Newly uncovered cellphone records show special prosecutor Nathan Wade visited the Atlanta-area neighborhood where District Attorney Fani Willis lived nearly three dozen times before he was hired by her office in 2021 to work on the election subversion probe into former President Donald Trump.
The evidence, based on cellphone tower records and outlined in a court filing Friday by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, could undercut testimony from Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade about the timing of their romantic relationship.
Mr. Trump and his co-defendants say Ms. Willis should be kicked off the case because she took lavish trips with Mr. Wade, giving her a financial incentive to prosecute the case as Mr. Wade received taxpayer money for his work on the probe.
The new filing said Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade exchanged over 2,000 voice calls and just under 12,000 text messages during the first 11 months of 2021. Many of the calls were in the evening hours.
On the witness stand, the pair testified they spoke with increasing frequency in 2021 but didn’t start their romance until 2022.
Notably, the filing from Trump lawyer Steve Sadow said Mr. Wade’s cellphone connected with towers near Ms. Willis’ residence in Hapeville, Georgia, a minimum of 35 times before his hiring in November 2021.
Mr. Wade testified he visited the Hapeville residence no more than 10 times before his hiring, and the pair said he never spent the night.
Yet the tower records suggest Mr. Wade arrived late at night and left the next morning on two occasions in late 2021. The pair testified their relationship started in 2022 and ended in mid-2023.
The filing is a notable ripple in the defense’s push to get Ms. Willis booted from the case.
Judge Scott McAfee heard two days of fiery testimony from Ms. Willis, Mr. Wade and other witnesses this month and is reviewing other evidence to determine if she had a financial conflict and should be disqualified.
The issue stems from a motion filed by Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, who says she learned of the Willis-Wade relationship through multiple sources and dug into the matter.
The situation grew into a minitrial of Ms. Willis and forced her and Mr. Wade to delve into intimate details of their relationship from the witness stand.
The new filing is based on an analysis from Charles Mittelstadt, a criminal defense investigator. He served a request for call/text history records and specialized location data from AT&T’s Subpoena Compliance Center and used an analytics tool known as CellHawk to produce his report.
The Washington Times reached out to a Willis spokesman for comment on the defense filing.
Ms. Willis began investigating Mr. Trump three years ago, based on his efforts to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to dig up enough votes to overturn President Biden’s 2020 electoral victory that the former president says was rigged. A grand jury last year indicted Mr. Trump and his associates.
The former president faces 13 counts, including a violation of Georgia racketeering laws, solicitation of a violation of an oath by a public officer, and several counts related to alleged conspiracies to commit forgery, make false statements and writings, or make false filings.
His co-defendants face an assortment of charges — 41 counts in all — that at times overlap with those against Mr. Trump.