merchant, one of the defense lawyers questioning her, alleging that Ms. Merchant’s court filings — which accused Ms. Willis of having a disqualifying conflict of interest stemming from a romantic relationship with Nathan J. Wade, the special prosecutor on the case — were full of lies. At one point her voice approached a yell, prompting Scott McAfee, the mild-mannered judge, to call a five-minute recess in an apparent effort to cool things down.Elsewhere, Ms. Willis chided Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven Sadow, when he asked if she had been in contact with Mr. Wade in 2020. Noting that Mr. Wade had cancer at the time, she said, “I am not going to emasculate a Black man.” She spoke of giving Mr. Wade a trip to Belize for his 50th birthday — earlier in the day, Ms. Merchant had asked Mr. Wade about the couple visiting a tattoo parlor there. She also admitted, in a digression that the lawyers’ questions did not seem to prompt, that she thought Mr. Wade had a sexist view of the world, and said it was the reason they broke up last summer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Allegations of an Office Romance Came to Complicate the Case Against Trump

    The claims involving Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired to manage the sprawling case in Georgia, have led to new questions about Mr. Wade’s qualifications.Fani T. 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 J. 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 Ms. 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 J. 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 Mr. Wade was not only a mentor to Ms. Willis, but also a romantic partner. The allegations appeared in a court motion filed this month by Michael Roman, one of Mr. Trump’s 14 co-defendants in the Georgia case. In an interview with The New York Times, a person familiar with the situation said the two had grown close after meeting in a legal education course for judges in 2019 — some two years before Ms. Willis hired Mr. 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. Ms. Willis has not addressed the allegations of a romantic relationship, nor has Mr. Wade. Ms. Willis’s office said it would reply to Mr. Roman’s motion in court filings.On Friday, credit card statements included in a filing in Mr. Wade’s divorce case show that he purchased airline tickets for himself and Ms. 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 Mr. Roman’s motion that Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis had made trips to numerous vacation spots together, with Mr. Wade paying for some of the travel.Ms. Willis speaking at Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta last Sunday.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesWhether these new revelations will disrupt the Trump case — or Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade’s role in it — remains unclear. Mr. Roman’s motion argues that Ms. Willis and Mr. 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 Mr. Roman to be dismissed, and for Mr. Wade, Ms. Willis and Ms. Willis’s entire office to be disqualified from the case.In a letter to Ms. 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 Mr. Wade “were converted to your personal gain in the form of subsidized travel or other gifts.”At the very least, the revelations have raised questions about Ms. Willis’s motivation for hiring Mr. Wade, a legal generalist who appears to act as a sort of player-manager for the prosecution’s multi-lawyer team.A review of Mr. Wade’s more than two decades as a lawyer by The New York 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 dollars 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, Mr. Wade spent years handling low-level criminal cases, first as a prosecutor and then a judge. But he yearned to take on weightier work. And while he landed some, defending clients in a number of serious felony cases, his dream of being elected a superior court judge, where he could preside over bigger cases, was repeatedly denied to him by voters. Mr. Wade’s publicly available record as a lawyer shows scant evidence that he prosecuted major criminal cases, with no evidence that 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 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.Speaking recently at a historically Black church in Atlanta, Ms. Willis said that the questions raised about her hiring of Mr. Wade were racist. She praised Mr. Wade’s “impeccable credentials” and said they were being questioned because both she and Mr. Wade were Black.Mr. Wade could not be reached for comment for this story. 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.Gerald A. Griggs, a lawyer and the president of the state N.A.A.C.P. who knows both Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis personally, noted that as a defense lawyer, Mr. Wade brings a valuable perspective to a team that includes a number of veteran prosecutors. A defense lawyer “can show you where the holes are to make sure your case is strong,” he said. From traffic tickets to feloniesMr. Wade’s publicly available record as a lawyer shows scant evidence that he prosecuted major criminal cases.Pool photo by Elijah NouvelageMr. 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. He once told an Atlanta-area magazine, Cobb in Focus, that his career path was influenced by his father, a Vietnam veteran, and by early involvement in church activities that sparked an interest in public speaking.By the late 1990s, Mr. 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 told the magazine that he continued to do some prosecution work for local municipalities.Mr. 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.Ron Coleman, a retired Atlanta lawyer, said he faced Mr. Wade in a 2016 case in which Mr. Wade’s client claimed that she found glass in her food at a chain restaurant. A settlement was reached in mediation, and one of the things that Mr. Coleman recalled was that Mr. Wade was not as aggressive as some other lawyers he has worked against in such cases. “I’ve dealt with a lot of guys who would destroy you if they saw an opening, but he didn’t strike me as having that kind of focus or intensity,” he said. In a 2021 slip and fall case in which one of Mr. Wade’s clients was suing another restaurant company, Robert Jenkins, a lawyer for the defendant, said he found Mr. Wade to be both assertive and skilled.“He was forceful, but cool and composed,” he said. “And when he asks question number one, he knows what question number three is going to be. He seemed two steps ahead.”A Black Republican amid demographic changeMr. Wade representing the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in court. Pool photo by Jason GetzMr. Wade had already made history, in 2011, as the first Black man to be appointed to a judgeship in the city of Marietta, Ga. As an associate judge for the Marietta Municipal Court, he dealt with small-bore matters like traffic stops. He set his sights on more.Politically, it seemed as though there might be a path. Cobb County’s population boomed in the 1960s and 1970s with an influx of white city dwellers fearful of an integrating Atlanta. In the 1990s it was represented by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who in 1994 led a national conservative resurgence known as the Republican Revolution.But by the 2000s, demographic change was afoot as racial attitudes shifted and people of all kinds sought the same suburban idyll. As it gained residents, Cobb County became increasingly integrated, with Black residents growing to nearly 30 percent of the population in 2022 from just under 10 percent in 1990.For years, Mr. Wade was a regular at county Republican breakfast meetings, and he served for a time as a delegate to the county convention, said Jason Shepherd, who chaired the Cobb County Republican Party at the time. Mr. Shepherd said he once helped distribute yard signs for Mr. Wade during one of his numerous failed bids to be elected to a higher judgeship, and called him “charismatic,” “energetic” and “more on the Republican side on law enforcement issues.” In 2016, during one of his unsuccessful attempts to run for Cobb County superior court judge, he was supported by Ashleigh Merchant — the lawyer who filed the motion this month on Mr. Roman’s behalf that seeks to have him removed from the Trump case. The motion questions Mr. Wade’s qualifications. But in a Facebook post in the midst of his judge’s race, she praised him for his extensive résumé. “Nathan has practiced in every area of the law that appears before the Superior Court bench,” she wrote. (She recently explained her change of heart by saying that Mr. Wade seemed like a better choice to her than his opponent at the time.)According to the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration, Mr. Wade ran four times for superior court judge between 2008 and 2016. They were nonpartisan races. He lost each time. Mr. Wade found himself embroiled in Cobb County politics in a different way in 2020, when he was accused in a lawsuit filed by a local NBC affiliate of heading an investigation of the county jail that, according to the suit, was in fact a ruse by the longtime sheriff at the time, Neil Warren, a Republican, to keep reporters from accessing documents about a string of jailhouse deaths. No investigative report ever came publicly to light. The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office said it had no such report in its files and was “unable” to comment on any work Mr. Wade might have done on the jail. Mr. Warren did not respond to numerous calls and texts seeking comment. Mr. Wade also declined to answer questions on the matter. But in an earlier court hearing, he said his inquiry had not been memorialized in documents. “I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it,” he said. “That’s what I have.” Two lawyers land two big jobsMs. Willis and Mr. Wade, second from left, in August.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWhen Ms. 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 L. 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 Ms. Willis, about whether he had played politics in his handling of a high-profile police shooting.Ms. Willis, a single mother of two who had been one of Mr. Howard’s courtroom stars, handily defeated him in a Democratic primary runoff in August 2020. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, there was no Republican opponent on the general election ballot. 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 Mr. Trump and his allies and began building a team to prosecute the case. Some of them, like the lawyers Donald Wakeford and Daysha Young, were experienced prosecutors who had left the office but rejoined as full-time employees after Ms. Willis’s election. 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 D.A.’s office in federal court, where some co-defendants in the Trump case have been arguing, so far unsuccessfully, to have the case moved.Ms. Willis said she also needed a special prosecutor to lead the growing team, and turned to Mr. 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 an interview 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 Mr. Trump could open the door to personal security threats. Eventually, she said, she and other advisers turned to Mr. Wade and encouraged him to take the position. Ms. Willis recalled that Mr. Wade said, “Well, you know, I’ve spent a little time as a prosecutor, but really more of my career has been as a defense attorney.”She replied: “Well, I’ve been a defense attorney and a prosecutor, too. What I need is a trial lawyer.” From that point, Ms. Willis recalled, “it was a convincing process” to get Mr. Wade to sign up. “But he wasn’t afraid,” she said. “And I needed someone not afraid.”Mr. 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 Ms. Cross. Records show Mr. Floyd has charged between $150 and $200 per hour.County records posted online also show that Mr. Wade’s law partner, Christopher A. Campbell, has been paid $126,070 by the district attorney’s office since June 2021 and that his former law partner, Terrence Bradley, was paid at least $74,480 since May of that year. Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office, said that the payments to Mr. Campbell and Mr. Bradley were for services unrelated to the Trump case, including making court appearances in cases on behalf of the D.A.’s office when it was short-staffed and removing documents in potential public corruption cases that members of the D.A.’s office are not allowed to see.Managing the caseMr. Wade, left, and the lawyer Daysha Young during a hearing in October.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerIn court appearances, various members of the Trump prosecution team have taken turns handling presentations before judges. In state court, many of the complex legal issues that have arisen have been argued by prosecutors other than Mr. Wade. But much of the work of the Trump prosecution team occurs behind closed doors, which makes Mr. Wade’s full contribution difficult to discern. In some cases, Mr. Wade has raised the ire of lawyers connected to the case. One of them was Tim Parlatore, the lawyer for Bernard Kerik, a former New York Police commissioner who had been subpoenaed to testify by the district attorney’s office. In a letter to Mr. Wade in October, Mr. Parlatore said that prosecutors had identified Mr. Kerik as a co-conspirator in the case. For that reason, Mr. Parlatore said, Mr. Wade should have understood from the beginning that he would not allow Mr. Kerik to testify without a grant of immunity. “You seemed genuinely surprised by this relatively basic application of the 5th Amendment right to not answer questions from the very prosecuting agency that has publicly accused him of being a co-conspirator,” Mr. Parlatore wrote, addressing Mr. Wade.Another who clashed with Mr. Wade was Brian F. McEvoy, a lawyer for Gov. Brian P. Kemp of Georgia, whom Mr. Trump had telephoned late in 2020 for help in overturning Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win in the state. In a 2022 motion, Mr. McEvoy described a breakdown in communications between him and prosecutors as they discussed the terms of a potential interview of the governor. Mr. McEvoy said Mr. Wade’s demand that Mr. Kemp meet with prosecutors within a specific time frame came off as “threatening.”Ms. Willis weighed in with an email to Mr. McEvoy, accusing him of “rude and disparaging” conduct toward her staff that was “beneath an officer of the court.”One the most awkward moments Mr. Wade has spent in the spotlight came when a number of co-defendants in the Trump case complained to the presiding judge that they had received auto-generated mailers from a local law firm that was trying to drum up business.“Our lawyers have an abundance of experience handling cases in the state and local courts of Metro Atlanta,” the letters stated.The law firm was Mr. Wade’s.Reporting was contributed by More

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    Fani Willis Faces Upheaval in Trump Georgia Inquiry

    Accusations involving her relationship with the lead prosecutor she hired are seen as unlikely to derail the case but could cause serious distractions.Nearly three years after she began investigating former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Fani T. Willis is facing the biggest test of her handling of the landmark election interference case.Ms. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., was accused this week of being romantically involved with the lead prosecutor she hired for the Trump case, a turn of events that has invigorated Republicans and raised a flurry of questions about her conduct and judgment. The prosecutor, Nathan Wade, has reaped more than $650,000 in legal fees.While many legal experts doubt that the accusations — if true — will derail the case, they could present significant problems for Ms. Willis and create distractions around the case. The allegations have already created a firestorm on the political right, with Mr. Trump and his allies accusing her of violating a raft of county and state laws. They have even given pause to some Democrats.“If the allegations are true — and it’s a big if — it’s troubling,” Robb Pitts, a Democrat who is chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said in an interview this week. “To have this come up at this point in time, and at this point in this trial, can raise questions.”The allegations, which were lodged without supporting documents or named witnesses, surfaced in a court filing on Monday from a lawyer for Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign staff member who faces charges in the case along with Mr. Trump and 13 others.The filing suggested that the relationship was the reason Ms. Willis had chosen Mr. Wade, who had never led a high-profile criminal case and had largely worked as a suburban defense lawyer and municipal judge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Mark Gonzalez Seeks to Challenge Senator Ted Cruz in Texas

    Mark Gonzalez, facing a conservative effort to remove him from the district attorney’s office in Nueces County, Texas, resigned and announced his campaign for the Senate.Mark A. Gonzalez, a progressive district attorney in Nueces County, Texas, took an unusual tack when he came under fire from conservatives who didn’t like how he was doing his job.He resigned — to run for the United States Senate.Mr. Gonzalez announced Tuesday that he would join a large field of candidates in the Democratic primary to challenge Senator Ted Cruz next year, the most prominent of whom is Representative Colin Allred. In an interview, Mr. Gonzalez said his decision was directly tied to efforts to remove him from his elected office.“Prior to that, I hadn’t really had any more taste or want for politics,” he said. But “with the petition and some of the stuff that’s been going on at least statewide, it just kind of — I don’t know if the word is just angered me or incited me or something — and so I just decided that I don’t want to represent or try to represent just Nueces County. I want to represent Texans that want change.”He said the other issues that animated him included preserving abortion rights and voting rights, and combating conservative efforts to limit the teaching of subjects like the United States’ racial history.His campaign announcement video highlights Mr. Cruz’s decision to leave Texas for a vacation in Cancún in 2021 while the state was dealing with a disastrous winter storm, and contrasts that decision with a clip of Mr. Gonzalez during the same storm, asking Nueces County residents to notify his office of any incidents of price gouging. Mr. Cruz, a Republican seeking a third term in the Senate, fended off an unexpectedly fierce challenge from Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, in 2018. He won that race by about 2.5 percentage points, two years after Donald J. Trump had won the state by nine points.It will be an uphill battle for any Democrat to unseat Mr. Cruz given Texas’ partisan leanings, but his is one of the few Republican-held Senate seats — along with one in Florida — that Democrats may target amid a tough 2024 map. By contrast, Republicans see pickup opportunities in eight red or swing states. Democrats currently control the Senate by a narrow margin.Mr. Gonzalez does, however, have a record of winning difficult races. He was elected in Nueces County, home to the city of Corpus Christi, in 2016 and 2020, even as Mr. Trump narrowly won the county. He previously said he would not run for re-election as district attorney.“I think that more Texans probably can identify with a guy like me,” he said when asked what set him apart from the other Democratic candidates — a guy like him meaning, among other things, someone from a low-income family who has a criminal record.He added: “We have strong family values, we believe in small government, but I also believe in opportunity and giving people chances, and I think most Texans feel that way.”In his announcement video and his resignation letter to Gov. Greg Abbott, Mr. Gonzalez took the unusual step of emphasizing an element of his background that many candidates might have sidestepped: a drunk-driving arrest when he was 19. In the resignation letter, he said he had taken responsibility and pleaded guilty, then been dismayed to see the same charges dismissed for a defendant who, unlike Mr. Gonzalez, could afford a lawyer.“It dawned on me that the wealthy and well-connected have a different criminal legal system applied to them and accusations against them than everyone else does,” he wrote. “My ignorance of the system was detrimental to my life and has been to so many others just like me.”Mr. Gonzalez also drew attention to an effort by conservative activists to remove him from office, which his resignation has made moot. The conservative petition accused him of incompetence and official misconduct.The petition was both specific and broad. Specifically, it accused him of mishandling two capital murder cases. But it also accused him of having “intentionally nullified duly enacted laws of his oath of office,” reflecting a growing pattern of right-wing attempts to remove progressive prosecutors who have used their discretion to seek lower sentences or to decline to charge certain crimes.“They want to use me as a sacrificial lamb to send a foreboding message to other duly elected D.A.s in Texas who exercise their discretion,” Mr. Gonzalez wrote of state Republicans in his resignation letter.“I will not be used that way, nor will I run from a fight,” he added. “Quite the opposite, in fact.” More