Fani Willis’s relationship with top prosecutor started before she hired him, witness claims

A witness who said she was a former friend of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testified on Thursday that Willis was romantically involved for years with a special prosecutor she later hired to work on her case against former President Donald Trump.

Robin Yeartie said she was aware of the romantic relationship and witnessed physical affection between Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade beginning “soon after” the pair met in 2019, contradicting a sworn affidavit Wade wrote earlier this month saying the relationship began after Willis hired him. Willis appointed Wade to work on the Trump case in November 2021.

Yeartie’s remarks came during a pivotal hearing that a judge held to examine whether Willis had an undisclosed conflict of interest in the case that is grounds for her disqualification.

The accusation surfaced last month in a bombshell court document filed by co-defendant Mike Roman. He accused Willis of personally benefiting from appointing Wade to the Trump case because Willis has been paying Wade hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds to work on the case while secretly carrying on a relationship with him. The relationship, Roman alleged, involved vacations, cruises, dinners, and hotel stays.

Willis was forced to respond to the accusation and admitted in a court filing to having a relationship with Wade. But she argued it had no impact on the case and that the pair evenly split expenses. Wade also submitted a sworn affidavit to the court saying the same. He noted in the affidavit that the relationship began in 2022.

Roman’s attorney Ashleigh Merchant led the questioning in the hearing on Thursday. Roman and other co-defendants, including Trump, are seeking to have the case dropped, or at least have Willis’s office disqualified from it, over the alleged conflict of interest.

Merchant established during the questioning that Yeartie had been good friends with Willis since the early 1990s, and that they stopped talking after March 2022, when Yeartie resigned from the district attorney’s office over a job performance issue.

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Yeartie said that while she was aware of the romantic relationship, she was not aware of Willis and Wade cohabitating. Merchant said earlier this week in a hearing that she had evidence that contradicted sworn statements from Wade about the start of his relationship with Willis and his claim that they never cohabitated.

Merchant then moved on to questioning Wade, who appeared on Thursday under subpoena after lawyers for the state tried unsuccessfully to quash it. Merchant grilled Wade on the contradictions in his statements and about specific payments allegedly involving Willis.

This story is developing and will be updated.