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      Judge to consider whether to disqualify Fani Willis from Georgia election case

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      An Atlanta judge on Thursday will examine whether Fulton county prosecutors charging Donald Trump and his allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia had improper romantic relations that merit being disqualified from bringing the case.The eventual outcome of the hearing – expected to take over two days before the presiding Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee – could have far-reaching implications for one of the most perilous criminal cases against the former president.Trump’s co-defendant in the Georgia 2020 election interference case, Michael Roman, is seeking to have the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and her top deputy, Nathan Wade, disqualified as a result of their romantic relationship because it constituted a conflict of interest.If Roman is successful in having Willis relieved from bringing the case, it would result in the disqualification of the entire district attorney’s office, throwing into disarray a prosecution that has already been roiled politically since the allegations were made last month.The district attorney’s office has vehemently rejected the claim that the romantic relationship gave rise to a conflict, arguing in court filings that there was no impropriety under the law and there was no financial benefit to either Willis or Wade, as has been alleged.McAfee allowed the hearing to go forward after he decided on Monday that there was the possibility of conflict that he wanted to resolve. “It’s clear that disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” he said at a hearing.The judge is not expected to immediately rule on the matter. The anticipated two-day proceeding is what is known as an evidentiary hearing, where both sides are expected to call witnesses to testify in open court under oath.During the potentially fraught hearing, McAfee is expected to delve into three principal issues to tackle the conflict of interest question: whether Willis financially benefited from hiring Wade, when the romantic relationship started, and whether the romantic relationship was ongoing.The main focus of the hearing is likely the testimony of Terrence Bradley, a former partner at Wade’s law firm, and those of Willis and Wade. McAfee rejected a request from the district attorney’s office to quash their subpoenas but ruled out getting into Wade’s legal qualifications.The allegations first surfaced in an 8 January motion filed by Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, who complained about a potential conflict of interest arising from what she described as “self-dealing” between Willis and Wade as a result of their then-unconfirmed romantic relationship.Roman’s filing, in essence, accused Willis of engaging in a quasi-kickback scheme, where Wade paid for joint vacations to Florida and California using earnings of more than $650,000 from working on the Trump case. The filing also alleged the relationship had started before he was hired.The filing itself, however, provided no concrete evidence that showed alleged self-dealing. At the time, Merchant said her information was based on confidential sources and information in Wade’s divorce case. Yet when the divorce records were unsealed, there was similarly no concrete evidence.After declining to address the allegations for a month, the district attorney’s office acknowledged on 2 February that Willis and Wade had been romantically involved but only after he had been hired as a special prosecutor, and insisted there was no financial benefit because travel costs had been split.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe lawyer for Roman told the judge on Monday that she could undercut that characterization with testimony from Bradley. Indeed, the central thrust of the allegations appear to be buttressed by Bradley; the judge referred at one point to Bradley as the defense’s “star witness”.But special prosecutor Anna Cross, another top deputy on the Trump case who is also representing the district attorney’s office in the matter, told the judge Bradley’s recollections were either fabricated or misrepresented, and was restricted in what he could say because of attorney-client privilege.Whether Willis will be disqualified remains uncertain. Legal experts have generally suggested the evidence to date – there has been almost none, bar Wade’s bank statements showing he paid for a couple of trips – did not show an actual conflict of interest.The potential problem for Willis is that she was previously disqualified from investigating the Georgia lt governor Burt Jones over a lower legal standard of “appearance of impropriety”, after she publicly endorsed Jones’s political rival in that re-election race.The allegations have also threatened to turn the case into political theatre. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has derided the prosecution as scandal-plagued in addition to his usual refrain that the criminal charges against him are a political witch-hunt. More

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      Judge moves ahead with Fani Willis hearing but documents not turned over

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      A blockbuster hearing with details of Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade will go forward Thursday, after the presiding judge chose not to immediately quash subpoenas for their testimony.But the hearing revealed a possible new hurdle for Willis: county administrators have not turned over key documents subpoenaed by Ashleigh Merchant, attorney for former Trump White House aide Michael Roman, one of the 19 defendants charged in the county’s sweeping election interference and racketeering case with the former president.Willis said in filings and in front of an Atlanta church audience that Wade was paid as much as other special prosecutors. Merchant is seeking employment records to potentially refute that assertion. Records released by the district attorney’s office to date show that Wade has billed more than half a million dollars to the county for work on the case.Employment contracts for special prosecutor Anna Green Cross and others that Merchant demanded are not in the possession of county government records administrators, said Shalanda MJ Miller, Fulton county’s custodian of records, in a hearing Monday. Neither are two invoices for work done on the Trump prosecution that Merchant said had been paid.Superior court judge Scott McAfee dismissed questions at the preliminary hearing Monday about whether Wade was qualified to be appointed as a prosecutor on the high-profile racketeering case. Regardless of his experience – or lack thereof – as a prosecutor, “as long as a lawyer has a heartbeat and a bar card”, Wade’s appointment is a matter of the district attorney’s discretion, McAfee said.But the legal question about whether a personal relationship between the two leads to a conflict from personal enrichment requires an evidentiary hearing, he said. “The state has admitted that a relationship existed.”Roman and Merchant have raised allegations of an improper relationship as they seek to disqualify Wade and Willis as prosecutors on the Trump case and for the charges to be dropped. In filings and in court, Willis’ office described the accusations as speculative and baseless.“The defense is not bringing you facts. The defense is not bringing you law. The defense is bringing you gossip,” said Fulton county special prosecutor Anna Green Cross. Willis does not stand to financially benefit from prosecuting the case, she said, and even if the allegations made by Merchant are true, they are an insufficient legal basis to remove the district attorney and her appointees from the case.Thursday’s hearing in McAfee’s courtroom will hinge on testimony by Atlanta attorney Terrence Bradley, a business associate of Wade’s who previously represented him as his divorce lawyer. Willis, Wade and a host of other potential witnesses subpoenaed by Merchant filed motions for those subpoenas to be quashed – for McAfee to rule that their testimony would be unnecessary.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcAfee said he would consider those motions more closely after hearing Bradley’s testimony. More

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      Fulton county’s systems were hacked. Already weary officials are tight-lipped

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      As a Fulton county, Georgia, board of registration and elections meeting began in earnest on Thursday afternoon, the elections director, Nadine Williams, unfurled a prepared statement about a recent hack of county government computers.“There is no indication that this event is related to the election process,” Williams said. “In an abundance of caution, Fulton county and the secretary of state’s respective technology systems were isolated from one another as part of the response efforts. We are working with our team to securely reconnect these systems as preparations for upcoming elections continue.”Any time the Fulton county elections board meets, a cantankerous crowd greets them to pepper appointees with challenges to voter registrations or demands for paper ballots or generally unsympathetic noise. The rancor of the 2020 election and its unfounded charges of vote tampering still ripple through the democratic process. Elections officials in Fulton county take care about what they say, knowing that a platoon of critics lie waiting to pounce on a misplaced word.Even by that standard, county officials have been holding uncharacteristically tightly to a prepared script – or saying nothing at all – in the days since a computer breach debilitated everything from the tax and water billing department to court records to phones.“Because it’s under investigation, they’re telling me to stick to a list of talking points,” said the Fulton county commissioner Bridget Thorne. “The county attorney drafted them.”She did say that the county had come under a ransomware attack – and that the county had not paid off the attacker. “We’re insured very well,” she said.Systems began to fail on the weekend of 27 January. Ten days later, the phones for most departments returned a busy signal error when callers rang them up.County officials either cannot or will not directly and completely answer important questions about the cyber-attack’s scope. The Fulton county chair Robb Pitts made a brief statement on 29 January about the hack without taking questions.“At this time, we are not aware of any transfer of sensitive information about citizens or employees, but we will continue to look carefully at this issue,” Pitts said. “We want the public to be aware that we will keep them informed as additional information become available.”County commissioners held an emergency meeting with only two hours’ notice on Thursday evening, ostensibly to discuss the cyber-attack. The commission immediately entered a closed executive session, emerging 90 minutes later to say nothing to reporters.Asked whether leaders were aware whether sensitive personal information had been stolen by hackers, the county spokesperson refused to say.The FBI is leading the investigation, with assistance from the Georgia bureau of investigation and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency (CISA). An FBI spokesperson said the bureau had been in contact with Fulton county regarding the hack but could not comment on an active investigation.If this were any other county, common concerns about whether residents’ or employees’ credit card data had been stolen and when water billing would resume would be at the forefront of conversations. But Fulton county is where political freight trains cross tracks. Fulton county, home to most of Atlanta, is the largest county in one of the US’s most contested swing states.It is the subject of continuing litigation over the security of its election equipment in federal court.Last year, Georgia replaced its creaky voter-registration system with the Georgia registered voter information system, or Garvis. The state built the system on a Salesforce base. Garvis complies with the FedRamp federal standard for cloud-computing security, according to the office’s statements.A computer system that is FedRamp-compliant has monitoring safeguards to see whether unusual amounts of data are flowing out of storage servers – a telltale sign that hackers are stealing personally identifiable information.When the elections division of the Georgia secretary of state’s office heard that Fulton county’s computers had been hacked, it first cut the county off from access to the state’s computers – and then shut everyone out of Garvis just to make sure the central system had been unaffected, said Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the state office. The state restored registration services to other counties within a day or two, after checking the logs to ensure nothing strange had taken place.State elections officials asked the county to wipe their elections computers back to the baseline, which they have done, Hassinger said. Those computers are isolated from the rest of the network, he said.“We are now back up and running on Garvis,” Williams, the Fulton county elections director, said on Thursday.Fulton county, like every other county, is preparing for the next election: the presidential preference primary on 12 March. Registration for that contest ends next week.There are no slow weeks in Atlanta. Fulton county is also where the former president Donald Trump faces criminal charges for attempting to tamper with the 2020 election. And the court’s creaky computer system is all the way down.For example, this morning, after the high-profile arrest of an activist on Thursday on arson charges related to “Cop City” protests, the media engaged in a spirited argument with court and jail staff. Arraignments are usually done by Zoom meeting with a prisoner remaining at the jail.But Zoom is offline. A judge was forced to trundle into Fulton county’s notorious jail to conduct the proceeding in person, yet the jail doesn’t allow visitors. Eventually, the sheriff relented and allowed some media representatives inside.The hack didn’t target the district attorney’s office and will not affect the Trump case, said Jeff DiSantis, a spokesperson for the office. “All material related to the election case is kept in a separate, highly secure system that was not hacked and is designed to make any unauthorized access extremely difficult, if not impossible,” he said.The office has yet to respond to questions about whether evidence stored on county computers in other criminal cases might have been compromised. Notably, the Atlanta police department said it isn’t accepting emails from Fulton county email addresses for the moment, just in case.The county’s court, tax and financial systems have been particularly affected, said the county manager, Richard “Dick” Anderson. “Our teams have been working around the clock to understand the nature and scope of the incident,” Anderson said in a briefing before the county commission on 7 February. “While a number of our key systems have been affected by this outage, it’s important to note that we have no reason to believe that this incident is related to the election process or any other current events.”Fulton county employs about 5,000 people. As of Wednesday, only 450 county phone lines were operable. The county cannot issue water bills or tax bills. For about 10 days, it could not hold property tax hearings.The county’s internal human resources portal remains down, making it difficult to hire, to manage payroll or to schedule staff.In public, the county has yet to say when it will fully restore services. Privately, officials are telling employees that functionality may not return before the end of the month. More

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      Fani Willis confirms relationship with prosecutor on 2020 Trump election case

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      The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor working on the case against Donald Trump and 14 other defendants, confirmed for the first time on Friday they had a romantic relationship. But they denied any wrongdoing and Willis said she should not be disqualified from the case.“In 2022, District Attorney Willis and I developed a personal relationship in addition to our professional association and friendship,” Wade wrote in an affidavit attached to a 176-page motion Willis filed in court on Friday. Notably, Wade said the relationship developed after he was hired to work on the Trump case in 2021.Willis wrote in the filing she had no personal or financial conflict of interest that “constitutes a legal basis for disqualification”. She urged Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, to dismiss a request to disqualify her without a hearing, currently set for 15 February.“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” she wrote.Michael Roman, a seasoned Republican operative and one of the defendants in the wide-ranging racketeering case against Trump and associates for trying to overturn the election, is seeking Willis’s disqualification. He alleges that Wade used money he earned from his work in Willis’s office on the case to pay for vacations for the two of them. Trump and Robert Cheeley, another defendant, have also joined Roman’s request to dismiss the case.Legal experts are largely dubious of Roman’s request to disqualify Willis.“The filing effectively ended any question I had about what Judge McAfee should and will do. The motion to dismiss and disqualify will be roundly and easily rejected. My only question now is whether other defendants will slowly back away from the Roman motion given how effectively the DA dispatched with the allegations of serious wrongdoing,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.But the confirmation of a relationship with Wade could still do serious harm to Willis in terms of the politics of the case, undermining the credibility of her judgment in the public’s view. The fact that Willis did not disclose the relationship publicly before Roman’s filing, and did not respond to the allegation for weeks, could also leave the impression she was trying to conceal it from public view. Trump, who has already taunted Willis over the relationship, is also likely to dig in.Meanwhile, even though he may not have done anything wrong legally, some experts have called for Wade to step aside in order to protect the public perception of the case.There is no evidence that the relationship resulted in any financial gain for Willis, the district attorney wrote in her filing. She noted they had no joint bank accounts or shared expenses and were not financially dependent on each other. While Wade has purchased travel for Willis with his personal funds, she also noted that she had done the same for him.“Financial responsibility for personal travel taken is divided roughly evenly between the two, with neither being primarily responsible for expenses of the other, and all expenses paid for with individual personal funds,” Willis wrote in the filing.A personal relationship between two lawyers also is not enough to disqualify a prosecutor, Willis wrote. She noted that some of the lawyers for various defendants in the case were either married or in a personal relationship. She noted Roman had offered no evidence their relationship affected prosecuting the case in any way.“The existence of a relationship between members of a prosecution team, in and of itself, is simply not a status that entitles a criminal defendant any remedy,” she wrote.Willis also rebuffed an additional argument by Trump’s attorneys that she should be disqualified because of comments she made at a Black church saying attacks on her were racist. Trump had used those comments to suggest the prosecution against him was racially motivated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The motion makes no serious legal argument, establishes no violation of any ethical rule, and makes no real effort to link the public statements to the legal standard for disqualification,” she wrote. “Instead, much like the motion advanced by … Defendant Roman, Defendant Trump’s motion appears designed to generate media attention rather than accomplish some form of legitimate legal practice. It should be dismissed out of hand.”Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead attorney in Fulton county, dismissed Willis’s filing.“While the DA admits to an intimate relationship with her employee Special Asst DA Wade, she fails to provide full transparency and necessary financial details. Indeed, she says absolutely nothing about the so-called ‘coincidence’ of Wade filing for divorce the day after the DA hired him!” he said in a statement.“Most significantly, and disingenuously, the DA attempts to explain and downplay her ‘church speech’, by preposterously claiming that her racially charged extra-judicial comments were somehow not about the case or the defendants, and that her intentional injection of racial animus in violation of her ethical responsibilities as a prosecutor should simply be ignored,” he added.“Apparently, the DA believes she can make public out-of-court statements about race, this case, and the defendants whenever she wants, and the court is powerless to punish her by disqualification.”Shortly after the filing, Trump distorted what Willis had said into falsehoods and used it to attack her. In a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, he said: “By going after the most high level person, and the Republican Nominee, she was able to get her ‘lover’ much more money, almost a Million Dollars, than she would be able to get for the prosecution of any other person or individual. THAT MEANS THAT THIS SCAM IS TOTALLY DISCREDITED & OVER!”Willis’s filing on Friday details how Wade stepped away from lucrative other legal work to handle the case and took on a reduced governmental rate to work on the case. More

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      Fani Willis: what does relationship with Trump prosecutor mean for Georgia case?

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      The case brought against Donald Trump in Georgia is a powerful, sprawling indictment that charges the former US president and his top allies with violating the state’s racketeering statute over their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.In January, the case was roiled by an explosive complaint filed by Trump’s co-defendant Michael Roman, who alleged that a secret personal relationship between the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and her deputy Nathan Wade, amounted to a conflict of interest that warranted their disqualification.The latest twist in the weeks-long saga came on Friday, when Willis acknowledged in a court filing that she had a relationship with Wade, but that it began after he had been retained to work on the Trump case.Here’s what you need to know.What has just happened?Willis and Wade, a special prosecutor working on the case against Trump and 14 other defendants, confirmed for the first time on Friday they had a romantic relationship. Previously, evidence had emerged in Wade’s divorce proceedings that he had used some of the more than $650,000 he earned from his work for her to pay for vacations for the two of them. Bank records showed Wade had paid for tickets for the pair to go to California in 2023 and Miami in 2022.What do the Trump team argue?Trump’s allies and lawyers allege that the relationship between the district attorney and one of her top prosecutors on the team is an improper one that affects the investigation. That is important as the Georgia case was seen as a powerful blow to the former US president, with a strong chance of finding him guilty for his actions in 2020. Because the case is in Georgia state court, it is also immune from Trump’s interference should he win the 2024 election.What could that mean for the case?There is little doubt that Trump’s lawyers will now seek to exploit this situation and use it to undermine the credibility of the case and delay the proceedings. But experts have generally been skeptical the relationship will result in disqualification or getting the case removed.Even if nothing were to happen legally because of the scandal, it offers huge political ammunition to Trump to argue that the case is flawed and motivated by politics and personal ambition. In an election year, that could be crucial.What does Willis say?Willis wrote in the Friday filing that she had no personal or financial conflict of interest that “constitutes a legal basis for disqualification” and urged McAfee to dismiss the request to disqualify her without a hearing.She noted that Roman had failed to offer any evidence that the relationship affected any decisions of the case. The mere existence of a relationship, she wrote, was not grounds for disqualification. She noted that some of the defense lawyers in the case were married or had personal relationships.She also noted that neither she nor Wade benefited financially from the prosecution. The two do not have a joint bank account or other shared expenses. And when they travel together for personal reasons, they split the costs and bear their own expenses, her office wrote.“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this Court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” she wrote.What happens next?A hearing has been set for 15 February by the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case. McAfee is expected to decide based on the evidence presented then whether Willis should be disqualified, either because he finds there is an actual conflict of interest, or because he finds an appearance of impropriety, a lower standard that has been previously used in some cases.If McAfee decides to reject Roman’s motion to disqualify Willis, Roman could challenge his ruling at the Georgia state court of appeals, a move that would almost certainly delay the case by weeks or months, setting back the start of a potential trial. A trial date has not been set for Trump and his co-defendants.If McAfee decides to grant Roman’s motion and relieves Willis and her office from prosecuting the case, it would be handed to the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, which would then appoint a replacement prosecutor. More

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      Trump ally Jim Jordan subpoenas Fani Willis for potential grant money misuse

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      The US House judiciary committee has subpoenaed Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, for records related to the use of federal grant money in prosecutions and the potential misuse of those funds.The subpoena escalates the conflict between Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican congressman, judiciary committee chair and ardent defender of Donald Trump, and Willis, whose office charged the former president and 18 others with 41 counts over interfering with a Georgia election and illegally attempting to undo Biden’s victory in Georgia.Willis responded to the subpoena on Friday. She said: “These false allegations are included in baseless litigation filed by a holdover employee from the prior administration who was terminated for cause. The courts that have ruled found no merit in these claims. We expect the same result in any pending litigation.”She went on to tout the office grant programs and said they are in compliance with Department of Justice requirements.The back and forth between Jordan and Willis began last year with correspondence Jordan sent on 24 August, the day Trump stood for a mugshot at the Fulton county jail. Jordan’s letter suggested Willis had subjected Trump to “politically motivated state investigations and prosecutions due to the policies they advanced as president”, and that any coordination her office had with federal prosecutors may have been an improperly partisan use of federal money.Willis’s scorching response in subsequent replies said the inquiry offends principles of state sovereignty and the separation of powers; that it interferes with a criminal investigation; that Trump is not immune to prosecution simply because he is a candidate for public office; and that Jordan himself was “ignorant of the US constitution”.The Republican-led committee opened a formal investigation into the Willis’s office in December.Willis has been under fire over the past month after allegations of an improper relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she hired to work on the Trump case in Fulton county.Jordan sent a letter to Nathan Wade on 12 January, asking for his cooperation in his committee’s inquiry into “politically motivated investigations and prosecutions and the potential misuse of federal funds”. The letter notes Wade’s billings for meetings with the federal January 6 committee, which the letter characterizes as partisan. “There are open questions about whether federal funds were used by [Fulton county] to finance your prosecution,” the letter states.Willis responded on Wade’s behalf 12 days later.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Your letter is simply a restatement of demands that you have made in past correspondence for access to evidence in a pending Georgia criminal prosecution,” she said in the reply.“As I said previously, your requests implicate significant, well-recognized confidentiality interests related to an ongoing criminal matter. Your requests violate principles of separation of powers and federalism, as well as respect for the legal protections provided to attorney work product in ongoing litigation.” More

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      Prosecutor in Trump racketeering case subpoenaed to testify in disqualification hearing

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      The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor in her office, have both been subpoenaed to testify at a 15 February hearing seeking their disqualification from the criminal racketeering case against Donald Trump and 14 others for their efforts to overturn the election.It is not guaranteed that either will actually testify. Both could seek to quash the subpoena.Michael Roman, a seasoned Republican operative and a co-defendant in the case, is seeking the disqualification of Willis and Wade and a dismissal of the indictment. He alleges the two had a romantic relationship and that Wade used the money he earned from his employment in her office to pay for vacations. Trump and another defendant, Robert Cheeley, have both joined the request.Experts generally consider disqualification unlikely, but Willis has not directly responded to the allegation. She has said she will respond in a court filing that is due on Friday.Roman filed a new lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Willis’s office of failing to comply with a public records request and failing to turn over records related to the hiring of Wade and other special prosecutors. The lawsuit says Wade and Willis have both been subpoenaed to testify at the 15 February hearing.Wade’s office has told multiple news outlets that it has provided all the information that Roman and his lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, have requested. The district attorney also reportedly sent a letter to Merchant on Friday saying they “disagree with your disingenuous implication” they had failed to meet their obligations. A spokesperson for the office also told ABC News it had not been formally served with the lawsuit on Wednesday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWade had been set to testify as part of an divorce case on Wednesday, but settled it on Tuesday evening. Willis had also been subpoenaed in that case. More

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      Prosecutor in Trump elections case will not have to testify on alleged romance

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      Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor in the case against Donald Trump over his alleged plot to overturn the 2020 election has entered into a “temporary agreement” with his estranged wife, according to a filing posted on social media. This agreement means that special prosecutor Wade will avoid having to testify in a court hearing that was scheduled for Wednesday.During the now-canceled hearing, Wade was expected to shed light on his financial dealings and purchase of plane tickets for himself and Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis in 2022 and 2023, according to the Washington Post. The pair have been under increased scrutiny since 8 January when Michael Roman, a veteran Republican operative and one of the former president’s co-defendants filed a motion to Fulton county’s superior court that sought to disqualify Willis and Wade from the case.Roman alleged that the pair were in a romantic relationship and that Wade, who was hired by Willis, used his attorney’s fees paid to him by the district attorney’s office to purchase vacations for the pair. Roman argued that while Wade was allowed to spend his earnings as he pleased, him using the money to Willis’s benefit in the form of flights and hotel stays presented a conflict of interestskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWade’s credit statements, made public via a motion filed in his divorce proceedings, show that Wade paid for two trips for him and Willis; one to Miami in October 2022 and another to the Napa Valley in April 2023. Neither attorney has publicly confirmed or denied a relationship.Wade filed for divorce from his wife Joycelyn Wade on 2 November 2021, the day after Willis appointed him as special counsel in the Trump case, court records show. The divorce grew ugly after Joycelyn complained that her estranged husband was withholding information about his finances, including income from working on the Trump case.Willis was expected to respond to the allegations in a court filing that was due on 2 February, but the agreement between the Wades will allow her to avoid filing. More