ATLANTA — A man billed as the “star witness” in the case to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) took the stand Friday and acknowledged he exchanged text messages about Willis with the defense attorney who first raised allegations that Willis was engaged in an improper personal relationship with the outside attorney she appointed to lead the case against Donald Trump.
But Terrence Bradley, a former law partner of special prosecutor Nathan Wade, repeatedly declined to answer questions under oath about what he knew about the romantic relationship between Willis and Wade. Bradley, who previously represented Wade in his ongoing divorce, cited concerns he might violate attorney-client privilege and could be disbarred.
However, in a dramatic moment, an attorney for Bradley later asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee if his client could be released from that privilege after a prosecutor claimed during cross-examination that Bradley and Wade ended their legal partnership after Bradley was accused of sexually assaulting an employee and a client. Prosecutors implied this raised questions about Bradley’s credibility as a witness and whether he had ill will toward Wade.
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Bradley, who emphatically denied he had sexually assaulted anyone, admitted the employee’s claims had led him to sever his partnership with Wade. He testified that he still considered Wade to be “a friend.”
The revelation, which came near the end of a two-day evidentiary hearing on misconduct claims against Willis, led McAfee to abruptly end Bradley’s testimony. McAfee said he would meet with Bradley and his attorney in a private hearing to consider whether Wade’s attorney-client privilege claim with Bradley had been pierced and whether Bradley could be forced to answer questions about Willis and Wade.
McAfee will ultimately have to decide if the prosecutors’ relationship created a conflict of interest or the appearance of one — and if Willis’s office should be removed from the case or if any of the charges should be dropped against Trump or his allies, who are accused of criminally conspiring to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. That decision probably won’t come soon: McAfee said Friday he will schedule another hearing for late next week or the following for closing arguments. The scandal has threatened to imperil the criminal case against the former president, and Willis’s allies worry it has hurt her credibility.
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Bradley’s silence on what he knew about Willis and Wade’s relationship, including when it began, came as Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for co-defendant Mike Roman, presented text messages and an email showing that she had been communicating with Bradley since September when she began investigating allegations of an improper romantic relationship between Wade and Willis.
The exchanges presented in open court suggested that Bradley had been a key source for Merchant, who has claimed that Willis was already in a romantic relationship with Wade when she appointed him to lead the election case.
Bradley initially testified he did not recall conversations with Merchant, claiming that he had communicated with her through a “third party.” But he eventually acknowledged that he spoke to Merchant by phone and later exchanged text messages as she sought to confirm rumors that Willis and Wade were a couple.
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In one message introduced as evidence by Merchant, she had messaged Bradley asking if he knew of anyone who would give her “an affidavit … about the affair.”
Examining his own phone, Bradley confirmed that he responded, “No one would freely burn that bridge.”
Bradley also confirmed that he texted with Merchant about trips Willis and Wade took together and how Wade had used his corporate card to pay for them. Bradley confirmed Merchant had sent him a copy of the Jan. 8 motion she filed that first detailed allegations of an improper relationship between Willis and Wade.
“Looks good,” Bradley texted Merchant in response to her filing — a message he confirmed under oath.
In a motion last week, Merchant claimed Bradley would “refute” claims by Willis and Wade that their romantic relationship did not begin until after Nov. 1, 2021 — the date he was appointed to lead the Trump investigation. But Bradley repeatedly testified that he had “no personal knowledge” of when their relationship began — a claim that visibly frustrated Merchant and other defense attorneys who strongly implied that Bradley had relayed different information in his earlier communications with Merchant.
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Special prosecutor Anna Cross, who is leading efforts to help Willis retain control of the case, accused Merchant and Bradley of trading “gossip” and “hearsay,” as lawyers from both sides battled for hours over what Bradley could and could not testify about. The back-and-forth came after Bradley, who briefly testified Thursday morning, failed to appear Friday morning for scheduled testimony. His attorney claimed that Bradley had a medical appointment.
Share this articleShareBut McAfee, a typically opaque presence on the bench, was visibly annoyed, telling the attorney that Bradley had not previously informed the court about a medical visit and warned that he was in potential violation of his subpoena.
One day earlier, Willis testified and angrily sparred with Merchant and other defense attorneys whom she accused of spreading “lies” about her and her relationship with Wade. Willis had been scheduled to return to the witness stand Friday morning for prosecution questioning, but as the hearing got underway, Cross announced she had no questions for Willis and the district attorney’s appearance was concluded.
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Instead, prosecutors called other witnesses to bolster Willis’s claims on the stand, including her testimony that Wade was not her first choice to lead the investigation. Former Georgia governor Roy Barnes (D) testified about an October 2021 meeting where he turned down Willis when she asked him to take on the case. He said he had concerns about income and potential threats that came with taking on the high-profile case against a former president.
“I have mouths to feed at a law office and that I could not, I would not do that,” Barnes testified. “I’d lived with bodyguards for four years, and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t going to live with bodyguards for the rest of my life.”
Prosecutors also called Willis’s father, John Clifford Floyd III, a former criminal defense attorney who at one point lived with his daughter in her Atlanta-area home. Floyd testified that Willis moved out at his urging when threats against her began to escalate, while he remained, taking care of the property — a brand-new home that his daughter had built only to be forced to leave it.
“Somebody needed to protect the house,” Floyd said, recalling how he once cleaned “the b-word and the n-word” that had been spray painted on the house, not telling his daughter about it. The threats soon became too much and now the house is “uninhabitable,” he testified.
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Floyd said under oath that he had not met Wade until last year and didn’t learn of his daughter’s relationship with him until seven weeks ago — when the rest of the world did. While the two are extremely close, Floyd said he and his daughter don’t talk to each other about their romantic lives. “I haven’t confided in her about mine before — when I had one,” he said.
At Thursday’s hearing, defense attorneys seized on comments Willis and Wade made about her repaying him for trips in cash, exchanges for which they did not have documentation. Trump has accused Willis in social media posts of not having actually made those repayments and, therefore, financially benefiting from appointing Wade to the case.
But Floyd tried to explain to the court Friday that he taught Willis to always have large amounts of cash on hand in her home. He said he owned multiple safes of his own and had proudly purchased his daughter “her first cash box,” where he encouraged her to always keep at least six months’ worth of money.
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He said the advice was driven by his own experience, where people had sometimes refused to take credit cards or travelers checks from him because “of the color of my skin.”
“Excuse me, your honor, I’m not trying to be racist. But it’s a Black thing, okay?” Floyd said. “I was trained, and most Black folks, they hide cash or they keep cash.”
Gardner reported from Washington. Marianne LeVine and Maegan Vazquez in Washington, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez in Phoenix, Sarah Ellison in New York and Patrick Marley in Madison, Wis., contributed to this report.
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