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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis likely thought that her case against former President Donald Trump would be the highlight of her career, but now it appears that it may end it.
The district attorney who is embroiled in a scandal with her former lover, and prosecutor on the Trump case, Nathan Wade just got another hard hit, Fox News reported.
She and Wade have been referred to the Georgia state bar for alleged misconduct by a watchdog group.
“The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is requesting that the Georgia state bar open disciplinary proceedings against the Fulton County DA and Wade for violations of the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct,” the Fox News report said.
The group alleges that Willis and Wade both committed perjury by lying under oath about the timing of their affair.
“To ensure that the citizens of Fulton County and the State of Georgia understand that the Bar will not countenance any violation of its ethics by those charged with upholding it, we urge you to revoke Ms. Willis’ license to practice law and permanently bar her from practicing law,” the group said in its referral, with a near identical request in its complaint against Wade.
The complaint speaks about Willis’ testimony that she reimbursed Wade for trips he paid for but that she used cash and therefore there was no paper trail to prove she paid him back. And when questioned about where the cash came from her answer was curious.
“Cash is fungible. I’ve had cash for years in my house. So for me to tell you the source of where it comes from … when you go to Publix and you buy something and you get fifty dollars and you throw it in there. It’s been my whole life. When I took out a large amount of money during my first campaign, I kept some of the cash of that,” she said.
It was that last sentence that the group said was an “admission of a clear violation of Georgia Campaign Finance law.”
It cited the part of the law that says that “Nothing in this Code section shall permit or authorize a candidate to utilize campaign funds for the purpose of making gifts, loans, or investments directly to: (A) The candidate…”
“The statute is unambiguous – and the facts are not in dispute – as Ms. Willis described in her testimony, she placed the money that was intended for her campaign into a “fungible” slush fund with other moneys that she would use for various other purposes, including reimbursing her boyfriend for leisure travel,” the group said in its complaint.
It also said that “keeping some of the cash” was a “willful intentional act and denied the citizens of Georgia the ability to exercise effective oversight over her campaign.”
“It is unreasonable to believe that a barred attorney running for public office would not have been aware that the strict reporting guidelines of Georgia campaign finance law existed to protect the public’s right to oversee elections and that she had an obligation to scrupulously abide by them,” it said.
The group cited one instance of what it alleged was Wade lying under oath and when an attorney said to him to “describe each instance in which you have had sexual relations with a person other than your spouse during the course of the marriage,” and he responded by saying “none.”
“First it is simply not credible that Mr. Wade did not know that he had sexual relations with Ms. Willis when he replied to the interrogatories above in his divorce case. Put simply, it is clear Mr. Wade knew that he had had sex with Ms. Willis, and he knew that at the time he was still married, and he simply lied in the interrogatories,” it said.
“Whether he was married was not a complicated question. In fact, he was the plaintiff in a divorce case, a case that cannot proceed without the parties being married. As an officer of the court, this is simply unacceptable. It is challenging to think of a more clear-cut example of ‘dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation,’” it said.
The complaint said that Wade’s “rationale for not answering the interrogatories truthfully under questioning shows a whole lack of understanding of the law that makes him unfit to practice law in the State,” which makes him a risk to possible future clients.
“The Bar owes the profession and the public a duty to guard the practice from charlatans and incompetents. Any simple reading of Mr. Wade’s testimony quickly reveals that he is so grossly unfamiliar with the simple understanding of a legal concept like marriage that the risk he and his incompetence poses to vulnerable members of the public requires his exclusion from the profession,” it said.
