Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis planned her prosecution of former President Donald Trump before she took office, her former top prosecutor Nathan Wade revealed in a bombshell deposition before the House Judiciary Committee.
Willis’s prosecution of Trump for election interference has hit numerous roadblocks inside and outside the courtroom. Trump, who pleaded not guilty, has argued her case is politically motivated lawfare.
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Wade’s deposition on October 15 before Chairman Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) committee revealed Willis planned her legal assault on Trump before she took office in January 2021.
Wade, after struggling to remember the timeline, acknowledged Willis contacted him “sometime after the election, but prior to her taking office” to recruit him to lead a search committee for a special prosecutor to target Trump. The committee eventually selected Wade.
“Eventually, I guess the committee turned their guns on me and started trying to convince me to accept the role,” Wade said.
The day after Wade signed his lucrative contract with Willis, he filed for divorce from his wife. Willis and Wade later testified in court that after they began their affair — and after Wade began receiving checks from her office — he took her on multiple exotic vacations.
Wade officially resigned from the case in March 2024 after Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Willis could only remain on the Trump case — his sole assignment — if she removed Wade or if he voluntarily resigned.
While McAfee’s ruling found that the former lovers’ relationship produced no “actual conflict,” he wrote that the two engaged in an “appearance of impropriety” necessitating Wade’s removal.
Beyond suggesting a political motivation behind Willis’s Trump prosecution, Wade’s deposition included multiple other troubling moments regarding the level of White House involvement that led to more questions than answers.
Wade confirmed multiple meetings with Biden-Harris White House officials but repeatedly refused to disclose details of those meetings. He repeatedly claimed he did not remember whether critical meetings — some of which lasted 8 hours, according to his billings — occurred in person or via teleconference.
2024-10-15 Nathan Wade Deposition_Redacted_Errata by jmanship on Scribd
The most critical meeting took place on November 18, 2022, when Wade spent eight hours in the White House counsel’s office. That meeting occurred the same day U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith and Matthew Colangelo, the former third-highest ranking official at the U.S. Department of Justice, resigned to take a position in the Manhattan prosecutor’s office.
That trio of events occurred just days a November 9 press conference in which President Joe Biden, asked about the prospects of Trump running against him in 2024, said, “We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power, if he does run, making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again [sic].”
Breitbart News first reported the significance of those November 18 meetings, occurring on the heels of Biden’s pronouncement.
Despite the significance of meeting with White House counsel — a privilege rarely offered to a lowly county prosecutor — Wade testified that he did not remember this meeting or whether it occurred by telephone or in person.
He had billed the meeting as “Interview with DC/White House” and was paid 8 hours of work at $250 per hour.
Wade’s inability to remember details of critical meetings on his lone assignment for the office is striking. In another example, Wade confirmed billing Willis’s office $2,000 on May 23, 2022, for “Travel to Athens; Conf with White House Counsel.” Yet he could not recall who was involved with the meeting, where the meeting occurred, or whether the meeting occurred over the phone or in person.
He said, “I can’t recall,” “I don’t recall,” or “I don’t know” 58 times during his deposition.
Wade also confirmed his office’s coordination with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) much-maligned January 6th Committee, which Republicans have argued was illegally constituted and a political sham.
He confirmed meeting with “individuals associated with the January 6th Committee,” on several dates in 2022, although he repeatedly was unable to remember key details. After acknowledging he met with “lawyers” connected to the committee, he could not recall who the lawyers represented and did not provide their names.
Although McAfee ruled no actual conflict took place in Willis’s appointment of Wade, Republicans and legal experts have criticized Wade’s fitness for the role. His prior experience includes working in private practice as a trial attorney on contract disputes and family law and as a municipal judge dealing with traffic tickets.
Wade admitted in his deposition he had no relevant experience for the role and had to seek remedial training to gain applicable subject matter knowledge.
Despite Wade being an apparently poor fit to oversee such a prosecution, he admitted during his deposition that no one oversaw his work as special prosecutor.
Willis instructed Wade on the day before his deposition not to answer any questions about his work in her office to the House Judiciary Committee, Breitbart news reported.
In addition to Wade’s repeated inability to remember details regarding Willis’s office and his work prosecuting Trump, Wade’s counsel repeatedly interjected to channel Willis’s instructions that the case was “ongoing,” hindering the committee from details on the case.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
