In a potential setback to former President Donald J. Trump and his co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case, a key witness testified on Tuesday that he had no knowledge of when a romantic relationship began between the two prosecutors leading the case.
Defense attorneys are seeking to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, claiming that her romantic relationship with the lawyer she hired to run the case, Nathan Wade, has created an untenable conflict of interest.
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have said that the relationship began only after she hired him in November 2021. Mr. Trump’s lawyer has accused them of lying.
For weeks, the defense had suggested that the key witness, Terrence Bradley, the former divorce lawyer and law partner of Mr. Wade, could provide crucial testimony contradicting Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade. But Mr. Bradley testified in court on Tuesday that “I don’t know when the relationship started,” and that he “never witnessed anything.”
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and other defendants hammered at Mr. Bradley’s credibility on Tuesday, reading aloud text messages he wrote in January that appeared to suggest that he knew more about the prosecutors’ relationship than he was letting on. In text exchanges, Mr. Bradley told a defense lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, that the romance between the prosecutors had begun before Nov. 1, 2021, when Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade.
“Do you think it happened before she hired him?” Ms. Merchant asked Mr. Bradley in one text exchange, which was entered into evidence. “Absolutely,” Mr. Bradley replied.
But on the stand on Tuesday, Mr. Bradley insisted that he had been only “speculating” about the relationship in those texts, and was not speaking from personal knowledge.
It was Mr. Bradley’s third time on the witness stand this month, in a series of hearings that have threatened to upend the prosecution of Mr. Trump and his allies for seeking to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. The defense team contends that the two prosecutors engaged in “self-dealing,” because Mr. Wade spent money on vacations that he took with Ms. Willis while he was being paid by her office.
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have denied that there was any improper financial benefit, and have testified that they roughly split the costs of their vacations to places like the Caribbean and Napa Valley.
The extraordinary detour that the election interference case has taken, forcing the lead prosecutors to fight accusations of impropriety, may have changed it fundamentally. Even if the presiding judge allows Ms. Willis to keep the case, she is likely to face tough scrutiny moving forward, including from a new state commission that will be able to remove prosecutors and from the Georgia Senate, which has opened an investigation.
And if the case is taken from Ms. Willis and her team, more serious problems may follow.
The accusations first surfaced in a filing last month from Ms. Merchant, a lawyer for Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is among the defendants. Her effort to disqualify Ms. Willis, Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis’s entire office has appeared to rely heavily on her recent communications with Mr. Bradley.
Mr. Bradley had a falling out with Mr. Wade in recent years as their business relationship soured. In a previous hearing, it emerged that Mr. Bradley had been accused of sexual assaulting an employee of the business, an allegation that he emphatically denied.
Mr. Bradley clearly had no desire to testify about his former law partner and was a reluctant witness each time he took the stand.
In a court appearance this month, he declined to answer questions related to what he knew about the romance, citing attorney-client privilege and other rules that shield lawyers from having to disclose communications with clients.
But Scott McAfee, the Fulton County Superior Court judge overseeing the case, said on Tuesday said that neither Mr….
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