Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis is refusing to hand over five years of texts she exchanged with ex-boyfriend Nathan Wade, the attorney she hired to prosecute Donald Trump election fraud allegations.
In a court filing, Willis’ lawyer states that a Georgia senate committee has subpoenaed the texts, regardless of subject, and collecting them would be an “immense” burden on Willis’ office.
The Republican-led committee has also subpoenaed five years of emails between the pair, to assess if Willis improperly hired Wade to prosecute the former president.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis appears before Judge Scott McAfee in a Georgia election interference hearing. Willis is opposing a demand to hand over five years of text messages exchanged with Nathan Wade, the chief prosecutor in the case.
Dennis Byron/Getty Images
“The subpoenas’ broad demands to produce documents are profoundly harmful to the Prosecution. For example, the subpoenas seek every single email between Petitioner [Willis] and Former Special Counsel Wade for the last five years,” according to the filing by Willis’ attorney, Roy Barnes. “By its own terms, this request seeks privileged documents concerning the Prosecution.”
“The subpoenas also seek every text message exchanged between Petitioner and Former Special Counsel Wade for the last five years, regardless of their relevance to any legislative purpose. Even if Petitioner were to direct her office to provide only a privilege log for such documents, the financial and temporal burdens to comply with the subpoenas would be immense,” the filing adds.
A privilege log would assess which emails and texts are protected by attorney privilege.
Newsweek sought email comment on Thursday from Nathan Wade and from Willis’ office.
Willis, a Democrat, charged former President Donald Trump with allegedly seeking to interfere with the election results in Georgia, a swing state that narrowly backed President Joe Biden in 2020.
Her case focused on Trump’s call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump asked him to find enough votes to tilt the 2020 election in his favor, as well as 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 had been in a relationship with Nathan Wade, the attorney she hired to prosecute the case.
The trial judge, Scott McAfee, sharply criticized Willis in a ruling in March and ruled that either she or Wade had to leave the case. Wade resigned from the Trump case hours later.
On Tuesday, McAfee declined to rule on Willis’ efforts to block the requested subpoenas.
He said he has concerns about a potential conflict of interest, as he is also the trial judge in Trump’s election fraud case.
“The court concludes that its impartiality might be reasonably questioned in this matter,” he wrote.
Willis’ attempts to block the subpoenas will now be “randomly” assigned to another judge, according to McAfee’s order.
The subpoenas were issued by the Senate Special Committee on Investigations.
The Georgia senate set up the special committee to “thoroughly investigate the allegations of misconduct by the district attorney for Fulton County, Fani Willis” related to alleged “potential conflicts of interest and misuse of public funds.”
