This past August, Manny Arora, a lawyer in Atlanta, considered an unusual challenge to the charges brought against his client Kenneth Chesebro. Arora, who is in his fifties, is an unflappable retired Air Force prosecutor. He has argued cases on behalf of the former N.F.L. star Adam (Pacman) Jones and Gucci Mane, the Atlanta rapper. Chesebro was a big client, too: a Harvard-trained lawyer and one of the alleged architects of Donald Trump’s scheme to have several states, including Georgia, submit fake electors to overturn the 2020 election. The Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, had just charged Trump and eighteen others, including Chesebro, with taking part in a criminal enterprise. Her indictment listed more than a hundred and sixty acts in furtherance of their conspiracy, including a taped phone call Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to “find 11,780” votes. Chesebro was charged with seven felony counts related to the fake-elector plan—a stratagem that he’d admitted, from the start, would “likely” be rejected by the Supreme Court.
Willis had hired a special prosecutor named Nathan Wade, in November of 2021, to lead the case, which she’d launched in February of that year. But when Arora dug into his background, last fall, he thought that Wade had an oddly thin résumé for someone working on such a high-profile case. Wade had spent his career as a private defense lawyer, often fighting misdemeanor charges, and later as a municipal-court judge. He’d never worked on a racketeering case. “He really didn’t appear qualified to lead a RICO prosecution,” Arora, who had also worked in the Fulton County D.A.’s office, two decades ago, told me. Georgia has an unusually broad racketeering statute, which Willis is fond of using. “Most lawyers in this state aren’t qualified to do it, and here you’re talking about using it in the most unique way in American history—going after a President,” Arora said. “And the D.A. hires someone that hasn’t had any serious felony experience, much less something at this level?”
Others in Georgia’s legal community felt similarly. “It was weird,” a longtime criminal-defense attorney who asked to remain anonymous, given his regular interactions with Willis, told me. “I’ve been practicing for decades here. So has my partner. We’d never heard of this guy, and suddenly he’s lead counsel in a monumentally important case.” In 2014, Wade had run unsuccessfully for superior-court judge, in Cobb County. Arora reached out to people in the area who knew Wade, including, he said, one of his former law partners, Terrence Bradley. Arora learned from them that Wade had been seeing Willis romantically. “Nobody wanted to be the one going on record about it,” he told me. “They’d just say, ‘Some things were going on at this apartment.’ ‘Get the cell-phone records and you’ll see this.’ ‘Talk to her security detail.’ Things like that.” Wade, it turned out, had initiated divorce proceedings with his wife a day after Willis hired him, in 2021. His divorce case is ongoing, and it’s not clear what precipitated it, or when exactly the marriage unravelled and when the relationship with Willis began. Arora has seen a lot in his career, but all this startled him and begged further scrutiny. “We just didn’t have enough time to flesh it all out,” Arora told me. “We were busy with other motions.”
Chesebro and Sidney Powell, another of Trump’s lawyers charged in the alleged conspiracy, had demanded speedy trials. Arora also thought that it would be enough for his case to pick apart Willis’s use of the RICO statute—which some observers believe stretches the limits of the law. In the end, he got Chesebro’s charges dropped and five years of probation for pleading guilty to just one felony count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. (Because he is a first-time offender, his parole ends in three years.) There was no need to hire a private investigator to dig into Willis’s love life. “It was a great deal for us,” Arora said. “But I think it’s smart that they’re challenging the Wade thing now.”
Arora was referring to a motion filed by the lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, in January, that did what he’d considered doing last fall: using Wade’s role in Willis’s case as an argument for challenging the indictments. Merchant, whose practice is in Cobb County, had also been looking into Wade’s background as Arora did so, and he told me that they’d traded notes. Merchant represents Michael Roman, a Trump campaign official who is among the fifteen remaining co-defendants in the case. Merchant’s motion claims that Willis did not receive authorization from the Fulton County Board of Commissioners before hiring Wade, nor did she disclose their personal relationship. By the time the motion was filed, Willis had paid Wade more than six hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his work. Willis and Wade allegedly took trips together to Napa Valley, Florida, and the Caribbean, travelling on Norwegian and Royal Caribbean cruises. Merchant claimed that Wade had paid for these trips using money from his work with Willis. The pair, the motion argues, “profit[ed] personally from this prosecution at Fulton County’s expense.”
Merchant didn’t provide proof of Wade’s expenditures, but that soon came from a filing in Wade’s ongoing divorce proceedings: receipts for flights to San Francisco and Miami, for the cruises, and for a hotel booking in Napa. (There were also purchases from 1-800-Flowers, a flower-delivery service.) Willis and Wade, Merchant’s motion claimed, “have violated laws regulating the use of public monies, suffer from irreparable conflicts of interest, and have violated their oaths of office under the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct.” Merchant called for Willis to recuse herself, or be disqualified—along with her entire office—for this “clandestine” personal relationship. Five of the other co-defendants, including Trump, have since signed on to the effort to remove Willis and her office from the case and to have the charges dismissed
Some believe that a secret relationship inside a prosecutor’s office engaged in one of the highest-profile cases in the country was itself inappropriate. Others worry about payments made to Wade. Arora told me, “If I’m a taxpayer, I’m, like, what? I’m paying how much for this? We’re now way beyond the six hundred and fifty thousand dollars everyone’s been quoting.” The criminal-defense attorney defended Willis’s record as a lawyer: “I like Fani. I’ve known her for many years. She’s a very smart prosecutor.” For him, the problem was the trips and other possible perks for Willis. “I don’t care that she’s having an affair,” he said. “It’s common knowledge that D.A.s sleep with D.A.s, public defenders sleep with each other, occasionally you have a judge thrown in there. But I’m concerned about the money. Not the amount he makes—I’ve done contract work for the county and I’ve made more than the deputy county attorneys per hour—it’s whether Wade spent county money on Willis. It starts to look like a kickback.”
Whether Willis’s relationship with Wade amounts to a violation of ethics or of the law—or merely to bad optics—the right-wing media has seized on the story. “Crooked Soros-funded Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had an ‘improper’ romantic relationship with a top Trump prosecutor in her office,” a piece in the Gateway Pundit read. Republicans in Congress piled on, too. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from northwest Georgia, called for the state’s ethics commission to consider sanctioning Willis. She also asked the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its attorney general, Chris Carr, to initiate a criminal investigation. Democratic strategists have called for Willis to step down, too, citing her damaged credibility. But Willis has given no sign that she’ll do so. After Merchant’s filing went public, Willis and her office remained quiet for a few weeks. Then she made an appearance at Atlanta’s Big Bethel Church, a historically Black place of worship, for a Martin Luther King Day sermon. Without naming Wade, she told the congregation that he had “impeccable credentials.” She seemed to imply that the scrutiny of her personal life was rooted in racism. “Wait a minute, God,” she said. “You did not tell me, as a woman of color it would not matter what I did—my motive, my talent, my ability, and my character would be constantly attacked.”
In early February, Willis filed a nearly two-hundred-page legal response to the allegations, in which she admitted that she and Wade were in a romantic relationship. But she noted that, when he joined her prosecutorial team, they were just friends, and became intimate only afterward. She called the allegations of misconduct “meritless” and “salacious.” (When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Fulton County D.A.’s office declined to comment on behalf of Willis or Wade, pointing me to “what is filed with the court.”) She said that she and Wade had split their expenses when travelling together. Wade also filed an affidavit denying wrongdoing. “No funds paid to me in compensation for my role as Special Prosecutor have been shared with or provided to District Attorney Willis,” he said. Late last week, Merchant claimed in a court filing that Terrence Bradley, the lawyer Arora had spoken to at Wade’s firm, could testify that Willis’s relationship with Wade began before the district attorney hired him. (Merchant and Bradley did not respond to requests for comment.)
Willis’s case was the last of four major criminal indictments filed against Trump last year. It is, in some ways, the most ambitious in scope, drawing in many of Trump’s biggest allies—Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman—along with Cheseboro’s alleged fake-electors scheme, the breach of an elections-office server in rural Georgia, and the phone call Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state to change the election’s outcome. Some observers believe that this case poses the biggest threat to Trump, both because it appears potentially winnable and because he couldn’t pardon himself of any convictions resulting from it, since it was brought using state, rather than federal, law. Shortly after Willis’s indictments came down last August, I spoke to Norman Eisen, a former trial lawyer and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee in Trump’s first impeachment trial. He described Georgia’s RICO statute as the perfect vehicle—“a punch list,” he called it—for prosecuting the many-faceted election-interference scheme. He remains bullish. “The relationship between the D.A. and Mr. Wade does not alter one iota of evidence in this case,” he told me. He didn’t believe that any formal wrongdoing had been committed and was certain that Willis should not be disqualified from the case. “Couples are allowed to give each other gifts,” he said. “But this has been a sufficiently large kerfuffle that there needs to be some consequences.” He believed that Wade should step aside “so we can return our focus to that tape.”
On February 15th, Scott McAfee, the judge presiding over the case, is scheduled to hold an evidentiary hearing, which may last two days, on Willis’s relationship with Wade. McAfee, a thirty-five-year-old former federal prosecutor himself, joined the bench last year. He was appointed by Kemp, the Republican governor, but he does not have a reputation as a partisan. Attorneys in Atlanta who’ve argued cases against him, and before him, described to me a fair and moderate judicial mind. “He’s a straight shooter,” Bruce Harvey, a criminal-defense attorney in Atlanta, told me. “He’ll give everybody a fair shake.” Harvey is representing one of the defendants in Willis’s other huge ongoing case: the sprawling RICO prosecution of the rapper Young Thug and his associates, for being part of what Willis describes as a criminal street gang. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Harvey learned about the Willis-Wade affair from early news coverage in January, on a break from court. He waived off the allegations with characteristically blunt humor. “Much ado about fucking,” he said. “The story is made for the blogosphere, not the legal sphere. It’s incredibly bad optics, but I don’t think there’s enough substance that it would result in any kind of conflict or disqualification legally.”
As McAfee considers Willis’s situation, he will likely look back on a recent precedent set by Robert McBurney, another judge in Fulton County, in 2022. At the time, one of the targets in the election-interference case was Burt Jones, a former state senator and Trump elector, who was then also running for lieutenant governor. While Willis was investigating the election case, she held a fund-raiser for Jones’s opponent in the race, a Democrat named Charlie Bailey, and donated to his campaign. Jones’s lawyer argued, in a hearing, that Willis had demonstrated a political bias against his client by having the fund-raiser, saying that she had a “dog in the hunt.” McBurney called the fund-raiser a “ ‘What were you thinking?’ moment.” Although Willis had not broken any law, he said, she had created “horrific” optics. He decided to sever Jones’s case from his co-defendants’ and to disqualify Willis’s office from prosecuting him. As a result, Jones, who went on to win the lieutenant-governor race, has so far avoided legal consequences. “They’ll never find another prosecutor to pick up his case,” Arora told me. (Jones is now supporting a Republican-led effort to investigate spending by Willis’s office, which Jones calls “fair game,” given her relationship with Wade.) Harvey said that he agreed with McBurney’s ruling in the Jones case. But he told me that he didn’t believe that Willis’s misstep here was as serious. “That was a more direct conflict than we seem to have now,” he told me.
It remains within McAfee’s power to recuse Willis’s office from the entire case. That would, of course, be a tremendous setback for the prosecution effort, given the time and resources the office has already poured into it. But Arora wondered, “Will the judge invite the political pushback that doing so would create for him?” McAfee is up for election in May and the deadline to qualify for the race ends in early March. His decision in the Willis matter could create an opening for an opponent. “That could be a consideration,” Arora said. But others rejected this theory, arguing that McAfee would decide the issue on its merits. “I wouldn’t question the integrity of his court,” Harvey told me. As for Willis’s situation, Harvey added, one thing is certain. “If there are convictions in this case, all will be forgiven,” he said. “At least by truth-seekers.” ♦