Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, was seemingly born to prosecute Donald Trump — and at one point she had him in the palm of her hand.
But by Friday she will learn whether she’ll be thrown off the very case she started by the judge who oversees it — after weeks of explosive claims of a secret affair, adultery, corruption and conspiracy, all involving her, not Trump.
Willis, 44, went after Trump with a vengeance, securing racketeering indictments against him and 18 co-defendants alleging a sweeping plot to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, in what was thought to be the strongest of the four criminal cases he faces.
But what was shaping up to be a place in the history books for Willis has gone up in smoke — drowned out by increasingly serious allegations against her involving a messy love triangle with her then-married special prosecutor, dirty weekends, law office trysts, lavish vacations, incriminating cell phone data and shady cash.
Judge Scott McAfee has set a deadline of Friday — the Ides of March — to rule on a claim brought by one of Trump’s co-defendants that Willis has a conflict of interest and must be removed from the case she brought herself.
The Trump hunter
The daughter of a Black Panther-turned-criminal defense lawyer who raised Fani as a single dad in Washington DC, Willis spent 16 years as a prosecutor in the Fulton County DA’s office before successfully running for DA in 2020.
The day after she was sworn in, Jan. 2, 2021, then-President Trump, seeking a way to challenge election results in some swing states, called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to “find” 12,000 votes that would have reversed his loss in the state.
Just one month later, Willis announced a criminal investigation into election interference allegations.
She impaneled a special grand jury to maximize her investigative powers, subpoenaed Georgia’s governor and even forced a sitting senator — Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — to give evidence after his own bitter court battle to avoid being deposed and used sweeping anti-racketeering laws to draw up indictments.
Willis ultimately triumphed on Aug. 14, 2023 when Trump and 18 others were indicted in Fulton County.
But it was the mugshot of Trump, looking by turns both angry and defiant, the first ever of a US president, that defined Willis’ accomplishment.
“It will be forever part of the iconography of being alive in this time,” said Marty Kaplan, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications, said at the time.
Defense attorney opens Pandora’s Box
But her run of success suddenly ended on January 8 this year, when GOP operative Michael Roman, one of Trump’s co-defendants,upended both Willis and the Trump investigation in a bombshell legal filing.
Roman’s attorney Ashleigh Merchant, claimed that Willis had financially and improperly benefited from the Trump case by hiring a man who was secretly her lover as special prosecutor and paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars for his work.
The lover was Nathan Wade, and the claims were a result of information gleaned from divorce documents involving Wade, and his estranged wife, Joycelyn Wade.
Merchant asked Judge McAfee to disqualify Willis from the case because employing Wade was a conflict of interest: she and Wade had a financial interest in the case continuing, so could not make fair decisions in the public interest.
The attorney demanded the charges against Roman be dropped but in effect she was asking for all the defendants — including Trump — to be cleared.
Merchant opened a Pandora’s box that continues to have repercussions to this day.
Wade, it turned out, was mainly a personal injury lawyer who worked out of a small basement office in Marietta and had zero felony trial experience.
Yet Fani was paying double that of two other, highly experienced prosecutors on the Trump team.
They had the same hourly rate but he claimed far more, once billing for 24 hours of continuous work.
In addition, Wade used some of the nearly $654,000 in legal fees that he had been paid by the Fulton County DA’s Office for his work on the Trump case to take Willis on lavish vacations to “Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean,” according to court filings.
Willis admitted to having a “personal relationship” with Wade, but said it didn’t become romantic until after 2022 – and after she appointed him special prosecutor and the case was well underway.
Both prosecutors testified that they met at a 2019 judicial conference and bonded professionally but not romantically at first.
The tables turn: Willis goes on trial
McAfee called a special hearing to decide Willis should be disqualified from prosecuting — and when it began on February 15, it quickly became a circus.
Willis’ former friend and colleague in the DA’s office, Robin Yeartie, testified that Willis and Wade’s romantic relationship began in 2019, well before they both claimed it did.
Wade’s testimony about his relationship with Willis, when it started and what they did together became instant fodder for online memes, especially one pointed question about whether Wade had ever booked a cabin in Tennessee for the two of them which took him 15 awkward seconds to answer.
He was asked if they had had sex in his office; he denied it.
Wade called Willis an “independent, proud woman” and sometimes picked up the entire tab for their romantic getaways, like a March 2023 trip to Belize for his birthday, in cash.
He said they split expenses for trips to Napa Valley and the Caribbean in 2022 and 2023.
But the hearing took on a surreal dimension when Willis, who originally fought not to testify, barreled into the courtroom in a vivid red dress and belligerently took the witness stand.
Wade was “a Southern gentleman,” she told the judge. “Me, not so much.”
Willis called out Merchant and other Trump defense lawyers for what she said were lies while sharing details of her personal life — including how she preferred Grey Goose vodka over wine and that she’d been taught by her father to keep stashes of cash at home.
“Don’t get cute with me!” she told Merchant at one point; at another she yelled, “It’s a lie, it’s a lie!”
A garage opener, 4:20am texts and ‘sex in the office’
In contrast to Willis’ fiery testimony, Wade’s former law partner Terrence Bradley — who had told Merchant in a series of text messages that Willis and Wade began their affair in 2019 — sweated profusely on the stand.
He claimed to remember nothing of what he allegedly told Merchant until he was confronted with his own texts to her and muttered “oh, dang!”
Bradley was also alleged to have told another Trump defense attorney, Manny Arora, last year that Wade even had a garage door opener for one of their alleged love nests.
Bradley’s puzzling memory loss came as the defense presented dozens of pings from Wade’s cellphone that placed it at Willis’ rented condo prior to 2022 — data that included apparent evidence that Wade visited Willis, or at least an address very close to hers, at night, and returned to his home in the early morning hours and texted her from there.
Trump’s team filed a document in court Feb. 28 stating that an outside tech expert had identified over 2,000 phone calls and nearly 10,000 texts between Willis and Wade.
As one example, the private investigator hired by the Trump team claimed in an affidavit that one day in Sept. 2021, before Wade was hired for the case, Wade went to Willis’ address at 10:45 pm and remained there until about 3:30 in the morning.
The data showed Wade’s phone arrived near his own apartment just after 4:05 a.m., and that Wade “sent a text at 4:20am to Ms. Willis.”
‘Don’t talk to them, they’re coming after us.‘
Then the case took a new twist: last Monday, attorneys for another co-defendant, David Schafer, alleged that a new witness may testify that Willis warned Terrence Bradley to stay quiet about their affair, an explosive new court filing last week claimed.
“They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us,” Willis is alleged to have warned Bradley in a September 2023 phone call.
The call was allegedly overheard by Cobb County, Georgia prosecutor Cindi Lee Yeager, according to court papers.
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.
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,” the filing said.
But it came after the judge had wrapped up hearing evidence, so Yeager’s full testimony has not been part of his deliberations.
Beware the ides of March Fani: Judge to rule by Friday
McAfee has said he’ll announce his ruling by Friday at the latest although there is a slight chance he will re-open the hearing to allow for Yeager to testify.
He has to decide first what standard Willis should be held to.
Does a district attorney have to avoid actual conflicts of interest, or is the appearance of an actual conflict of interest — meaning a much lower standard of evidence — disqualifying.
McAfee has said there is “ambiguity” in the case law.
And then he will rule on whether Willis passes or fails that test.
Sources close to the Willis and Wade case were split when speaking to The Post about what they thought McAfee’s decision would be this week, pointing out that he’s up for re-election soon himself.
“Nobody wants the DA after you no matter who you are,” one source said. “McAfee’s no different. Fani’s a bully and you don’t want her after you.”
Though the Georgia Senate held a hearing last week on efforts to disqualify her and the House Judiciary Committee has launched an investigation into Willis, she remains defiant.
Willis spoke at the Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church in Atlanta shortly after her contentious testimony and said that supporters had sent her an Old Testament verse, “No weapon formed against you shall prosper.”
“They did not say the weapons will not form, and that’s the part I didn’t hear until recently,” Willis said. “Just because they won’t prosper, it doesn’t mean that they won’t form. You should not think that those weapons will not form.”
By Friday Willis will know if those weapons have prospered and her attempt to jail Trump is over.
