Credit Card Statements Suggest Prosecutors in Trump Case Traveled Together
The estranged wife of a special prosecutor accused of having a romantic relationship with Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta district attorney who hired him, offered evidence on Friday that Ms. Willis accompanied him on trips unrelated to their work: leading the Georgia case against former President Donald J. Trump.
A court filing from Joycelyn Wade, who is in divorce proceedings with the prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade, included what it said were statements for a credit card account belonging to Mr. Wade. The statements showed that he bought plane tickets for himself and Ms. Willis, including tickets to San Francisco from Atlanta purchased on April 25, 2023, and to Miami from Atlanta purchased on Oct. 4, 2022.
The release of the credit card statements follows a motion filed last week by Michael Roman, one of Mr. Trump’s 14 co-defendants in the Georgia case. That motion, which did not include any proof, claimed that Ms. Willis was having a romantic relationship with Mr. Wade that began before she hired him in 2021 to manage the high-profile case. The motion also stated that Mr. Wade, who has been paid more than $650,000 by the district attorney’s office, paid for vacations with Ms. Willis.
The motion argued that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade had violated state rules of professional conduct, as well as local and federal law, and had created a conflict of interest that should result in both of them, and Ms. Willis’s office, being removed from the case.
The credit card statements appear to give weight to some of the claims in Mr. Roman’s motion, which said that Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis “have traveled personally together to such places as Napa Valley, Florida and the Caribbean,” and that Mr. Wade “has purchased tickets for both of them to travel on both the Norwegian and Royal Caribbean cruise lines.”
Ms. Willis, who is Black, has drawn significant national attention for her prosecution of Mr. Trump, who has attacked her as a “racist” and once made an unfounded allegation — promptly refuted by Ms. Willis — that she was “having an affair” with a “gang member.”
It is unclear whether the allegations of an improper relationship between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade will derail the case, or lead to either of them being removed from it.
While she has not directly addressed whether she is in a relationship with Mr. Wade, Ms. Willis has pushed back forcefully against some of the allegations in court and in public. At a Black church in Atlanta on Sunday, she suggested that racism was playing a role in the allegations against her and Mr. Wade, who is also Black.
Ms. Willis sought on Thursday to quash a subpoena that would require her to testify next week in the divorce case. In a court filing, her lawyer said that Mr. Wade’s estranged wife had “conspired with interested parties” in the Trump case “to annoy, embarrass and oppress District Attorney Willis.”
Ms. Wade’s filing on Friday stated that “Ms. Willis’s implied threat to pursue charges” against Ms. Wade and her divorce lawyer, “based on inconvenient facts from her personal life that are directly relevant to the ongoing divorce proceedings,” was “an affront to the integrity of her office.”
“Defendant seeks to depose Ms. Willis in order to determine details surrounding her romantic affair” with Mr. Wade, the document states, “as there appears to be no reasonable explanation for their travels apart from a romantic relationship.”
On Friday, a spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.
A hearing to consider unsealing filings in the Wade divorce case is set for Jan. 31 in Cobb County, Ga., outside Atlanta.
On Thursday, the judge presiding over the Trump case, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, ordered Ms. Willis to file a written response to Mr. Roman’s motion by Feb. 2 and to appear at a hearing on the motion Feb. 15.
