Are They Hunter Biden-ing Fani Willis?

A star witness blows up in defense counsels’ faces, and this feels so familiar somehow.

Terrance Bradley testifies in court. Photo courtesy of AP / File

I’ve refrained from commenting on the Fani Willis brouhaha until we knew more. Well, now we do.

So, does this sound familiar? Someone with an axe to grind makes salacious allegations and funnels highly questionable information to a Republican operative, creating a media frenzy and weeks of official “hearings.” 

In the end, the allegations are baseless, the star witness is super sketchy, but the damage is done because everything’s been derailed.

That’s the Hunter Biden story, but it applies to Fani Willis, too. 

To shift focus away from their own crimes, defendants alleged an illicit affair between Willis and a top prosecutor on the Georgia RICO case, Nathan Wade. That by itself isn’t enough to disqualify Willis on grounds of conflict of interest, so they further claimed she somehow benefited financially because Willis pays Wade, and he took her on trips.

Willis and Wade acknowledge they were romantically involved at one point, but that it occurred after Wade began working for Willis, and that the couple split expenses evenly and Willis paid him back for anything he spent on her. 

Judge McAfee wants to know when the romance began. If it was after Wade started, there logically would be no conflict because Wade couldn’t have been hired to benefit Willis financially.

If this wasn’t all exhausting and weird enough, the defense attorneys’ main line of attack ran into an unexpected wall earlier this week, indicating that the whole thing was, as it appeared to be, an inside set-up job leading to a total media and courtroom circus.

Today, I’ll lift this rock up and show you all what was wiggling beneath it.

The star witness was in cahoots with a defense lawyer for months

The initial chief source of information for the defense apparently was Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney, Terrence Bradley. The fact that Bradley was once Wade’s attorney and that they had a bitter falling out is important, but I’ll get to that in a bit. This next part is the headline and is frankly shocking—akin to learning that the source for the Biden bribery scandal was meeting regularly with Russian intelligence.

As reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bradley was secretly working behind the scenes against Wade, his former client and law partner. In fact, he had exchanged hundreds of text messages with defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, and even guided her on filing the disqualification motion against Willis and her office. The AJC received copies of the text messages on Wednesday and has reviewed them, determining that the communications between Bradley and Merchant had gone on for months. The paper reported,

They gossiped about lawyers in the DA’s office. Bradley referred to Willis as “arrogant” and encouraged Merchant as she was preparing to file her blockbuster motion to disqualify the DA.

“I am nervous,” Merchant wrote on Jan. 8, the day she filed the motion. “This is huge.”

“You are huge. You will be fine. You are one of the best lawyers I know,” Bradley responded. “Go be great.”

Bradley reviewed a copy of the motion before Merchant filed it, and he suggested adding information about money Wade had earned from the District Attorney’s office. Merchant took his advice.

The text messages also appear to contain blatant and salacious falsehoods, according to people who were identified in them. For example, as the New York Times reported, Bradley claimed to Merchant in the text messages that a man named Andrew Evans, or his wife Stacey, who is a Democratic state representative, had witnessed Wade and Willis having sex. Evans, who is a lawyer for Wade, described that as “outright lies.”

Bradley even fed Merchant ideas about whom she might subpoena to testify about when the relationship allegedly began, using his inside knowledge of office politics as a potent weapon. The list of potential witnesses included members of Willis’s security detail and employees of her office. One former employee was Robin Bryant-Yeartie, a one-time friend of Willis who testified she saw Willis and Wade kissing and hugging before Willis hired Wade in November 2021. 

But Bryant-Yeartie had an axe to grind as well. According to reports, she had departed the office on bad terms after being written up for poor performance. And she had not spoken to Willis in nearly two years, confirming on the stand that her departure had ended her friendship with Willis.

Within the text exchanges, Merchant promised to protect Bradley’s identity in her motion. But then, as it became clear that there was no strong direct evidence to refute Willis’s and Wade’s account that the romantic relationship began after Wade started working, Merchant made him a witness.

And the defense choked. Badly.

Bradley admits he was only speculating

First, let’s review the run-up to the bombshell testimony. Merchant was running out of options, so she ultimately reneged on her agreement and subpoenaed Bradley to the stand. He at first seemed okay with this, but then fought her over it, arguing ironically that his knowledge of the Willis / Wade romantic relationship was protected by attorney-client privilege. (And yes, once you think about that, it is bonkers. Because if that were true, then those text messages he exchanged with Merchant were huge violations of that privilege.)

After meeting with Bradley in private for nearly an hour and a half, the judge ultimately ruled that Bradley’s knowledge about when the romance began was not privileged and ordered him to testify. 

When Bradley took the stand on Wednesday, it was something straight out of a courtroom TV drama. And it quickly became clear that Bradley was not interested in getting himself into further trouble than he already was. 

He testified repeatedly that he didn’t know when the romantic relationship began, and that he was “speculating” when he was texting with Merchant about the case.

“I have no direct knowledge of when the relationship started,” Bradley said on the stand, then reiterated some version of that throughout his testimony. Defense attorney Merchant grew visibly frustrated at her star witness folding up his tent, even complaining, “Judge, he doesn’t remember much of anything right now.”

Seven defense lawyers then took turns trying to get him to testify about any actual personal knowledge. But Bradley repeatedly answered, “I don’t know” and “I don’t recall” and wound up not ever contradicting Willis and Wade. 

Steven H. Sadow, a lawyer for Donald Trump, took his turn at Bradley as well. He had the unenviable task of trying to get at why Bradley’s current claim that he was merely speculating contradicted the implication of the text messages. 

“Why would you speculate and say that in a text?” Sadow asked six ways to Sunday.

“I don’t recall why I thought that it started at that time,” Bradley stubbornly replied.

So, here’s the thing

In my view, his testimony confirmed, as the exchanged text messages suggest, that Bradley was highly biased against Wade and wanted to damage him by spreading a false rumor via the defense counsel on the case. But Bradley never thought this would come to light, and he drew a line when it came to perjury. In other words, Bradley was eager to spread lies about Wade and Wilis to Merchant in private, but he didn’t dare publicly lie in court about it.

Why the false rumors and apparent vendetta in the first place, though? The business relationship between Wade and Bradley soured after (checks notes) Bradley was accused of sexually assaulting an employee. 

Bradley denied this on the stand, but we shouldn’t give this guy any benefit of the doubt. Remember, this was the same guy who, by his own admission, violated attorney-client privilege by discussing the alleged affair’s timing with counsel for one of the defendants. And by the way, this is not only a betrayal of confidence, but also the duty of loyalty that attorneys owe their clients. That duty prevents attorneys from acting adversely to a current or former client. It’s why we lawyers run conflicts checks whenever we take on a new client, to make sure we aren’t even by accident signing on to a case that would be against the interest of a client.

That duty of loyalty would seem to cover an instance when you are freely gossipping with defense counsel about a motion to disqualify your former client and his boss from one of the most important cases in the country.

What’s worse, it appears from the record that Bradley may have been attempting to induce Merchant into filing the motion to disqualify based on “evidence” that he knew he could not substantiate under oath. It would not surprise me in the least to see very serious ethical complaints against Bradley arise out of this. Based on the record, he really should lose his bar license over his behavior.

So where does this leave the case and the motion to disqualify? Judge McAfee took many notes during Bradley’s testimony, according to observers. The fact that Bradley was scheming behind the scenes with Merchant, but now had essentially disavowed everything he told her, is unlikely to play well with the judge.

But the Bradley fiasco doesn’t necessarily end the quest to disqualify Willis. The judge could in theory apply a squishy standard of “appearance of a conflict” rather than an “actual conflict” and hold Willis to what I feel would be an unfair standard, all over unproven and now highly suspect allegations.

The judge will hear legal arguments next over whether to disqualify Willis and her office. Those arguments are going to be supported only by rather flimsy facts and no credible direct evidence. But if he rules against disqualification, Judge McAfee will need to ensure there is an airtight record. The defense’s star witness’s involvement in the scheme, paired with his about-face on the stand, could insulate the ruling considerably on appeal. If McAfee is inclined to find no disqualification is warranted, the shocking implosion of the defense’s factual presentation likely could figure highly in his final decision.

From a broader viewpoint, we need to understand one thing: This was a hit job, manufactured from the get-go, and carried recklessly forward by people who ought to have known better. I have learned not to jump on shady stories immediately precisely because the level of subterfuge and the possibility of bad faith actors is a known fact of our politics and now our legal system.

If we have learned anything from Hunter Biden, and now Fani Willis, it is that we should never trust unfounded allegations and should certainly never run with them, no matter how breathlessly the media may cover it. Instead, it’s vital to ask, as an initial matter, who might be spreading misinformation in order to cast long shadows of doubt and to undermine justice or merely sow chaos.

The answers nearly always are as we suspected.