An important witness in the hearings to determine whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from prosecuting the case against former President Donald Trump said under oath Tuesday that he “could have” lied about his friend and client, special prosecutor Nathan Wade, in text messages with one of the attorneys representing a co-defendant in the case.
Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former law firm partner who also served briefly as his divorce attorney, was forced to return to the witness stand Tuesday after the judge overseeing the case ruled that his previous claims of attorney-client privilege were invalid.
Judge Scott McAfee met with Bradley behind closed doors after he began to suspect during Bradley’s prior testimony that material the witness claimed as privileged might not actually be covered by attorney-client privilege.
McAfee said that Bradley’s testimony had caused him to be “left wondering if Mr. Bradley has been properly interpreting privilege this entire time,” as The Western Journal reported on Feb. 17.
The result of the judge’s meeting with Bradley on Monday was that the witness would have to return to the stand and testify on some points that he had refused to discuss under prior questioning.
He was confronted by the defense team with a transcript of statements he had made to attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who is representing GOP political operative Michael Roman, one of Trump’s co-defendants in the election interference case.
Merchant asked Bradley in those messages whether he believed the romantic relationship between Wade and Willis, which both have claimed didn’t begin until 2022, had actually begun before Willis hired Wade in November of 2021.
“Absolutely,” Bradley replied, according to Fox News.
According to CNN, however, Bradley testified Tuesday that he didn’t actually know when the relationship started, and that his response to Merchant had been “speculation.”
Should Fani Willis be impeached?
“I do not have knowledge of it starting, or when it started,” he said, according to the outlet.
“I was speculating, I didn’t have a — no one told me,” he further claimed. “I was speculating.”
Richard Rice, an attorney representing another co-defendant in the case, asked Bradley if he regularly shared “lies about your friends” with others, according to Fox.
“Do you tell lies about your friends? About a case of national importance?” Rice asked.
“I could have had, I don’t know,” Bradley responded.
Bradley remained on the stand for about two hours Tuesday, according to Fox, claiming during that time that he couldn’t recall the answers to “more than two dozen” questions and that he and Wade had spoken about the relationship only once.
Robin Yeartie, a former employee in the DA’s office with Willis, had previously testified that she had “no doubt” that the romance between the two began in 2019, well before Willis hired Wade as special prosecutor in the case.
Yeartie, whom Fox described as previously having been a “good friend” of Willis, said she had seen the two acting affectionately well before Wade’s November 2021 hiring.
“She testified to observing Willis and Wade ‘hugging’ and ‘kissing’ and showing ‘affection’ prior to November 2021 and that she had no doubt that the two were in a ‘romantic’ relationship starting in 2019 and lasting until she and Willis last spoke in 2022,” Fox reported.
