Legal professionals representing former President Donald J. Trump are persevering with to press their argument that the lead prosecutors within the Georgia election interference case are mendacity about when their romantic relationship started, surfacing telephone data on Friday that they may doubtless use to attempt to undercut the prosecutors’ testimony.
In a court docket submitting, Mr. Trump’s legal professionals in Atlanta offered an affidavit describing telephone data obtained by a subpoena that they mentioned confirmed greater than 2,000 calls between Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district lawyer, and Nathan Wade, the lawyer she employed to assist oversee the case, within the first 11 months of 2021. The data additionally confirmed that the 2 exchanged roughly 12,000 textual content messages over that interval.
There isn’t a dispute that Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis had been in touch in 2021. They’re longtime associates, and after Ms. Willis was elected district lawyer in 2020, she appointed Mr. Wade to a hiring committee to display candidates for jobs within the district lawyer’s workplace. She additionally consulted with Mr. Wade on quite a lot of points, together with strategic questions on large instances, after taking workplace in January 2021.
His advisory function prolonged into the interval lined by the cellphone information that Mr. Trump’s new movement cites, Jan. 1, 2021 to Nov. 30, 2021. At a listening to within the case final week, former Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia, an skilled trial lawyer, recalled that Ms. Willis and a group that included Mr. Wade met with him in October 2021 and requested if he needed to take the job that Ms. Willis ultimately gave to Mr. Wade.
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade just lately acknowledged that they’d been in a romantic relationship, however they mentioned it started after she employed him to work on the Trump case
The affidavit of Charles Mittelstadt, an investigator employed by the Trump legal professionals, additionally described cellphone location information that they mentioned confirmed Mr. Wade’s telephone, on at the least 35 events, was linked “for an extended period” to a cell tower close to a condominium the place Ms. Willis was residing.
The investigator mentioned the information advised that on two particular events, Mr. Wade was within the neighborhood of Ms. Willis’s residence starting late at night time, and ending earlier than daybreak. A type of events was late on the night time of Sept. 11, 2021.
Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for the district lawyer’s workplace, declined to remark, besides to say that the workplace would reply to Mr. Trump’s submitting with its personal court docket submitting.
Mr. Trump’s group didn’t launch the information utilized by their investigator, so it was not doable to instantly confirm their claims. Nor was it clear on Friday what impact Mr. Trump’s submitting may need on the protection’s ongoing effort to disqualify Mr. Wade, Ms. Willis and her total workplace primarily based on allegations that the romantic relationship led to a battle of curiosity.
However the data will nearly actually be utilized by protection legal professionals to argue that the 2 prosecutors started their romantic relationship earlier than Ms. Willis employed Mr. Wade on Nov. 1, 2021 — and never in 2022, as the 2 prosecutors have insisted.
The reliability of such cellphone monitoring expertise has come beneath hearth earlier than, together with when it was deployed by allies of Mr. Trump to assist advance false claims about widespread poll stuffing in the course of the 2020 election. Such expertise may be restricted in how exactly it could pinpoint somebody’s location.
The variety of contacts described within the new Trump submitting would imply that the 2 prosecutors, on common, talked on the telephone round six occasions a day over 11 months and exchanged roughly 36 texts every day.
The connection first got here to mild in a submitting final month by Michael Roman, considered one of 15 co-defendants within the election interference case and a former Trump marketing campaign official. Mr. Roman contends that the 2 prosecutors engaged in “self-dealing” habits that amounted to a battle of curiosity, as a result of Mr. Wade used cash he was paid by the district lawyer’s workplace to fund journeys that he and Ms. Willis took collectively.
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have denied any improper monetary advantages, and have testified that they roughly cut up the prices of their holidays.
However the query of precisely when the connection began has additionally change into a matter of competition, with Mr. Roman’s lawyer claiming that it began earlier than November 2021 — which might imply, in essence, that Ms. Willis employed a boyfriend for the profitable and high-profile job of managing the Trump case.
The legal professionals are scheduled to proceed arguing over the disqualification query in a listening to set for subsequent Friday.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a legislation professor at Georgia State College who has adopted the Trump case in Georgia carefully, mentioned he doubted that the cellphone information would issue closely into the decide’s ruling on disqualification. As a result of Ms. Willis has acknowledged that Mr. Wade was a mentor and shut adviser, Professor Kreis mentioned, “it’s not contradictory for them to spend time together and exchange text messages, especially in the run-up to the investigation of Donald Trump.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Kreis mentioned the information “could be problematic” if the decide believes that it damages Mr. Wade’s and Ms. Willis’s credibility.
