Texts Show Witness Readily Helped Build a Case to Disqualify Trump Prosecutors
Terrence Bradley, an Atlanta-area lawyer, had been billed as the star witness in the effort to disqualify Fani Willis, the district attorney leading the election interference case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia. But when Bradley took the stand this week — and twice earlier this month — he was a deeply reluctant witness.
His testimony did little to resolve a question at the heart of the defense’s attempt to show that Willis had an untenable conflict of interest: whether the romantic relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, the lawyer she hired to help run the Trump case, began before or after he joined her staff.
But hundreds of text messages obtained by The New York Times show that Bradley, a former law partner and friend of Wade, helped a defense lawyer to expose the relationship between the two prosecutors.
The texts reveal that Bradley, who served for a time as Wade’s divorce lawyer until the two men had a bitter falling-out, assisted the effort to reveal the romance and provide details about it for at least four months — countering the impression he left on the witness stand that he had known next to nothing about the romance.
In the text exchanges, which began in September of last year and were reported late Wednesday by CNN, Bradley claimed some knowledge of when the relationship began. He even offered the defense lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, reassurance as she submitted her motion to disqualify to the court.
“I am nervous,” Merchant texted to Bradley on Jan. 8, the day she filed the motion. “This is huge.”
“You are huge,” Bradley encouraged her. “You will be fine.”
Ultimately, it will be up to the judge to assess the credibility of Bradley and determine whether the text messages bolster the case for disqualifying the prosecutors.
Lawyers for Trump and his co-defendants have argued that the relationship between the prosecutors amounted to “self-dealing,” because Wade, who has made more than $650,000 working for Willis’ office, paid for vacations that the couple took together. A series of hearings delving into the issue has plunged the overall case into turmoil.
When contacted Thursday morning, a lawyer for Wade, Andrew Evans, said that “the texts contain several outright lies.” Among them, Evans said, was an assertion from Bradley that either Evans or his wife, Stacey Evans, a Democratic state representative, had witnessed Wade and Willis having sex.
A lawyer for Bradley, Bimal Chopra, Jr., declined to comment.
Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has defended her conduct. She has acknowledged that she had a romantic relationship with Wade. But she has said that it started after she hired him and argued that the relationship did not create a conflict under Georgia law.
Both Wade and Willis have told the court that they divided the costs of the vacations about evenly between them.
Bradley was one of two witnesses called by Merchant to testify, expecting they would say that the relationship started before Willis hired Wade in November 2021. The other was Robin Yeartie, a former friend of Willis and former employee of the DA’s office, who testified in mid-February that the romance started before Wade was hired.
The business partnership between Wade and Bradley soured after Bradley was accused of sexually assaulting an employee, an accusation he vigorously denied during his testimony. Bradley told the court this week that he had not spoken to Wade in more than a year.
Before exposing the romance in her Jan. 8 filing, Merchant asked Bradley in a text, “Do you think it started before she hired him?”
“Absolutely,” Bradley replied, adding that the romance had started when the two served as local judges, before Willis’ election as district attorney in 2020.
But on the witness stand this week, Bradley said he had only been “speculating” about the timing. Although Wade had told him about the relationship, he said on the stand, he did not have direct knowledge about when it began.
The text messages — some of which Merchant described in court after Bradley did not provide the testimony she was hoping for — show that Bradley was trading messages with Merchant about the prosecutors and their romance as long ago as September. Bradley made suggestions about who might know about the romance and be able to corroborate it. He encouraged Merchant to subpoena members of Willis’ security detail and other members of her staff.
He also helped Merchant as she tried to pinpoint the location of an apartment where Willis was staying. And he accused Wade and Willis of “arrogance.”
Merchant texted Bradley in early January that she had records showing the two prosecutors had traveled to the Napa Valley in California and had taken a Royal Caribbean cruise together, writing that she was “shocked they were so careless.”
“Damn what else,” he replied.
When Merchant was writing the motion to disqualify the prosecutors, she assured Bradley that “I protected you completely,” adding, “I kept you out of it.”
Merchant also told Bradley that she was becoming president of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and wanted him to become more involved in the group, including by becoming a program director for an upcoming seminar.
Their mutual trust developed to the point that Bradley agreed when she asked if she could subpoena him.
“You are my friend and I trust you,” he told her.
Weeks later, on the witness stand, Bradley appeared to be dismayed that Merchant had ended up making him a central witness on the matter. They clashed during his testimony when it became evident that his prior enthusiasm for talking about the prosecutors’ romance had vanished. At one point during a hearing Tuesday, a frustrated Merchant said to the presiding judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court, “Judge, he doesn’t remember much of anything right now.”
Steven Sadow, a lawyer for Trump, pressed Bradley on the text exchanges at the hearing, seeking to cast doubt on Bradley’s claim that he had merely been speculating in the text messages about when the relationship began.
“Why would you speculate and say that in a text?” Sadow asked, repeating the question several times.
“I don’t recall why I thought that it started at that time,” Bradley replied.
The hearings delving into the romantic relationship do not change the underlying details of the election interference case itself, in which Trump and his allies are charged with conspiring to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Four of the 19 original defendants have already pleaded guilty.
Even so, the effort to disqualify the prosecutors has been an extraordinary detour that has turned the case upside down, with defense attorneys acting more like prosecutors, and vice versa.
Another defense witness, Yeartie, testified that the romance started before Wade was hired. Yeartie left the DA’s office on bad terms, a turn of events that ended her friendship with Willis.
Even if McAfee allows Willis to keep the case, she is likely to face tough scrutiny, including from a new state commission with the power to remove prosecutors and from the Georgia Senate, which has opened an investigation.
Many observers, including some who support the election interference case, believe that Willis needs to cut ties to Wade and have him leave her office. So does Bradley, according to his texts: “She needs to fire nathan but she wont,” he wrote to Merchant, to which she replied, “yep,” adding, “She will go down in flames for Nathan.”
Merchant declined to comment Thursday, except to say that she had not provided the text messages to the media. Another hearing in the case is scheduled for Friday, but a decision on the disqualification issue is not expected until next week at the earliest.
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