On Thursday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis fired back at a former employee who gave potentially damaging testimony about her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade who was hired for the 2020 election interference case against former President Donald Trump in late 2021.
Robin Bryant-Yeartie, a former employee in the DA’s office, testified by video conference earlier in the day that Willis and Wade had been in a romantic relationship from 2019 to at least 2022 — contracting a claim by Willis that he did not begin a personal association with Willis until 2022 — and offered alleged details about their affectionate behavior.
Willis, who dropped a motion trying to squash a subpoena for her testimony, showed up in court after Wade took the stand and insisted that they had not dated until around March 2022 and claimed Willis reimbursed him in cash for travel they did together in recent years. He also said they were no longer dating.
Although Willis acknowledged that she has known Yeartie for decades, she said, “I have not spoken to Robin in over a year,” lining up with around the time Yeartie testified she resigned from the DA’s office under threat of being fired.
“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,” Willis said. The DA recalled that she started dating Wade in early 2022, perhaps around April, and said she reimbursed Wade with cash she kept at her house.
The hearing was taking place amid a bid by Trump and his co-defendant Mike Roman to disqualify the prosecutors and dismiss the case over an allegedly improper relationship that led Willis and Wade to profit off the prosecution at the expense of taxpayers. Willis hired Wade one day after Wade filed for divorce in a marriage he claimed had long been “broken” — a series of events he said was “purely coincidental.”
Willis got testy at times, saying she found a motion that “tried to implicate” that she slept with Wade on the first day they met “highly offensive.” The DA denied being a “hostile witness,” noting that she wanted to be there, and said Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Roman, has interests that are “contrary to democracy.”
Trump is facing a total of four criminal cases and civil litigation as he runs another campaign seeking a second term in the White House. He has broadly denied wrongdoing and has claimed that prosecutors are engaged in a politically motivated “witch hunt” against him.
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