Cellphone data submitted in a Friday court filing by attorneys for former President Donald Trump showed that special prosecutor Nathan Wade appeared to make dozens of trips to District Attorney Fani Willis’ home before he was hired to lead the prosecution of the former president and numerous others in Fulton County, Georgia.
The newly revealed cell data shows Wade appeared to make 35 trips to Willis’ neighborhood in Hapeville, Georgia, before he was hired, contradicting his testimony last week when Wade said he had not visited Willis’ home any more than 10 times before 2021, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Willis and Wade also testified last week that the two never spent the night together at her home in Hapeville, but the cellphone data indicates that Wade came to her condo late at night and left early the next morning on two separate occasions.
The data submitted by Trump’s attorneys poses another timeline problem for Willis to address, since both she and Wade testified under oath that their relationship didn’t begin until 2022 — after Wade had been hired by Willis. An affidavit from investigator Charles Mittelstadt was included in Friday’s court filing and says that Willis and Wade called each other more than 2,000 times in the first 11 months of 2021. Willis and Wade also sent nearly 12,000 text messages during that same time period, according to CellHawk, the tool Mittelstadt used.
“CellHawk is considered by law enforcement to be the gold standard in cellphone records analytics,” Mittelstadt said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Lawyers for Trump raised concerns over the relationship between the Democratic DA and the special prosecutor she hired. Willis faces possible disqualification from her case against Trump over allegations that she has misused taxpayer dollars and showed favoritism to Wade, according to the judge overseeing the case.
Willis’ and Wade’s testimonies on their relationship were also contradicted by statements from Robin Bryant-Yeartie, a former employee in the DA’s office, who testified by video conference last week that Willis and Wade had been in a romantic relationship beginning in 2019.
Willis testified that Bryant-Yeartie “betrayed” their friendship, saying she has “not spoken to Robin in over a year.”
“I certainly do not consider her a friend now. I think that she — you know, there’s a saying no good deed goes unpunished and I think that she’d betrayed our friendship,” she said.
Judge Scott McAfee was forced to step in and call for a five-minute recess last week after Willis began yelling at defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant over her line of questioning. After returning to the courtroom, McAfee told Willis that he would be forced to strike her testimony if she engaged in any more outbursts on the stand.
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