Fani Willis rejects ‘huge’ request for years of text messages with Nathan Wade

Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis is refusing to hand over five years of text messages she exchanged with her ex-boyfriend Nathan Wade, the lawyer she hired to prosecute election fraud allegations against Donald Trump.

In a court filing, Willis’ attorney argues that a Georgia Senate committee subpoenaed the texts, regardless of their subject matter, and that collecting them would place an “enormous” burden on Willis’ office.

The Republican-led committee has also requested five years of emails between the two to assess whether Willis wrongly hired Wade to prosecute the former president.

“The broad demands in the subpoenas to produce documents are extremely damaging to the prosecution. For example, the subpoenas seek every email between Petitioner (Willis) and former Special Counsel Wade from the past five years,” according to the filing by Willis’ attorney, Roy Barnes. “By its terms, this request seeks privileged documents relating to the prosecution.”

“The subpoenas also seek every text message exchanged between Petitioner and former Special Counsel Wade over the past five years, regardless of their relevance to any legislative purpose. Even if Petitioner were to instruct her office to provide only a privilege log for such documents, the financial and temporal burdens of complying with the subpoenas would be immense,” the filing adds.

A privilege log is used to determine which emails and text messages fall under the lawyer’s right to refuse to testify.

Newsweek Thursday, an email seeking comment from Nathan Wade and Willis’ office.

Willis, a Democrat, accused former President Donald Trump of trying to influence the outcome of the election in Georgia, a swing state that narrowly supported President Joe Biden in 2020.

Her case focused on Trump’s phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump asked him to find enough votes to tilt the 2020 election in his favor, and an alleged plot to submit a false slate of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Trump’s prosecution was thrown into disarray after one of Trump’s co-defendants discovered that Willis was having an affair with Nathan Wade, the lawyer she had hired to prosecute the case.

The trial judge, Scott McAfee, sharply criticized Willis in a March ruling, ruling that either she or Wade must leave the case. Wade resigned from the Trump case hours later.

McAfee declined Tuesday to comment on Willis’s efforts to block the requested subpoenas.

He said he is concerned about a potential conflict of interest since he is also a judge in Trump’s election fraud case.

“The court concludes that her impartiality in this case may reasonably be questioned,” he wrote.

Willis’s efforts to block the subpoenas are now “arbitrarily” assigned to another judge, McAfee’s order said.

The subpoenas were issued by the Senate Special Investigating Committee.

The Georgia Senate has created a special committee to “thoroughly investigate allegations of misconduct by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis” related to alleged “potential conflicts of interest and misuse of public funds.”