All Episodes
Previous Next
March 1, 2024 - Viva & Barnes
04:44:36
The End of the Fani? Closing Arguments in Disqualification Hearing LIVE with Viva Frei Commentary!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Who haven't yet had the joy of having products from Amos Miller's organic farm?
We're going to figure out whether are you as a farmer allowed to make your own food?
Are you allowed?
The state testified that they don't even think you're allowed to make food without their permission, eat food without their permission, purchase food without their permission.
If they don't, you're not even allowed to do it on your own farm.
In this case, they've been rationing food, telling Amos how much he can eat, how much he can feed his own family, how he can't even feed his own pigs.
That's how insane it's got.
It's got to the point the state of Pennsylvania thinks they should have a complete monopoly on all food everywhere.
And if it's in your fridge, they can come in and take it, steal it, destroy it, because they didn't give you permission to eat it first.
That's what this is about.
And we're going to find out how much the court considers those issues and whether or not at least...
Giving some relief to this punitive injunction that right now is crushing Amos Miller and is putting people at risk of real harm because they can't get the food they need from them.
Now, I'm not going to play the entire thing because I don't want to be accused of and or even siphon off of everyone going to the Lan Patriot to watch the eight-minute video yourselves.
It's right here.
The Lancaster Patriot.
I'll tell you this.
How can you not love Barnes?
Barnes is not just a national treasure.
He's a...
I'm an idiot.
He's an international treasure.
How can you not love him?
In a platonic intellectual legal sense, obviously, because I'm a married man and I've been always talking about keeping your schmeckle in your pants.
Go check out the rest of that interview and share it.
And tag politicians who you think should be aware of this situation.
Not in a harassing way.
Ooh, is that me?
You look horrible today.
Not in a harassing way.
Go tag RFK Jr. is on it.
Tag a politician who does not understand what's going on in Pennsylvania right now.
Oh, we've got a day today.
Now, I wanted to address a couple of things.
Someone in the chat.
I'm not trying to pick on anybody and I'm not trying to pick on anybody.
I'm just going to go.
Okay, Megan.
Yeah, Megan DeLumpio.
Let me get the original one here.
Oh, there's too much.
I didn't slow the chat down.
That's the problem.
Megan DeLumpio.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
Megan, I don't know what you're saying.
I don't know why Viva is implying, trying to imply Fanny is getting in trouble.
I'm not implying anything.
I've predicted it.
She's getting disqualified from this case.
If I'm wrong, hell, there'll be a lot to make fun of.
I predicted it before things went really south and not in the Fannie Willis South way.
I'm predicting she's getting disqualified.
Period.
Now, I've got a bigger brain involved in today's stream who's going to be our intro guest until this goes live at 1 o 'clock.
Have you all been following Phil Holloway on Twitter?
If you haven't, I guess you haven't been getting things...
As early as you could possibly get them with the insights of Phil Holloway.
Shave my head.
That's a bannable offense, Joey.
Just so you know.
I'm joking.
Phil Holloway is going to be the intro guest.
He got those text messages.
He published them the day before yesterday.
He's been following this.
He's a lawyer.
He's got what I love as the southern accent.
And I love it.
We were talking before we went live.
And now, did the judge do anything today?
Earlier today, I didn't hear of anything the judge did earlier, but I did see the Fannie Willis affidavit of despair.
Like in the Princess Bride, you know they had the pits of despair?
Affidavit of despair is what Fannie just filed either today or yesterday.
I found somebody in California who remembers me paying him $400 cash.
We'll get into it.
All right.
That being said, we're saying hi to Phil, a new guest to the show, but hopefully this will be one of many.
Phil, you ready?
Coming in hot.
Three, two, one.
Sir, how goes the battle?
Well, it's like drinking from a fire hose.
You know, there's just so much that's coming at me so, so fast.
But hey, I'm happy to be here with you today.
It's wonderful how our paths cross.
I don't remember when I discovered you on Twitter, and I suspect it was as a result of Fannie Willis, but there's a lot of faces and a lot of stuff.
But I've discovered you now, and I know that you're covering this left, right, and center.
Let me just see if the audio level good, everyone.
Tell everybody who you are who may not know who you are.
Yeah, so I'm Phil Holloway.
I'm a lawyer in the metro Atlanta area.
I've been practicing in Cobb County, which is next door to Fulton County, for those who may not be aware, for, oh my God, 25 years almost now.
So I've been around here a long time.
In fact, I know a lot of the players involved in this.
I know Ashley Merchant.
I've known her since 2000.
Same with Terrence Bradley.
Same with Nathan Wade.
And, you know, it's just one of those things where this whole thing just literally blew up in my very backyard.
It's not the first time I've been involved in high-profile cases.
I used to work for CNN as a legal analyst until 2016 when I think they went all politics all the time, all Trump, and so it was time to punch out.
But you may have seen me a lot on Fox News and other...
Radio, even Sirius XM, Megyn Kelly Show, other things like that.
So I do a good bit of media.
I'm the legal analyst for WSB Radio here in Atlanta, and I'm also a town hall columnist.
Fantastic.
I'll ask you straight up front the first question.
People say Fulton County is corrupt.
People say Georgia as a whole is corrupt.
I don't want to ask any questions that you can't answer without getting disbarred.
Is it as corrupt as people say it is?
Well, there's corruption everywhere.
I mean, in any state, you're going to be able to find corruption.
I think that Georgia, on whole, I would not characterize as a corrupt state.
Now, there are pockets of it where, depending on how you define corruption, yeah, you're going to find it.
Fulton County, you know, some may call it corrupt.
I just call it a hot mess.
It's been a dumpster fire for as long as I've been practicing here, well before the current DA, well before the current sheriff.
And, you know, Fulton County has always been a...
Very, very challenging and not a very user-friendly place for lawyers to practice in.
I mean, it's just really, really bad, and I cannot overstate that.
And so what we see is a lot of dysfunction down there, and now Fulton County is suffering under a cyber attack.
They've got a malware ransomware attack, and so half their systems are still down.
It's just a hot mess.
You're still a practicing attorney?
Yes, sir.
And what type of law?
I do almost exclusively criminal law, but I do have a law enforcement background, and I do some independent investigations for people, oversee some things like that.
I've got a high-profile criminal case right now.
We're running a parallel investigation into.
I got my fingers in a lot of different pies, so to speak, but for the most part, I practice criminal law.
I came out of the military.
I was in the Navy as a judge advocate, and that was mostly all criminal law for the most part.
I just have never had much of an interest in civil law.
I've done it.
I've had my taste of it.
It's just not my thing.
I'm glad other people do it, but I think criminal law is more interesting, to be honest with you.
Well, look, I don't want to get into your childhood, but now I've got to ask a few more questions.
Born and raised in Georgia?
Yeah, I was born in Augusta, Georgia.
Left there when I was a...
My father was a doctor there.
I went to a small town of Tifton, Georgia to set up his medical practice when I was, I don't know, maybe one or two years old.
I was a toddler, but I grew up in South Georgia.
Other than my time in the military and in law school, which is like Texas and California, New England, more or less I've lived in Georgia my whole life.
And if I may ask, his family politically orientation, have you been Democrat, Republican, conservative, religious, neither here nor there?
I've got some family that, you know, may be a little different.
My political, I'm more of a libertarian, I think is where I would describe myself.
I've, you know, a lot of things that maybe certain Democrats might espouse might be things that I can get behind.
I believe in Fundamental fairness in the justice system, and I believe everybody is innocent until proven guilty.
You know, I'm very much into, you know, like the Constitution.
I'm a textualist.
I believe the Constitution means what it says.
I think that it's not a living and breathing document that needs to be tinkered around with a lot based on the political whims of the day.
So I don't know what that makes me, but I would call myself...
Really just a libertarian.
The Bill of Rights means quite a lot to me.
And so you go into the military as a JAG, like an official JAG.
Yeah.
It's a jury advocate.
What does the G stand for?
Judge Advocate General.
Yeah.
Judge Advocate General.
That's cool.
And so you're in the military, but a lawyer.
That's right.
Yeah.
And honestly, that was some of the best courtroom training I could ever get.
I cannot begin to say how much it helped prepare me.
My first job when I got back to Georgia was at the Cobb County District Attorney's Office.
I was a prosecutor here in the metro Atlanta area, you know, trying all kinds of cases for all those years I was there, and I was just ready to walk into a courtroom ready to go.
A lot of people right out of law school, they still have a lot of training, but the Navy had given me those skills, and I'm very grateful because it allowed me to To get off to a pretty good start with my career, you know, in terms of trial advocacy.
And what is, I mean, I saw the television series back in the day, JAG.
What is it, what did you do as a judge, a judge advocate general?
Like you try people for...
Yeah, you know, all the branches of the service have judge advocates, they have JAGs, and they, you know, they do things like claims, they'll get involved in...
Laws of conflict, when you have the military deployed somewhere and you've got rules of engagement, each commander will have a JAG that sort of makes sure that they're following the rules of engagement, interpreting them correctly.
But on a more, like, local sense, yeah, there's crimes that occur in the military.
And so you've got a prosecutor, you've got a defense shop, and they're all active duty, you know, military officers that work as prosecutors and defense counsel, and they have trials that are called court marshals, but it's a jury trial.
That's very, very, a jury trial and the jury members are consistent.
Yeah, the jury members are military.
Yeah.
Okay, that's wild.
I never even thought about this.
I have no life experience with this.
It's amazing.
Okay, so then you go into, well, you said you had law enforcement experience.
That's right.
When I was 18 years old, my father had died when I was around 17. And so when I was 18, a deputy sheriff in my hometown kind of took me under his wing.
Made sure I didn't, you know, get off from the wrong path and started riding around with him a lot doing ride-alongs.
And then they sent me to the police academy and I got certified as a peace officer in like 1998, I think it was, and became a reserve deputy sheriff at the age of 18. I wasn't even old enough to buy the gun that I was legally carrying.
And so...
Yeah, and so right before I went to law school, I was working as a police officer at Georgia Tech here in Atlanta.
And honestly, I got tired of having to fight people and get shot at for, I think I was making $9.17 an hour, and I didn't think that was really worth it anymore.
And I thought, heck, I'm just going to go ahead and go to law school, which I did.
Went out to law school in Houston, Texas, and the rest is history.
That's fantastic.
Now, I guess we should get into some of the juicy questions of this judicial saga here.
You've been following this from the beginning.
Yeah, pretty much.
You know, obviously, when...
Look, in full disclosure, I live in Fulton County, and I had a Fannie Willis yard sign in my yard when she was running.
The prior DA was a...
And everybody in the legal community wanted him gone, and she came along, and it was one of those things, well, hey, anybody's got to be better than Paul Howard.
So, yard sign goes up, I tell all my friends to go vote for her, and, you know, we got rid of Paul Howard.
And, you know, she takes office, and then she begins this investigation in Trump, and we knew we had the special grand jury.
We all knew where it was going.
We knew she was going to indict Trump and a whole bunch of other people.
She tried to even include the current lieutenant governor of Georgia in this group of potential defendants, but she was disqualified by a different judge for that because she had supported and I think maybe even given money to or hosted a fundraiser or something for his Democrat opponent.
And so for that reason, another judge says, no, you're disqualified from investigating this man.
And taking any action because of your politics and what you've said and done in terms of your politics.
And so to this day, you know, he has been excluded from this.
She wants the state of Georgia to pick it up and investigate him and include him.
But as of yet, the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia has not done anything with that request.
But she's no stranger to being disqualified from cases due to politics and shenanigans, that's for sure.
I don't want to get you in trouble.
Having supported Fannie is one thing.
Did she, like Leticia James, basically campaign off beating Trump somehow directly?
And people are into that in Georgia.
Well, some are, obviously.
It's just like everything else.
Trump lost Georgia, but barely.
Ask him, he'll tell you he didn't lose it.
But anyway, officially he lost it, but barely.
So I think the politics here are...
You know, 50-50 roughly.
I know there's some support for Trump that's rising and some support for Biden that's waning right now.
But it's roughly 50-50.
It's just like everywhere else.
You know, you got a lot of people that want to get Trump.
But see, here's the thing.
If you can give me just a minute to bear down on this point.
I don't care if you like Donald Trump or you hate Donald Trump.
This is not about Donald Trump.
This is not about Donald Trump's guilt or any other defendant's guilt.
This is about fundamental fairness.
This is where the libertarian comes out of me.
If the system isn't fair, then it breaks down.
And when the system breaks down, you get wrongful convictions.
You get people on death row when the system doesn't work who don't need to be there.
I have a podcast of my own that I did for a couple of years called Sworn.
And in season two, we drilled down on things that go wrong in the justice system that put people on death row and send them to prison for things they didn't do.
There's a lot of things in the system that need work, but it starts with a prosecutor with integrity.
A prosecutor who's not focusing in on one person because they're on a mission.
A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, as the saying goes, if they want to do it.
But you've got to have a fair-minded, objective prosecutor, or nothing else matters.
It's just as important as the right to a lawyer and the right to a jury.
And the right to be presumed innocent.
And if you have a prosecutor that's on a mission to get a specific person because she doesn't like him, that's wrong.
And I think that's what's going on here.
Look, it doesn't matter if I voted for Trump or if I didn't.
Maybe I didn't vote for Trump.
Maybe I don't want to vote for Trump this time.
But I think this prosecution is wrong.
And I'm not telling you, by the way, what my voting is or is not.
I'm just saying I don't want any people to read into that.
Because to me, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
This has everything to do with fairness.
Fundamental fairness is at the heart of due process.
Our Constitution requires due process, and that means, and it's been defined by the Supreme Court, as fundamental fairness.
And if you don't have a fair-minded, objective prosecutor, then...
The whole thing is invalid from the beginning, in my view.
Well, I'll ask this, but this is not...
I'm reluctant to ask because this is not about personalizing anything.
But Fannie runs off this idea like Leticia James of going after Trump.
I mean, how does anyone square that?
With any subsequent prosecution?
Like, there would have been a legitimate way to do this if she had done it properly?
Going after Trump after campaigning on going after him?
Like, that's what I don't understand with Leticia James, is how they didn't get disqualified from the get-go, or how it's not...
I don't know what...
Well, with Leticia James, you've got judges that are complicit.
Judges let her get away with it.
One thing that I have, over my almost 30 years of being a lawyer, I've learned that I don't trust...
Black robes to do the right thing under any circumstances.
And with all apologies to my judge friends, and I have many who might be watching this now or later, nothing personal, but I've seen judges do things that were just absolutely wrong, and I don't trust them to do the right thing.
And that's why lawyers, if they have some wisdom, they will try to work things out without having a judge to make the decision because it's a crapshoot.
You just never know.
There are some judges, obviously, that I would trust more than others to do the right thing, but as a general rule, I gave up years ago having any faith that just because somebody has a black robe on, it doesn't make them necessarily a great lawyer or a great jurist.
It just means that they...
Either, you know, won a popularity contest election or they got a political appointment because of who they knew or something along those lines and doesn't make them a smarter lawyer than I am.
It just means that they got the they got the rope.
Well, we say or we some people say in Canada that, you know, the lawyers who go become judges.
If you're a good lawyer, that's a downgrade in terms of pay.
So the people who do it are either not the best lawyers in the first place or people looking for clout and not financial compensation for their hard work.
I suspect it's maybe the same in the States.
Getting into this situation here, first of all, if I may ask, you've worked with Ashley Merchant?
Yes, yes.
I know her well.
I've had cases with her as co-counsel, and we're friends.
I'm friends with her husband, John.
She was a guest on my podcast a number of times as well.
I mean, so she's a very, very smart lawyer.
Now, let me ask you this.
Oh, and by the way, I saw several weeks ago, you had put something on Twitter.
You were trying to get her attention.
You were like watching a court hearing, and you were like, Ashley, I wish you could see this.
I actually responded to you.
You didn't see it.
I'm like, Tell me what you want to tell her.
I can get her the message.
Oh, dude, I'll ask you offline afterwards.
My request is still pending.
She has a private account for reasons I can imagine are obvious.
Did you know Terrence Bradley, personally?
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
Over 25 years.
Did you know Nathan?
Or do you know Nathan Wade as well?
Yes.
Absolutely.
I'm asking everything.
If you can't answer it, don't answer it.
I don't want to get anybody in trouble.
Everybody knows I know these people.
I've got nothing to hide.
Well, okay, so just starting with the most recent, the text messages.
I don't know Fannie, and I don't know the judge.
Okay.
Well, the judge is brand new, young, and I guess younger than you, or younger than us.
He's 30-something.
Yeah, 30-something.
Fannie, not Fannie, sorry, Terrence Bradley and Ashley Merchant go back as well.
She said we have a relationship, or a friendship.
Sure, sure.
In the text messages.
Was it sincere or was Ashley, as far as you can surmise, trying to use a source to get information?
Or was she sincerely friends with him and didn't want to hurt him?
That's Ashley.
She's being herself and he was being himself.
That was sincere.
What that was, was that was two lawyers.
Well, yeah, two lawyers working together, collaborating.
But Ashley's the one that's investigating the facts and circumstances that she needs to make sure she files the best motion, the most accurate motion she can.
You know, we can't just go off and launch these kind of missiles against people without having a good reason to do it.
So she's wanting to get her ducks in a row, and Terrence was one of the people that was helping her.
He's not the only one.
But Terrence is the one, if you read those text messages, that kind of put her onto this Robin Yurdy.
She's the former friend of...
Fonnie Willis, the person who owned the infamous condo, the sex condo down in Hapeville, Georgia, and testified that she saw Wade and Willis huggy kissy in 2019, right?
So this is where Ashley gets this information.
And so fast forward to court, he got Fonnie Willis walking in there slamming papers down saying, hey, you're a liar and you got no good faith basis for this.
Well, look at the text messages.
Obviously, there's a good faith basis for it.
Terrence and other people, I mean, I'm sure that's not the only person she was talking to.
Terrence is literally telling her where to look.
He says in there, if you've noticed in those text messages talking about, you need to go back to her original security detail in 2020.
They'll know everything.
And they'll know everything.
Well, what is it that they know?
Well, presumably they know about the affair because that's what Ashley was digging into.
If you look at the text messages, before Fannie admitted, The affair, Ashley still felt like she had to prove the affair, right?
And so she was digging up anybody who might have seen them or have knowledge of them at any time.
And he referred her back to the security detail from 2020, among other things.
A couple of procedural questions that I'll ask as they come up.
First of all, I'm shining a little too much.
I might have to back my lights up.
Subpoena, a subpoena Duchess Tecum.
You have those, like a subpoena bring with you documents.
Yeah.
Why did Fannie, not Fannie, why did Ashley not subpoena Terrence Bradley to bring with him the text messages so they could avoid all of that debate as to filing and completeness?
Well, I don't want to speak for her, but my best guess is, well, she had them in her own phone.
So she knew that he had them.
And so you can refresh a witness's recollection with...
Anything.
It could be a piece of paper, a napkin, or a text on your phone.
And if you need to impeach them with a prior inconsistency statement, which is what she did, she's printed them off from her own phone, so there wasn't really any need to have him bring something that she already was in possession of.
A lot of those text messages that are now in the public domain and that you have are not...
All of those are filed with the court.
They're not all in evidence, so to speak.
Some of them...
We're used in court.
Some of the smoking gun ones like, you know, are you sure that this is when the affair started?
He says, absolutely.
You know, that's the big one, right?
And it's in there.
There's some other ones in there.
And in Georgia, a prior inconsistent statement is substantive evidence upon which a judge can make a ruling.
In other words, it's just like a murder.
You got a picture of the crime scene or a picture of the murder weapon.
You can...
You know, if you're the judge, you can make a decision on that.
If you're a jury, you can convict somebody.
You can ignore what they say on the witness stand, and you can rely on what they've said in a prior inconsistent statement.
So, look, some media, CNN and some of the other crazy ones are saying, well, this was a bad day for the defense.
I say, no, it was not a bad day.
It was a great day because they got in, you know, the big text messages that they need.
I think the text messages are really clear.
Right?
It's clear that Terrence Bradley is lying when he says, I don't recall on the stand.
These text messages are from January.
But CNN comes out and says, bad day for the defense.
Merchant made accusations that she couldn't substantiate elsewhere as it relates to the date of the relationship.
Oh, she substantiated them.
It's like, you're in his testimony.
I don't know.
Can I say bullshit on here?
You can say whatever you want.
I mean, that's bullshit.
She can substantiate it, and she did.
Look.
She's not a liar, and she wouldn't put that in her plea.
She put in her pleading that she said Terrence Bradley will come to court and he'll say yada, yada, yada, yada.
And he didn't.
He said other things than what she expected him to say.
But why would a lawyer put that in their pleading?
I expect the witness is going to say this.
It's because she's talked to the witness and she's texted with the witness.
She has an idea of what the witness is going to say.
And so she puts a summary of it in her pleading.
Okay?
So that's why she wrote it up that way.
And after you see the text string that you have, it's obvious why she would believe that he would come to court and say that.
So the question is, and I don't know the answer to this.
I'm just posing the question.
What happened in maybe mid-February time frame?
Because these text messages look pretty collegial and friendly up until early February.
What happened?
To cause Terrence Bradley to do a 180, he didn't want to be there.
He didn't want to testify.
He looked ill.
He looked visibly ill.
He did not look like the Terrence that I've known for many years.
He said he was at the doctor on the Friday of the second day of the hearing.
Whether or not, I don't believe it, but it's plausible now.
Well, I mean, but when I say he looked ill, I'm not in the sense that he...
I'm not relating it to why he may have been at the doctor.
I'm just saying he just looked like he was sick, just wanting to get the hell out of there as fast as he could.
My hypothesis as to why Bradley flipped a 180, I mean, first of all, he gets the call, remember your ethics.
And some people say, that's not a call, that's a threat.
Then he also, I don't know if they told him beforehand, but he knows of the sexual...
The alleged sexual incident at the firm.
I mean, he knows that...
I don't know that he knew they were going to throw that at him.
No, no, well, for sure he didn't know that, but I mean...
He got blindsided by that.
Oh, God, there was the moment where you saw his...
He really is like, oh, they're going to do this.
But, I mean, that's where I see the implicit thread.
You got a DA of Georgia going after Trump, and in my humble view, for no good reason, and it's a total fabricated persecution.
If this guy has any alleged sexual assault, he knows...
They come up to you, we'll put you in jail.
And so my theory is...
I want you to refresh my...
Back to the, I guess, the first round of testimony with him.
Who was it that said, remember your ethics?
It was...
I remember it.
Grant, a guy named Grant.
It was a friend.
It wasn't either Fannie nor Nathan Wade.
It was somebody who...
Hold on, chat.
It'll get in the chat there.
I think his name started with a G. Let me see if anybody's going to get it.
And they said, remember...
Gabe Banks.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gabe Banks is married to, I think, the chief of staff for Fannie Wills.
Yeah, that's why people were telling me, Viva, you're missing something because Gabe Banks is a player in this, and that was a threat.
Well, okay, so if somebody's saying to him, remember your ethics, what was reported was, and I think it maybe came out in testimony, Bradley had contacted the State Bar of Georgia to get some guidance on what he's supposed to do here.
But it's already too late by that time.
He's already given the information to Ashley.
Well, and the thing is, the judge ruled that it wasn't covered by attorney-client privilege anyway.
And the judge told him, you've got to answer.
So he's in the clear.
To me, I'm missing something.
I don't see the ethical problem if the judge cleared him.
Well, the judge cleared him now, but the judge hadn't cleared him by then.
But he he had I could understand how he might say, like, holy crap, I did give some information.
It's not clear if I got this as a result of being friends or as a result of representing.
Well, you know, you know, as well as I know lawyers.
We go to lunch together.
We see each other in the courtrooms.
We're on the same calendar.
We shoot the shit in the jury box.
We're waiting on the judge to come.
We go drinking together.
We go to seminars together.
There's lots, or maybe we're law partners.
The lines get kind of blurry.
If you and I, if I'm representing you in your divorce, and I see you with another woman making out in a car, What I see you doing is not an attorney-client bit of information.
That's something that I observed.
If you tell me where you buried the body, because I'm your lawyer, I can't talk about it.
If I see you burying the body, that's a different story, right?
So there's lots of different ways he can learn things about Nathan Wade that are outside.
And in Ashley's pleading, she said he has knowledge that is not covered by attorney-client privilege.
And so she was aware that that was potentially an issue, but she was careful to isolate it to things that they were satisfied.
And presumably she knew that from talking to Terrence, right?
What is the source of your knowledge?
That way I can say in my pleading that it's not covered by attorney-client privilege.
And that's what she did.
Reading through it, I can understand how Terrence might have gotten a little nervous, but reading through it also, it's like, this is common knowledge.
Everybody knew what they were doing.
He was bragging and talking amongst friends.
Fannie Willis' friend knew it.
But the 180, I have no doubt that someone threatened him with criminal prosecution.
I don't know what good it's going to do.
Sorry?
For what?
For having colluded to help Ashley Merchant get disqualified, Fanny and what's his face?
Way out from the file.
I don't see that as a crime.
I mean, that's...
That's just...
It's not a crime, but it's certainly now shut up and protect Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade, or we're going to...
Oh, no, the crime is his alleged sexual assault employee at Wade's place.
So they say, hey, dude, we'll put you behind bars if you don't retract or recant and forget everything.
And I have no doubt that's what happened.
Look, I'm surprised.
That was the first I had heard of that.
That's the kind of thing that...
Us in the legal community, we probably would have gotten wind of that.
And the only reason that I have to explain it, that maybe it didn't get out, was the COVID years.
And we weren't seeing each other in court.
We weren't crossing paths as much.
We weren't seeing each other at the sandwich shop across the street from the courthouse.
And so lawyers weren't, the rumor mill wasn't going, right?
That's the kind of thing, though, if under normal circumstances, if 2021 and 2020 had been like normal years, that's the kind of thing that would have been harder to keep quiet.
But when I heard that come out from the courtroom, on the witness stand, I was floored.
I couldn't believe it.
There's not an ounce, there's not a fiber in my body, my being, that would believe that Terrence Bradley would commit a sexual assault.
I just can't fathom that.
And then it opens up an entire new can of worms, or at least the question is, did he actually commit assault, or was it something of a shakedown to get him out of the firm, and he had to leave under the threat of some sort of...
Maybe it was consensual.
By the sounds of what's going on in that firm, dudes are sleeping around left, right, and center, and it becomes an issue.
So whether or not it's even a real sexual assault or a falling out, and they use someone as a pretext to get him out.
Well, there was definitely a falling out.
It's obvious that Nathan and Terrence hate each other at this point.
Oh, I mean, what's amazing from the text messages as well is that everybody is afraid of, subservient to, or, I don't know, intimidated by Fanny Willis.
Like, it's wild that nobody would come out with the truth, by all accounts, because she'll burn them the way she just burnt Terrence.
Okay, so that was the Terrence Bradley text messages.
Fannie Willis...
I mean, so...
Okay, well, let's back it all the way up now.
When did she...
She hired Nathan Wade in November.
The allegations that the relationship started in 2019.
There's...
I don't understand the details of it, but the allegation that she didn't follow Georgia law in appointing a special prosecutor or an external prosecutor.
Yeah.
How does that work?
I mean, if you know the details of the procedure.
So look, let's start back.
Let me back up, though, and sort of set the stage for this.
I hope people realize how really, really, really unusual this kind of arrangement is.
Almost unheard of.
It's one of those things where I heard, when I first heard that she was hiring...
A criminal defense lawyer to lead the team.
I'm like, what in the hell is going on down there?
They're chock full of trained criminal trial lawyers who are assistant DAs that don't work by the hour.
They're on a salary like every other normal prosecutor in the state of Georgia.
What the hell is she doing hiring?
There's this one guy who's the RICO expert.
I can see bringing that guy in, right?
Would that have been Governor Barnes?
No, no, no.
It was John...
I forget the name.
Okay, but someone else who has...
Yeah, he wrote the book in Georgia on RICO prosecution.
So I can see that.
That makes sense.
But bringing in, well, she gave a contract to Nathan Wade.
She gave a contract to Terrence Bradley when he was with Nathan Wade.
Gave contracts to other lawyers in Nathan Wade's office to do other things that assistant DAs can do that even if they weren't working on the Trump case, she gave contracts to all these private, only other, it's like two other that I've found.
There's DA's offices in Georgia that have contract attorneys, and they use them for very limited things because they're shorthanded.
Maybe it's for child support enforcement or something.
They pay them by an hour, but it's only like $45 an hour.
And these are people who are also part-time state court misdemeanor prosecutors elsewhere, so they're still from the prosecution kind of a side.
Here, you're bringing in...
Criminal defense lawyers.
I'm a criminal defense lawyer.
It'd be like somebody hiring me to go prosecute a case.
It's theoretically possible.
I know how to prosecute cases.
I'd do a damn good job.
But it's just not the kind of thing that we see.
And it's so bizarre that all of us around here were just scratching our heads.
What is going on?
And then we all got wind.
I mean, the rumor mill's going on.
So I think the people in the community had a pretty good idea that Nathan and Bonnie were carrying on.
And so, you know, when all this stuff comes to light, we're not shocked by it.
But it's just, you know, it's just so damn unusual to bring people.
And then your boyfriend?
I mean, it's just, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know what she was thinking.
That's probably the worst judgment.
It's terrible judgment, in my opinion, to use nepotism to bring in your lover.
And then...
Let him spend the money that you steer to him through a no-bid contract for a guy who's never prosecuted a felony case, by the way.
Let him take you on cruises and Napa and drink Grey Goose and all this other stuff.
So Terrence Bradley did say in the text messages with Ashley Merchant that Nathan Wade had never prosecuted a felony.
Yeah.
And then she says, that's what I thought.
We know that's a matter of fact.
That's a verifiable fact?
That's the testimony.
I presume you can look into one's career.
Well, not really.
Let's put it this way.
I know that Ashley has, and she said this publicly, she said, I've looked into it.
I can't find any record of it.
I'm personally not aware of ever seeing him try a felony.
I've seen him in court a lot.
But I can't tell you that from my own knowledge he hasn't, but I can tell you that that was the evidence that was presented in court is that he has not.
Uncontradicted evidence.
Yeah, I mean, nobody popped up and said, well, here's the transcript from when he prosecuted this murder case.
I know that he was never a felony prosecutor, but I guess the question was, has he ever tried a felony, I guess, as a defense lawyer?
He was a state court prosecutor when I first met him in Cobb County.
State court handles misdemeanors, traffic, DUIs, minor shoplifting, that kind of stuff.
And he was a state court prosecutor for a year or two in Cobb County.
I don't know exactly how long he was there, so don't hold me to that, but it wasn't long.
Eventually...
You know, then he became a criminal defense lawyer, and then he was named to be what's called an associate judge of the municipal court in Marietta, which is a block and a half from my office.
So even the chief judge of the Marietta municipal court is a part-timer.
So what they do is they have four or five other people.
That can come in to fill in for them when they're out sick or they're on vacation.
I might have seen Nathan on the bench as a judge in that traffic court handling tickets maybe twice in my entire career.
She advertises how qualified he is.
She just goes all in on him being a judge.
A 10-year judicial career.
Superstar.
Superstar.
She's playing word games.
What the truth is, is he was a part, part, part, part, part, part-time fill-in judge in a city traffic court that handles...
Traffic tickets and shoplifting.
And all he would do, it's not like he's having trials.
It's not like he's having motion hearings.
It's not like he's handling big litigation.
He's signing off on negotiated pleas on DUI cases.
And I've done that shit.
I've sat as an assisting state court judge before.
I've done the same thing.
But I don't hold myself out as a former judge because I happen to have been a substitute a few times.
I don't know.
I suspect you don't frequent the church that Fannie Willis gave the speech at, but do you talk to anybody who has now basically said, how could you get up in front of a church of congregants and use the name of God and the pulpit of God to lie to people?
Is she taking flack for that socially?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't cross paths with her socially, so I couldn't tell you.
But she's taken flack for it from people that are now interested in this case.
Look, it's just in a general sense.
It's just improper for prosecutors to get out and make these kind of public statements about cases.
And that's, by the way, that's part of Ashley's motion.
We haven't had an evidentiary hearing on it.
But Ashley has said that she has violated the rules of ethics.
For prosecutors by going out and making so many extrajudicial statements that are designed to prejudice the defendants to the point they can't get a fair trial.
She went out and spent tens of thousands, I don't know how many dollars, it's in the pleadings.
She hired some, like, right out of the get-go, right when this case against Trump and everybody was sort of getting off the ground, she hired, with taxpayer money, some media monitoring company to basically...
Figure out how she was coming across in the media.
So she was very concerned with elevating her media profile and making sure that it was a positive media profile.
On taxpayer dollars?
All on taxpayer dollars.
Actually, she's got the receipts.
I remember reading that allegation.
She's got the receipts.
I've seen that she's attached them as exhibits to all of her pleadings.
And it's really...
Something to behold, that she's paying all this money to make sure that her media profile is high and that she's well-regarded.
She really is interested in making herself a star.
That's what Megyn Kelly was saying with me on the show the other day, and I'm stealing her words.
But yeah, she wants to become a star.
She wants to become a media superstar.
Local gossip is that she had her eyes on running for governor as soon as Kemp's term is over.
I think that's probably shot now, but she wanted to run for governor.
She definitely has political aspirations.
She's not the first prosecutor who's used a high-profile case to advance a political career, but this was done in such an overt, just underhanded and sleazy way.
It really is sickening.
It's wild, and part of me wonders whether or not she will actually be politically rewarded for this, regardless of what happens as an outcome in this case.
So you don't know Scott McAfee as a judge.
He's fresh off an appointment.
He's up for re-election in May.
The question that I was asking, he's up for re-election, or he's up for election for a full four-year term in May.
Yes.
How do you think that influences his decision-making in this case?
Well, that's an excellent question.
All right, so there's nobody currently that has announced that they're running against him that I know of.
I've been asking around.
I've been keeping my ear to the ground to see if anybody's coming out.
Nobody's announced that they're running against Willis either.
Qualifying, you've got to qualify and pay your money and all that to get on the ballot.
That's this month.
It's later on in March.
And it's like a week.
It might be two weeks.
I forget.
People can research it and figure it out.
It's a limited window of time.
And a lot of judges who are unopposed, they literally are like they're just watching, watching, watching to see if somebody at the last minute throws their hat into the ring to run against them.
And once qualifying's over, they can breathe a sigh of relief if nobody runs against them.
So we just don't know.
If it stands the way it is now and he has no opposition, then he'll be...
Well, he'll start his own four-year term next year.
Well, I would say strategically, then, what he might do is take two or three weeks to draft a decision.
You know, I think, well, a cynic could look at it that way.
But the thing is, it's going to take him a while anyway, because...
He's been taking a lot of notes, if you look.
He's got a lot to think about.
He's got to have him and his law clerk hit the books.
He's got to read.
They're going to supplement their argument today with a whole bunch of briefs and pleadings, and there's going to be some other things that are going to transpire that I'm not at liberty to talk about that might also factor into this equation.
But he's got a lot to consider.
And it's going to take him a few weeks, I think, to deliberate on it.
So, yeah, I mean, just by happenstance, it's going to be after the qualification season's over.
Okay, interesting.
And there's no chance that he renders an oral judgment.
I'll make you a deal.
If he does rule today from the bench, I will come back on your show and I will eat this pop filter.
No, I...
I will eat it and swallow it on your show.
Okay.
Because there's no urgency to the decision.
There's no urgency to render it today.
What is the status now of the RICO prosecution?
Totally.
It's all suspended indefinitely.
Well, it's all...
They can't get down to the...
To that, anything else would add until they get past this.
And then here's what's going to happen.
The judge is going to rule one way or another.
Maybe he rules entirely for the defendants.
Maybe he rules entirely for the state.
And maybe it's a mixed bag.
Maybe he says, I'm going to kick Willis off the case.
I'm not going to dismiss the indictment.
It's going to go up on appeal.
Whatever he rules, there's going to be an appeal.
And you've got the Georgia Court of Appeals, and you've got the Georgia Supreme Court.
And you've got an election for president coming up in November.
So if you fast-forward this out, what happens if Donald Trump wins, and he becomes president, and next year we get this case back from the Georgia Supreme Court, and they say, okay, yeah, you're good to go.
You can prosecute him.
Do you really think that Fonnie Willis and Judge McAfee are going to be able to put a sitting president of the United States on trial for a crime in Fulton County, Georgia?
I don't know.
Maybe Fannie will run on it again, and she'll get reelected with an even greater margin.
And if Trump loses, does she still want to have any—is she still interested in prosecuting him?
Because then, I don't know.
I mean, these are all questions.
I'm just asking them.
I don't know the answers.
I don't know how you put a sitting president on trial if it comes to that.
But I know this.
The Court of Appeal is going to be tied up with this issue for a while.
Before I forget— Ask him about DeSantis.
Now, this is not the DeSantis from Florida.
There's a Jeff DeSantis, and I don't think I understand the impact or the importance of this person allegedly being a Democratic operative in...
I don't even want to finish that sentence for fear of finishing it wrong.
And you might have just frozen, Phil.
Uh-oh.
Fannie Willis has come for Phil.
Chat, am I frozen or is it just Phil?
Let me see.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Do I refresh?
Hold on.
Is it frozen for everybody or is it just me?
Or I should say this, just Phil.
What I'll do, I'm going to take Phil out and see when he starts moving again in the backdrop.
Okay, so at least...
Fanny has come for Phil, people.
He said too much.
Okay, first of all, this is some good stuff right here.
Okay, so just Phil.
I'm going to tell him to reboot.
Hold on.
Let me send him a text or a DM on the Twitterverse.
Phil, reboot if you're still there.
Boom.
While Phil...
Wait a minute.
Is he back?
Oh, he's coming back.
Okay, hold on.
He's coming back with a new window.
How do I kick this person?
I won't kick.
I'll bring back.
Add to stage.
Phil?
I'm here.
You got me?
Yes, I can hear you now.
All right.
I don't know.
Look, it may be my Wi-Fi.
I switched to a different one.
We have a power outage in Atlanta due to weather, and our generator at home has been running the power, so it may have been a glitch on my end.
I'm sorry about that.
We've lost some pixelation, but it doesn't matter.
DeSantis.
Do you know who DeSantis is?
What's the deal with DeSantis?
Yeah, he's a lawyer that she pays, I think I heard, $200,000 or more to be her communications director, but he doesn't go to court.
He's technically a chief or something along those lines, but he...
He's got ties to the DNC and even to the White House.
And so Breitbart News has been digging up a lot of stuff on this.
They've written some pieces on it, and I think maybe there's some more to come.
I know they're looking in very closely at him and how he might be sort of the source of all this and kind of the connection to the White House.
I see now.
Okay.
And that might explain actually why Nathan Wade was meeting with the White House, billing eight hours or whatever.
I want to make sure I don't forget any questions before this gets started.
So your prediction, by the way, what is your prediction?
My prediction, and the judge said something the other day that causes me to predict this.
He said lawyers might be able to understand this.
I'll try to...
Speak to non-lawyers here.
When a judge looks at a lawyer, and you're asking the judge, Judge, I got this stuff I want to present, i.e.
cell phone data and all this, and the judge says, you know, let's put a pencil in that.
I might be able to make a ruling without getting to your evidence, and that's what the judge said.
What the judge is telling you is that you might be winning, and we just might not even need to go that far.
The judge has enough here.
He can decide his case based on the testimony of Robin Yerney, who said that she saw them huggy-kissy in 2019.
He can base his ruling on other things in the case.
He can base his ruling on the text messages between Ashley and Terrence.
He may not need to get into that.
And he might just be saying, look, I've heard enough.
I mean, a lot of judges wouldn't let lawyers get this far, and he's done it.
So I think he's signaling that he might be leaning their way.
And so everybody knows what you're talking about now.
The supplemental exhibit, it's Sada who prepared it, right?
It's the expert forensic report or analysis of the AT&T cell records showing that they were texting 20,000 times in a year, that they had 2,000 phone calls in a year.
And so they were talking about a proffer, which is, if I'm just going to try to take a simple, a mechanism to offer or present evidence at trial for immediate acceptance or rejection.
The judge could say, like, if I accept this, then Fannie's going to say, well, we want to counter expert and show why he misinterpreted the data.
Or he could say, I'm not going to accept it for now.
And what he basically indicated was, I may not need it, is what he said, basically.
We'll see if we need to, you know, when we get there.
Yeah, and that's a...
Now, he's signaling that he may not need it, and basically I think he's forecasting that he's kind of leaning towards the defense on this.
So if I had to say right now, I'd say 70% chance that he rules for the defense and finally he's gone from this case.
Maybe a little bit more than that.
Ask me again next time we talk after I see what he says today.
Well, I mean, I predicted long ago he's going to disqualify them.
It's a total shit show.
Like, there's no way he can allow them to continue with anybody having any sort of respect for the process here.
Yeah, it's a total sham.
Here, is it possible the threat to Wade was the fact that they knew the allegation to his face?
I think we covered that one.
If yes, would that be defamation?
No, there would be the litigation privilege.
You can't defame someone if you're in court really very hard.
I want to see if I missed anything here that I didn't.
I'll get to the Super Chats later.
Oh, here.
Why Trump lawyers not filing witness tampering?
Did you notice they asked a lot of questions on Tuesday of Bradley?
Have you had any correspondence with Fannie Willis, her lawyers?
And he said no.
Do you think they have any cell data on that or they're looking to find some potentially?
Yeah.
I don't know about cell data, but I'll stay tuned.
Okay.
I love this.
Okay.
Stay tuned.
You may learn something very soon on that.
Amazing.
My heart needed McAfee to rule justly to show the country.
A coward can be apolitical.
Okay, I'll get to these later.
What the hell did Anna Cross do?
Did she not understand what she was doing when she turned Bradley into a liar and brought up that totally irrelevant accusation of sexual assault?
I don't know why she did that because all she had to do was not ask him any questions and he would have left.
The courtroom and they would have never been able to get back on redirect examination.
And that was, if you remember, that was what led the judge to feel like maybe he misunderstood attorney-client privilege.
And that opened the door to him eventually having to come back.
And then now we got the text messages.
If Anna Cross had not even done that, we would not be here talking about text messages because he would have been gone from that courtroom and we wouldn't know about these text messages.
That was a blunder.
It was a blunt.
The question is, it looked like a pre-strategized tactic.
Yeah, I think Nathan Wade was pissed off at Terrence Bradley and he just wanted to get him.
That's just what it looked like.
Did Anna Cross threaten Terrence Bradley with sexual assault charges in open court?
Why else would they have brought that up?
That might be my theory.
The other question was, why wasn't Anna Cross at court on Tuesday when Bradley was testifying?
So a lot of people are talking about that, and I'm privy to an email where, like, last Friday the state had responded to some of the cell phone stuff, and it was not signed by her.
She was not on the email chain where the lawyers were.
You know, trading because you got to serve it on everybody.
So it's all done by email.
She wasn't on the email chain and she said something about she didn't have time to be there on such short notice the next day.
She said she's busy with her other.
She's another private lawyer.
She's got her own clients and her own cases, right?
So she's not an assistant DA.
She's not an employee.
So she's out there doing her own thing, practicing her own law and says she's tied up for, you know, I think what she said in the email, she's tied up for several weeks or something.
You know, a lot of people are speculating, and it is just speculation, that maybe she's out of the case.
Maybe she says, well, you know what?
Look, I think I can't be a part of this anymore.
I don't know if that's, I just don't know.
But I'll tell you, if it were me, and I were prosecuting on this case, and it became obvious to me that my boss was having me help perpetrate a fraud on the court, I'd have to quit.
A lawyer can't participate in fraud.
Just can't do it.
I'm not giving any of these people any ethics, credibility for ethics.
So I said that she got kicked off the file after she just blew it open.
I don't have to say, like, thanks, Anna.
You just destroyed everything.
Now you're gone.
Look, we may see her back.
I don't know.
Everything I've said is just speculation here.
But I'm reading between the lines.
Maybe she...
A reasonable person in her position might say, my boss is having me do something that I'm uncomfortable with, I think is unethical, and I'm going to have to step away.
That might be what a reasonable person would do.
She may believe that her boss is not lied.
She may genuinely believe, so she may be back in a few weeks.
I don't know one way or another what the situation is with her.
I'm just telling you, if it were me, I could not sit at that state's table.
In good conscience and move forward from this point, if it were me.
All right, fantastic.
Now, we should be scheduled to go live with the actual hearing in a few minutes, so proper goodbyes.
I'm going to go over that last-ditch affidavit effort to, you know, distract and confuse and distract.
Today, closing arguments, do we know what the schedule is?
How long has been, how much time has been allocated?
Or three, maybe two or, well, I think maybe probably about 4, 4.30 we'll be done.
Okay.
And so it's going to be led by merchants, sat out to follow, and then the other lawyers will get five or ten.
Yeah, it's probably going to be very similar to what we've seen.
Yep.
Okay.
And did I forget anything else?
Phil, where can people follow you?
All right.
It's right here on my screen.
Follow me at philhollowayesq on Twitter.
I've been getting a lot of stuff out about this, and I expect that we'll be tweeting about some additional very interesting stuff very shortly.
Check it out.
Please follow.
I'll do my best to keep everybody updated as best as I can.
If I've got any questions, you've now become my immediate go-to because of the procedural stuff.
I think that's it.
Phil, thank you.
I'm going to continue on and do the annoying live commentary.
Phil?
I'm going to switch over to YouTube and watch the proceedings.
It's going to be a banger today.
Enjoy.
Have a good one.
Well, that was fantastic.
Oh my goodness.
Okay, so now what we've got to do, everybody, I'm going to go find a feed.
Somebody feed Phil.
Okay.
Bada bing, bada boom.
Let me see.
Well, okay.
I'm going to get a feed first, and then we're going to make sure that we're live when it goes live.
And it's going to be watching Closing Arms.
That was some good insight in there.
I think we might have gotten some tips to what's to come.
Fanny Willis Live AFN.
That's the one we're going to start with.
A superstar.
Never prosecuted a felony, by all accounts.
Totally nothing to see here.
And when I say nothing to see here, it looks like I got a stream with nothing to see here.
Skip ad.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Check this out, people.
Oh, yeah.
Let's get the party started, eh, boys?
Here.
Is this it?
Live.
What I'm going to do...
See if we catch anything on the hot mic.
Everybody, let's get ready to rumble.
Okay.
And, um, the commentary.
It shall begin shortly, sir.
I said that I'll choose this.
They just sent us a courtesy copy.
There might be new filings today.
Let me do one thing before we get started.
I'll put this on mute for the time being.
There was an additional affidavit filed today, people.
Fannie Willis, in full meltdown mode, filed an affidavit from some dude in Napa Valley who testifies to the fact that he remembers her paying cash.
$400 cash for some Grey Goose.
Not for some Grey Goose.
Look at this.
Notice of filing.
This is from State of Georgia, yada, yada, yada.
Who's this?
Notice of filing states proposed Supplemental Exhibit 1 to the hearing on defendant's motion to disqualify.
Comes now!
That's probably not the best way for Fannie Willis to stop.
Or Nathan Wade to start.
I'm joking.
That's how they start all of them.
State of Georgia, by-in through Fulton County, District Attorney Fannie Willis, etc.
Files this proposed supplemental Exhibit 1 to the hearing on defendant's motion to disqualify.
Proposed supplemental Exhibit 1 consists of an affidavit from Stanley Herbert Brody, asserting 1 that on April or May 2023, Brody was working at the Acumen Wine Gallery in Napa, California.
2 that Brody greeted and met with District Attorney And four.
that District Attorney Willis paid the bill for the tasting with approximately $400 cash.
That affidavit is attached to the state's proposed supplements.
Mr. Brody is available to testify today.
Oh, yeah, yeah, because it's totally relevant that at some point in Fannie's life, she did in fact pay for cash.
Like, that's the disputed fact here.
Oh, it's an act of sheer desperation, people.
Yep, we found a guy who's going to say that...
Oh, here we are.
We're on.
We're on.
We found a guy that says he paid cash.
He paid cash.
Amazing.
I'm going to do this.
The audio sounds good.
Let me know if my audio is too low or too high.
We're back on the record with 23SC188947.
Beginning with the state, if I could have counsel.
Or do they identify themselves for the record?
Okay, I'm going to be back in exactly 30 seconds.
I don't know if it's a statement.
Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Steve Sada, Jennifer Littleford, President Trump.
I like Steve Sada.
He reminds me of Robert Duvall from a civil action.
Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Richard Rice and Kristen Lewis from Mr. Gino.
Oh, people, let's get ready to rumble.
Dramatic.
On behalf of Mr. Giuliani.
Your Honor Jim Durham, on behalf of Mr. Meadows, he waives his appearance.
Via Zoom.
On behalf of Mr. Clark.
Mr. Clark, I had him on the channel.
Your Honor, Mr. Clark, waves his appearance.
On behalf of Mr. Roman.
Good morning, Judge.
Ashley Merchant and John Merchant on behalf of Mr. Roman.
On behalf of Mr. Schaefer.
Good morning, Your Honor.
Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Craig Gillen, Anthony Lake, and Holly Pearson, on behalf of David Schaefer, and he waives his presence.
On behalf of Mr. Floyd.
Do we have anyone joining us on Zoom on behalf of Mr. Floyd?
Neither Floyd nor his counsel.
They're out.
All right.
Well, seeing as counsel had previously attended the prior hearings and this one has been noticed, I'll find that they've waived their appearance for argument today.
They're halfway to Mexico.
I don't want to have Ms. Latham.
Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Bill Cromwell on behalf of Ms. Latham.
She makes the present.
All right.
Thank you, Mr. Cromwell.
All right, so I've been informed by counsel collectively for the defendants that they were requesting a total of an hour and a half for argument to be divided amongst themselves as they've already agreed.
And so to effectuate that, I'll have the time queued up, and we'll start the clock running, and you all can see fit to divide that as you...
I would like.
Obviously, I've allowed the same amount of time for the state as well.
Before we get into that, I believe there may have been a few things just to clean up as part of the record.
Specifically, since we last convened, counsel on behalf of Mr. Roman had submitted a defense exhibit 39. If there are any objections that want to be placed on the record on behalf of the state, we can do that now.
But at a minimum, I think the intention was that I would be admitting that collectively as an exhibit, if nothing else, just for appellate purposes for the record.
Mr. Abadi, anything the state wants to add as it relates to Exhibit 39?
No objection to the state.
I like this, Judge.
I have a copy for the court reporter.
I printed the copy out, and then I sent it off.
Ethan Wade is there?
You've got that marked in Stantel.
Provide that to the court reporter.
My audio is too quiet.
Hold on.
Let me see here.
Locals.
Not that I don't trust everybody in YouTube, but locals.
And then, as I indicated as well on Tuesday, both parties since the close of the de-evidence on the 16th had followed up.
Now I think both sides have made requests to reopen the evidence.
On behalf of the defense, there were some issues with cell phone records, and the state has found an additional witness that they would like to present.
And the instruction I provided on Tuesday was that for today, I think we've reached the point where I'd like to hear more of how some of the legal arguments apply to what has already been presented.
And it may already be possible for me to make a decision without those needing to be material.
To that decision.
So that's why we're here today.
I wanted to make sure we held this time because it is a bit of a logistical challenge to get everyone in a room together.
So, but recognizing that, again, in the interest of efficiency, if both parties want to reserve part of their time to argue as if those proffered exhibits had been admitted, feel free to make whatever arguments you would like.
And if, in fact, it turns out that I do need those to be part of the record to make a decision.
Then we'd have to come back, and we will do those in accordance with the rules of evidence.
Okay, so people are saying that the audio is...
My audio is...
And we have a...
And we have not filed anything.
I'll talk louder.
We also have a proper witness that we would like to call in the event the court does open the evidence up.
I can make an oral proper as to who that witness is and what that witness would be saying, and I could do it, and I think in a fairly brief manner, if the court would permit me, so the court would understand...
i'm coming from and i believe also mr cromwell also has a uh...
reproffer uh...
for proper witness that he as uh...
has as uh...
talk with him I've got a joke here.
So are these, we've got, this is the first I've heard of it, so are these things that have been discussed or shared with the state at all?
No, Your Honor, I literally, my communication with this particular witness occurred this morning at about 10.10.
Go on, what does the witness want to talk about?
I'm more than happy to enlighten the court as to what the witness would say, who the Yes, yes, yes, please tell us.
To be reopened so that the court could hear if they want to bring in someone from California, let them bring them in.
And we believe that the court might want to view the proper and the evidence that we are prepared to at least proffer today.
All right.
So, Mr. Gilliland, on that point to this and Mr. Cromwell's...
You know, additional evidence, in my mind, in the interest of a fair notice to the other side, I wouldn't want that to be part of the argument today, because the state has no idea what you're about to say.
And I think the purpose of a proffer, in large part in this role, in this context, is having them at least have the ability to make those initial counterarguments.
I really want to know what the witness was supposed to say.
Make a motion.
That both parties have already elected that they are willing to use that mechanism.
But just for today, kind of showing up now without showing the other side at all, even this morning, I don't think that would be fair.
I did not intend to use the proffer in the legal argument.
Sure.
I just wanted the court to be aware that we do have an oral proffer.
We can file it.
We can supplement the record and file it for consideration.
It's literally hot off the press.
Sure.
As we printed it out and wrote down to the podium.
Okay.
All right, well.
What the heck are they doing?
Mr. Cromwell, is there anything you wanted to add to that?
Thanks, cameraman.
What the heck are you doing?
Mr. Bonnie, anything you want to add to that?
I don't know what it is.
I don't know how to add to it.
I don't know.
What's the cameraman doing here?
All right, just anything on a procedural perspective?
I mean, from a procedural perspective, I would...
Is this a joke?
Hold on, I'm going to find another video.
Evidence is close.
This is beyond the scope of your honor's ruling on Tuesday.
So I guess we'd object at this point and go from there.
Okay.
All right, anything else by way of housekeeping?
Apparently the state filed two supplemental exhibits, two and number three, about 15 minutes ago.
Okay, they're back, please.
So, It's a clogged.
Use those in their proffer.
Talking about the same notice requirement that we actually did, just got to get slow.
As it relates to that, Your Honor, I believe you were very clear on Tuesday as well that in the propers we could argue rebuttal evidence as it relates to the Oh, the non-expert.
Give me a break.
Mr. Kelly.
As it relates to the proffered evidence, our proffered evidence would be a direct rebuttal to testimony given in the courtroom, particularly by Mr. Bradley.
So we would have a direct rebuttal of that.
That's what our proper will be.
I understand the court's ruling.
Just want to put that on the record.
So we know the context of it.
Is that similar for Mr. Cromwell as well?
It is.
It just solely relates to Mr. Bradley's testimony?
It does.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Notice.
Anything else then?
Your Honor, the proper evidence is basically corroborate.
Okay.
All right.
Then if there is nothing else, I'll turn it over to Ms. Merchant to begin on behalf of the defense.
Sorry, Judge.
Unfortunately, you're stuck with me today.
understand the the May it please the Court, Your Honor, John Merchant, on behalf of Mr. Roman, just by way of roadmap to give you some idea about the allocation of time and what I'm going to be covering.
I've been charged with talking to Your Honor about the conflict issue and the appearance of the conflict and what we believe the evidence to show on that issue.
Mr. Sedow, Mr. Gilliam will be talking more about the forensic misconduct piece of it, Ms. Willis' church speech, statements made to the media.
Fraud on the court, frankly, and the book that she gave several interviews for.
So I won't be discussing any of those issues, so if you'd like to ask me, certainly I can try to address them, but that's going to be the focus of their presentation.
And then towards the end, other folks may have issue-specific type arguments, either in follow-up to mine or the forensic misconduct.
But those are the two lanes that we're going to be covering, but I'm going to do the conflict piece of it for you.
And on that issue, Your Honor, This is a matter of first impression in Georgia.
I can't find a single case that's been published by the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court that is based on these facts.
There are, of course, a number of different appellate court cases that deal with conflict-related issues and, more importantly, appearance of conflict-related issues.
And some of those are based in state law.
Some of them are based on the ethical rules that govern lawyers.
Some of them are based on the Sixth Amendment right.
To due process that's implicit in all of what we're doing here today.
I want to remind the court that we're here today on this motion to disqualify DA Willis and her office because of her judgment, frankly.
She is supposed to be disinterested under the Sixth Amendment, and she's anything but that.
The fact that these proceedings have taken this long, and through the convoluted way we've made it here today, explain that.
As I present my arguments, I want the court to understand that this court represents the guardrails for the Sixth Amendment in this context, and Ms. Willis has already been disqualified once.
So I would encourage the court to remember what Judge McBurney did and his order of disqualifying.
The same argument was made in that case as to whether or not there needs to be an actual conflict of interest or whether or not the appearance of a conflict of interest might be sufficient.
Under the facts.
I want to make clear to the court that the law in Georgia suggests, and it's very clear, that we can demonstrate an appearance of a conflict of interest, and that is sufficient.
I'm going to be candid with the court.
There was a Supreme Court decision from 1996, land v.
State, and then there are two court of appeal decisions.
After that, that deal, frankly, in some dicta that suggests that an actual conflict is required.
But the Supreme Court of Georgia, since those decisions came down, has made quite clear that the appearance of a conflict standard still applies.
And the reason that's important is, I think, under the Sixth Amendment, which is where we're at, in order to preserve the defendant's rights under that provision and under the court literary provisions of Georgia law, you've got to consider the appearance of a conflict.
And the reason why the appearance of a conflict is so prescient here is because if this court allows this kind of behavior to go on and allows DAs across the state by its order to engage in these kinds of activities, the entire public confidence in the system will be shot.
A thousand percent.
Don't need to convince the judge of that.
And the integrity of the system will be undermined.
And so with those sort of public policy and constitutional principles...
I wanted to turn to the law in Georgia on disqualification.
And, Your Honor, I'm going to give you the law, and then I'm going to talk about the facts and how they apply to law at the end.
If you want to talk about the facts earlier, jump right in, and I'll be happy to do that.
Is this actually a merchant's husband?
Probably knows all the law that I'm going to cite to you.
But to give the skeleton outline, the original seminal case that deals with conflict of interest.
from the Georgia Supreme Court of Williams v.
State.
That's 258 Georgia 305.
And there are basically two methods by which you can disqualify a district attorney.
One of them is a conflict of interest, and I'll suggest it to the court.
That doesn't mean an actual conflict.
That could mean an appearance of conflict as well, and then forensic misconduct.
Importantly, in the Williams case, though, in footnote four, I think this is important for the court's analysis about the facts and which box it fits into.
The court said there is no clear demarcation line between conflict of interest and forensic misconduct, and a given ground for disqualification of the prosecutor might be classifiable as either.
And I think that's important because we have facts that fit in both boxes.
So if a state stands up and says, well, there's no actual conflict here, judge, that doesn't mean necessarily that it doesn't apply to the forensic misconduct.
Typically, forensic misconduct relates to statements of the prosecutor designed to impugn the character of the defendant before trial and to affect the jury pool, which we have here, which I'm not going to discuss, but the facts that we have here very much relate to that issue, and there's a crossover.
Importantly, and I think this is important for the court's consideration of what effect the court's ruling may have, is if you deny this motion, there's a good chance, if it's reversed, that we would be granted a new trial.
So that means we're going to have to do this all over again.
In Amusement Sales versus State 316 Georgia Appellate 727...
This is boring.
I'm going to try to make this exciting.
...that's a case that cites Whitworth, which is...
I think this is Michael Roman's attorney.
I think this is Michael Roman's attorney.
All over again.
If the appellate court say we were wrong.
What is that personal interest?
Financial.
So the personal interest can be...
There's no definition of that under George Law.
And it could be a personal financial interest.
It could be a personal interest related to bias against a particular defendant, which sort of falls into the forensic misconduct box.
But we have here a very personal financial interest that's been laid out in terms of money received by Ms. Willis as a result of the scheme that she set up.
and um To get to the issue of the personal interest in the context of an appearance, I think that's important.
I do want to suggest to the court that there are a number of cases that post-date this actual conflict of interest language that's suggested in some of the cases from the 90s that you have to pay attention to what this looks like to the public.
And I agree with all of the law, and I'm sure the state's going to stand up here and say it can't be speculative.
Or a conjectural type of personal interest.
We don't have that here.
We have something very concrete.
And as Judge McBurney put it, actual and palpable, not speculative and remote.
That's exactly what we have here.
We've demonstrated through the testimony of the witnesses, some of whom impeached themselves, that we have a very personal interest.
Was there an accusation of...
The seminal United States court case that deals with prosecutorial impropriety is Young v.
U.S. That's a 41 U.S. 787 case.
In that case, it's the opportunity for conflicts to arise that created at least the appearance of impropriety.
And that's the case that requires that the prosecutor be disinterested.
Since a scheme injecting a personal interest, financial or otherwise, into the enforcement process may bring irrelevant and impermissible factors into the prosecutorial decision.
Now, there are a number of Georgia cases that sort of repeat that theme.
Reeves v.
State 231, Georgia Appellate 22, that's a 1998 case, stated a potential conflict of interest existed and the appearance of impropriety existed.
Davenport v.
State, 157 Georgia Appellate, 704.
That's a 1981 case.
That was decided seven years before Williams.
When there is at least the appearance of impropriety, a defendant is denied fundamental fairness in the state's prosecution of the charges against him or her.
There are also rules that govern prosecutors.
Lawyers, in general, are bound to preserve and avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
That's Brown v.
State, 256, Georgia Appellate, 603-202, 2002.
Head v.
State, a prosecutor's close personal relationship with the victim in a case may create at least the appearance of a prosecution unfairly based on private interests rather than one properly based on vindication of public interest.
ABA criminal justice standards for the prosecution function standard 3-1.2C.
A prosecutor should avoid appearance of impropriety in performing the prosecution function.
3-1.7F.
The prosecutor should not permit the prosecutor's professional judgment or obligations to be affected by the prosecutor's personal, political, financial, professional, business, property, or other interests or relationships.
So the rules that govern her in her own profession.
This is going to be very boring.
interest in this case.
It's just going to be case law, and then they're going to get into the evidence.
The appearance of unfairness towards these defendants by setting up a relationship, a prosecutorial relationship with her boyfriend that she'd been dating for two years, according Closing arguments.
He's arguing the law.
I now get to some facts.
Frankly, as I was trying to figure this out, I think you know it when you see it.
It's just like in the concurrence in Jacobellis v.
State of Ohio, the Supreme Court case from 1964, Justice Stewart, in his concurrent opinion, said, "I know it when I see it," talking about obscenity.
I think you know it when you see it.
I think there's enough facts in front of you that you know it when you see it.
And not tangible enough.
Just go with some hard facts.
Vacations.
Lying about it.
It's not just financial, and McLaughlin v.
State, I think the court's very familiar with that case, 295 Georgia 609, 2014.
The Supreme Court essentially said that because the acting DA had become a witness in the case and developed a personal interest in the case due to his daughter's relationship with the victim, that he was disqualified.
And because he was disqualified, his entire office was disqualified.
The judge is going to make the decision.
It's not a good case.
My role is 20 minutes, so I've got about eight minutes left.
Why did we spend so much time on a relationship between these two people?
We frankly couldn't care less if they had a personal relationship outside of work.
That is not what the issue is here.
The issue is that they began this relationship in 2019.
They were dating for two years.
And then she awarded him a contract where public money, either from Fulton County or the state of Georgia, ended up in his pockets.
That decision alone was improper.
Ended up in hers.
But what's even more improper is that she and he used that money to go on personal vacations and trips.
If your honor will remember exhibits 9, 11, and 12 dealt with the expenditures by Wade on trips.
If you do the math on that, if you look at what he spent, and then you look at the testimony about what was paid back by Willis.
The cash reimbursement theory, I'll talk about it in a second, but if you do the math on what he actually paid for and what they testified she paid back in cash, you $10,000?
$9,200.
$9,247 to be exact.
I'm not sure I'm loving this delivery here, but...
In their testimony.
That's if she paid them back.
It was still $10,000 difference on benefits.
There was no mention of cash in Mr. Wade's affidavit when the best and first opportunity to raise that issue would have come up is when the state filed their response in his affidavit.
That is nowhere to be found in there.
The first time we heard about cash was here in this courtroom.
And so I think...
So she's received a personal financial benefit of over $9,200 in this case that she can't account for.
Even if she paid it back.
And the reason we can't account for it is because they came up with a cash theory.
Cash theory only raises...
Let me ask you this.
Let's say the theory wasn't even there that they had...
Repaid them.
Paid it back or that there had been any exchange.
Should there first be a consideration of a materiality requirement?
No.
Have you seen that in this jurisdiction?
Well, not in this jurisdiction.
Have you seen that in any other jurisdiction?
Materiality requirement.
If it was $6, that would still be improper.
Would it be improper where it's a per se disqualification if someone buys their boss a stick of gum?
Is that, per se, disqualifying?
Because there's no materiality requirement?
Well, I don't disagree.
Contextually material.
It may not be a materiality requirement, but it's I think the continuum involves you looking at whether or not, in the grand scheme of things, it violates the Constitution.
And whether or not there's an appearance.
of a conflict and the appearance suggests that she actually received a benefit.
And we know that she did.
They admitted it.
We don't have to speculate about that.
She said she got a benefit.
And she said she paid back certain amounts.
Would $100 be enough?
Would $200 be enough?
I think you have to look at it globally and consider all of the witnesses.
Consider all of the facts.
Consider the credibility of the witnesses, frankly.
Your Honor sat here and watched everybody, so I haven't spent a lot of time He's trying to help him, like the judge is asking him.
I don't really want you to pin me down on that, because there's no law on it.
I can't give you a straight answer because I haven't seen anything like that.
He wants you to tell him it's the totality.
And I think if we go the materiality requirement into the case law, then you're down a slippery slope then.
Because then it's going to be very...
The appellate courts are going to be deciding, well, is $50 enough?
Is $100 enough?
He gave you the answer, merchants.
It's the totality.
Contextual.
It's the fact that she received it, and it's not insignificant.
And I don't think your order has to say because she received $9,200, she's disqualified.
I think if we go back to the 20,000-foot level, what's the appearance here?
Is this fairness to the defendants?
Does it appear that she is interested in this prosecution, or does it appear that she's disinterested?
She don't understand.
You can tell she's not a disinterested person when it comes to this proceeding, but we also argue she's not a disinterested person when it comes to the prosecution as a whole.
I'm going to leave for...
I'll resist the temptation to defend my wife, who I believe to be an excellent lawyer and a member of the bar for 20 years in good standing.
But I will say this, Judge.
You don't just evaluate the credibility of the witnesses.
You evaluate the credibility of the lawyers.
And Mr. Abadi stood up here in open court from national news and the national public and called her a liar.
I need to address that for one minute.
The text messages that are now part of the record, which now are substantive evidence for you to consider, prove everything that she put in that motion, everything that she tried to elicit for Mr. Bradley was absolutely 100% true.
Not only was it true, she verified through the witness himself that the motion was accurate.
And it was confirmed.
It was confirmed by a witness.
It's not only improper, it violates Berger versus the United States, which is a case that says the state can't just get up here and make any argument it wants.
And I encourage the court to call him out on it when he steps up here.
We have to have candor towards the tribunal.
You cannot lie to the court, cannot lie to the public, cannot lie to the jury.
And I think that's what he did.
So there's another corroboration of our view that she was in this relationship.
Frankly, based on Mr. Bradley's testimony, Your Honor can separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to credibility, but Mr. Bradley had two chances to correct information that he suddenly developed amnesia about.
Three months after.
How does the timing of the relationship impact financial interest?
Because it's part of the scheme she created intentionally in order to give benefits to her boyfriend.
There's a reason why they fought so hard on this judge.
I mean, there's a reason that every single subpoena was objected to, every single question we asked Mr. Bradley was objected to, jumping up and down, all of the obfuscation.
There's a reason for that.
They know that if Your Honor finds that that relationship started in 2019, that the appointment of Wade itself was improper, and if that was improper, then he had no business, as an average citizen, Along with the fact that they didn't have approval from Fulton County to appoint him in the first place, that undermines the indictment.
It creates a structural impairment in the indictment.
Because he had no more justice being in the grand jury room than I did.
So that's what they're worried about.
And the reason why it's important for the financial peace judge is it's how the money ended up going back to her.
She put her boyfriend in the spot, paid him, and then reaped the benefits from it.
She created the system and then didn't tell anybody about it.
She didn't even tell her dad about it.
So I think, in the grand scheme of things, if you're looking at the totality of the facts, and I've got to sit down here in about two minutes to make room for my co-counsel, if you look at it, everything put together, judges, they did this, they knew it was wrong, they hid it, and even when they were called out on it, they tried to create an excuse for it by saying it happened after the fact.
We know now from the testimony, Ms. Geary confirmed that Mr. Bradley, his text messages were accurate, not his testimony, but that fact was accurate.
The motion is accurate.
And so, also, I do want to point out, there's no paper trail here for the cash.
I know that this was a, I know she and her father both testified that they kept cash on hand, which I mean, keeping cash on hand in and of itself is not a problem.
When you're a public official and you're required to keep track of gifts that you receive, then you need to keep track of it.
But there's no paper trail.
There's no deposit history.
There's no withdrawal history.
There's no receipts.
None of that.
It wasn't declared as revenue.
We don't think that it is.
You still don't have enough information to keep.
It was undeclared.
Does the lack of evidence fall in the state?
Does the lack of evidence fall in the state?
Isn't that where burdens come in?
Yes, I think they had an obligation to tell Your Honor, hey, this is where the money went.
And they certainly had the ability to do that if they could do it.
Since they didn't do it, we have to assume they can't.
And if they can't...
I just want to remind the court of a very important piece of testimony from Ms. Willis, that I think goes to credibility of all of the officers of the court who testified.
She met with Wade, and they developed, in 10 minutes after talking about the financial piece, I believe, this cash theory that could not be rebutted.
We have no ability to do that.
They did, and they chose not to do it.
You do.
Wade did not declare the revenue.
I'm going to sit down and turn the podium over.
To my distinguished colleague, Mr. Sadow.
There you go.
Bring on the Sadow.
I appreciate the court's time.
Okay, and by the way, people, when I'm saying I'm bored, it's not because I'm trying to...
That was not the most stellar presentation, even though he had to plead law.
He could have gotten to some good facts.
He should have picked up on the cues the judge was asking him by way of his leading questions.
So, no major judgment.
It's always easier to...
Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Now, Sadow.
I'm going to speak to what I would call a subset of forensic misconduct.
There you go.
And I'm going to assume that all the law that's been provided to you in pleadings as well as emails, you know.
You don't need me to tell you what the law is.
So I'm going to just set up how the disqualification...
And then dismissal of the indictment should take place under the subset of forensic misconduct.
Roman's counsel, Ms. Merchant, filed on January 8 her pleading, her motion to dismiss and to disqualify.
We were in court that Friday of that week in which I made it known that we, that is President Trump, may adopt that motion.
I wanted to see what was going to happen before I did so.
That Sunday, which would be January the 14th, 2024, D.A. Willis took it upon herself to go to a historic town.
Mm-hmm.
Miss Merchant's client, Roman.
And she made what we now call the church speech.
And Your Honor has reference to that.
A superstar.
You didn't necessarily want evidence on that, but you know what the church speech was.
It was videoed.
It was clear that Miss Willis had notes.
She was reading from notes that she had prepared.
It was a calculated determination by Miss Willis.
and their council.
Absolutely.
And so, by making an issue out of the fact that the person that was challenged in the Roman motion was black, without telling the public, or the church members, or anyone for that matter, that the reason that Mr. Wade was being challenged was not because he was black.
It had nothing to do with race.
It had to do with the relationship between That had been alleged and later admitted to by Miss Merchant.
Miss Willis took full opportunity to prejudice the defendants and then comes along later in a pleading and says it wasn't designed or intended to be at the defendants at all or the defense counsel, which with all due respect is just nonsense.
the purpose of that was to give public sympathy public empathy for what miss Merchant had already alleged in her motion now that was a violation of the professional rule Hence forensic misconduct.
I like that.
It wasn't in response to anything that was said.
It was a public statement, extrajudicial, for the purpose of making a comment upon the defendant.
Yes.
It would be in response to a motion that was filed.
But it wasn't filed in a response, in a pleading.
It was filed in response to a motion.
And the motion were allegations made.
If Ms. Willis wanted to respond at that point, she could have said the facts of the matter.
Instead, she misstated what the situation was, took advantage of the opportunity, an ethical violation, and the ethical violation makes it clear.
You must refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.
Can you think of anything more that would heighten public condemnation of the defendants than alleging that defense counsel and the defendants were making their motion based on race and religion?
That's as bad as it gets in Fulton County, with all due respect.
That's exactly...
That's exactly what Ms. Willis wanted done.
And remember, the state still had not responded.
This is fantastic.
And then what we get from the state is we get an affidavit filed as part of their response.
And that affidavit says specifically, and the affidavit is Mr. Wade, says specifically in paragraph 26 and 27, That the relationship did not begin until 2022.
It's a lie.
It acknowledges the relationship and says it didn't begin until 2022.
And the pleading that's filed, the state's pleading of response, indicates not exactly that, but it says there was no relationship as of November 1 of 2021.
And that's on page 7. So now we know that timing is the issue.
Because Ms. Merchant made it clear that we alleged and had evidence that indicated the timing was before Mr. Wade was hired, not after.
So the state now has filed an affidavit and a plea that claims post-hiring into 2022.
But pre-renegotiation.
Mr. Wade will testify to the same thing, under oath.
Now, Ms. Yerty says it began in 2019.
Why would she know?
Well, she would know because she was a former friend.
I know the state's going to get up here and say you can't believe, essentially what they're going to say is you can't believe any defense witness because they're defense witnesses.
And only people that would tell the truth would be Wade and Willis.
I suggest to you that that's not accurate.
That's quite the exact opposite.
I suggest that the testimony that Mr. Wade gave and Ms. Willis gave, and I'm specifically dealing now with the timing issue without getting into anything else.
That that brought forth a true concern about their truthfulness and being what is required of a lawyer in this state, which is candor toward the tribunal.
And that's 3.3 of the pressure rules.
Specifically, small a, one, make a false statement of material fact or law to a tribunal.
So that's...
As I posit to the court, that's the second ethical violation.
And then you also have 8.4 of professional rules that says it's a violation of the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct for Lawyer 2, and that's 8.4, engage in a professional conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.
Now, do you have to find that Wade and Willis lied?
No.
What you need to be able to find is that there is a concern, a legitimate concern based on the evidence in this case, about their truthfulness.
A legitimate concern about the truthfulness, which equates to an appearance of impropriety.
Because once you have the appearance of impropriety under forensic misconduct, the law in Georgia Mm-hmm.
To disqualify.
Public statements to prejudice defendants.
Why should you find there's a concern?
Lying under oath.
With their truthfulness.
ERT is the first one.
You have that testimony.
Oh yeah, Bradley.
But then we go to what is the most obvious indication.
Bradley.
That Willis and Wade were not truthful on the point of timing.
And that's Bradley.
Defense Exhibit 26 came into evidence.
Defense Exhibit 26 comes in and says...
And you know I went into this last hearing.
It says...
Those look like text messages.
And on January 5th, 2024, at approximately 9.49 a.m., there's text messages that are exchanged between Ms. Merchant and Mr. Bradley.
And the text messages go, like, just date?
And that's from Ms. Merchant.
Ms. Merchant says, do you think it started before she hired him?
Absolutely.
Bradley, who we now know from Defense Exhibit 39, has been texting with Ms. Merchant for a number of months.
This is not the first time.
This is months within the communications between the two.
Mr. Bradley says, absolutely.
Now, absolutely.
Is not a speculative word.
That's not speculation.
That's a definitive statement.
And Bradley then, unprompted, says this.
They met at the municipal CLE.
It started when she left the DA's office and was a judge in South Fulton.
It goes on, Ms. Merchant says, This is so good.
Emoji or whatever one would call it.
This is old man talk.
Mr. Bradley say they met at the municipal court CLE conference.
Again.
No speculation.
None.
And then this merchant says, and we're now talking about a couple hours later, she texts and says, upon information and relief, Willis and Wade met while both were serving as magistrate judges and began a romantic relationship at that time.
Looks good.
And Mr. Bradley responds, no, municipal court.
Thank you.
Doesn't say it didn't start then.
He doesn't suggest that she's wrong other than magistrate court municipal.
Now we have that, and it's in evidence.
And what does Bradley do?
He gets amnesia.
He knows that he's put himself in a position that if he testifies truthfully on the witness stand, your honor is in a position to be able to find, if you choose to, that both Willis and Wade lied.
So what does Bradley do?
You are an assistant U.S. attorney.
You know how this works when you have witnesses in this situation.
Mr. Bradley did everything he could possibly do to evade answering questions.
No recollection.
Couldn't remember.
It was speculation.
Anything he could possibly say that would cause Your Honor not to believe that Bradley knew when this relationship started.
I suggest...
They're lying.
They're lying.
Clear-cut lies.
And the truth...
Shall set them free.
Defense Exhibit 26. And so if we take that view, that he thoroughly impeached himself, that he did not give truthful conduct...
Why would I believe his texts?
You know, what's left standing?
Generally, you would see someone who's impeached.
Perhaps we have some kind of core that you could point back to and say, that's the time he was telling the truth.
in these text messages, Why would I do that?
Has it ever definitively shown how he knew this?
And that he actually did know it.
Other than just a assertion outright, absolutely.
Usually if a state has a witness that goes sideways, they've got them locked in, they've sat down with a detective, they've got a full statement.
We don't have that here.
Well, what you have is a text message, message I don't like the question of Bradley that he did on his own that was not given to him by someone else the only thing that the court is just noted what is how do we know he wasn't speculating Because you don't have to accept the fact that he wasn't speculating.
The cases that I provided, I think by email yesterday, the first dealing with that, you can disbelieve that testimony and draw a negative inference.
That's the Ferguson case.
On Lee, the other case, you can simply take the prior inconsistent statement as substantive evidence.
It has the same value.
And that's what I'm asking you to do, to take...
What was the unprompted statement in Defense Exhibit 26 of Bradley and take that on its face, face value, that that is an indication that Bradley in fact knew and had said he did.
If you accept that, you have to have concerns about the truthfulness of Willis and Wade on the timing issue.
And I don't know if this is something maybe one of your co-councils were going to address as well.
We heard about...
The law applies that we're outside the orbit of the core of cases we're used to dealing with here, where it deals with side-switching or where someone is in the relationship, the client relationship.
The proposition you're putting forward now is that if a representative of the state, a lead prosecutor, the district attorney themselves, says something that's untruthful on the record, that is something that immediately...
Has to be proactively policed by the trial court?
Basically what I'm getting at is, where in the law do we find the remedy to an untruthful statement?
Generally, we send you down the street to the bar, right?
And that's why I gave you the cases of Regis Day and Edwards yesterday.
While those aren't prosecutorial cases or dealing with prosecutors, they deal with counsel.
And in both those cases, the trial judge found ethical violations on the part of...
counsel, went through the ethical violations and said, based on that, you're disqualified.
You cannot be the attorney of record in this case.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If defense counsel can be kicked off of the case because of ethical violations, I suggest the same thing can happen for prosecutors when the ethical violations deal with truthfulness, candor to the court, equity.
Extrajudicial statement?
Those are the things that this court can rely upon and say.
Based on those, again, I find an appearance of impropriety.
Where would be the limiting principle that district attorney signs every indictment assigned to this court?
He better get to the text messages afterwards.
No, it would be if I found that she's untruthful.
Is that what you're...
I'm not saying you have to find she was untruthful or that Wade was untruthful.
You don't have to make a finding a fact that they lied.
All you have to do is make a finding a fact that you have genuine, legitimate concerns about their credibility, about their truthfulness.
And once you find that, then you can apply Registe and Edwards.
Well, but it's the same principle, though.
If I have genuine concerns about her Truthfulness on a particular occasion, how do those not spill over into every criminal case a district attorney brings?
Well, it's because she testified under oath.
And so did Mr. Wade.
They didn't have to testify falsely.
They could have testified truthfully.
They could have indicated that the relationship, the timing, was in fact before Mr. Wade was hired.
They chose not to.
And in that sense, that dishonesty...
That constitutes a violation of their ethical responsibilities.
This is not signing an indictment.
This is not filing a pleading in which both sides have their own positions.
This is a requirement that every witness has to tell the truth under oath.
And if they don't tell the truth under oath, or there's a significant concern about their credibility, then they're violating their ethical rules.
As Your Honor already knew from when you were a prosecutor, prosecutors are held to a higher standard.
They're the ones that are supposed to be seeking justice.
They don't have a particular...
They're supposed to be disinterested.
When you have the lead prosecutor and the DA giving what I suggest to you is untruthful testimony.
Based on what Yerty has said.
Based on what Bradley said in his text.
Based on the whole way it was presented to you.
Bradley didn't want to testify.
He first came up with his attorney-client privilege thing on that.
And your honor, fortunately, went into that.
And then when Bradley knew he had to testify about it, you saw what happened.
You can draw the inference, as I've suggested, on Bradley.
That what he said in the text message, Defense Exhibit 26, is true.
The relationship, in fact, started prior to November 1st of 2021.
The ERT says that.
And now, without getting into any detail, the cell phone records.
The cell phone records show that during that period of time from, let's say, April 1 of 2021 to November 1st, I'm sorry, November 30th of 2021, that there was a number, a considerable number of 35 or more occasions where it appeared.
That, based on the records, that Mr. Wade was down in the area where Ms. Willis was staying in the Air Chiefs apartment.
But more important is there are two occasions, and the state has not challenged those.
There are two occasions where the records reflect that it appears Mr. Wade spent the night at that apartment.
The state may say, we don't accept that.
But they didn't challenge it.
And even when they brought forth what they brought forth today, supplemental two and three, they didn't challenge it again.
So what does that suggest?
That's corroborating evidence of what Yertes said, what Bradley said in his text message.
It's also impeachment evidence as to what Wade and Willis said about how many times.
Is that significant in terms of just the times?
So didn't Mr. Wade testify that he was there at least 10 times during that time frame?
You've now found 35. Well, minimum of 35. Okay.
But never overnight.
He said he never spent overnight.
He just lied about the amount.
I think the judges...
More than 10, or around 10, and we say 35. Do we win on that point?
No.
Okay.
It's not determined.
The overnight rate might raise some more concerns.
I understand.
Yeah, it does.
And that's the reason why we highlighted it in the affidavit of Mr. Middlestad.
Because that is suggestive that they were not being honest to the court.
So then, how much time have I used?
Keep going.
Just keep going, Santa.
I'm letting them use the hook.
Suggestive.
Again, raising issues.
I'm wondering about burden.
Is it we're dealing with a preponderance standard?
We are dealing with a preponderance standard, and it's our burden.
No question about that.
So does suggestive get us there?
No, but it is corroborating evidence of evidence that we did put up.
Oh, Sato, get to the next two texts.
And that's the purpose of the cell phone records.
They corroborate what Yerty says.
They corroborate what Bradley said in defense exhibit 26. And they confirm that they were lying or evading.
And they impeach, to that extent, Wade and Willis' testimony.
So if you find by a preponderance of the evidence, so I can finish this up, if you find by a preponderance of the evidence that...
What I call subset of forensic misconduct, ethical violations, has been shown.
And that there is a significant and legitimate concern about the truthfulness of Wade and Willis, they're disqualified.
Now, obviously, the factual findings are yours.
But the law allows you to do that.
You don't have to do it through an actual conflict.
That's the other side of the equation.
And that's what I've argued, and I think that's what Mr. Gibbons can argue.
Before I let you go, though, this is an interesting classification.
You're saying forensic conduct isn't just public.
I'm commenting publicly about the case indicating guilt.
You're saying forensic conduct is just anything a district attorney says?
No, anything improper they do to compromise.
Forensic misconduct as a subset of that would include violations, ethical violations, which impact the ability of the defendants to get a fair trial, as well as impact the court's ability to have faith.
That the prosecutors, these two prosecutors, are acting in good faith in their own conduct.
Same idea dealing with, as I said, defense counsel in the two cases I mentioned.
Ethical violations can give rise to disqualification, and I suggest we have that here.
The next two texts after he says, when Bradley...
There's a shot clock when you need it.
No municipal court.
He says, but you can't put where they met.
Not many people know that.
I might be one of only not even Chris.
What we have is a systematic, continuous pattern, a calculated plan, evidencing a design to prejudice the defendants in this case, in the minds of the jurors.
This is what we have seen.
The problem that the district attorney has, it's not that the district attorney had some sort of brief off-the-cuff statement in an interaction with a reporter like in Williams.
That's not what we have here.
We have someone who sat down, wrote out her speech, wrote out her plan.
Who sat down for whether it's two, three, or six times with the editors of Find Me the Votes and told and got her message out about this case before it was supposed to be tried in this courtroom.
And so that is the problem that we have.
We have a pattern of forensic misconduct on behalf of Ms. Willis.
So, I mean, we have a pattern of public statements being made.
I take it you or your team has dived in and read the book.
I know she was asked about specific portions in it.
The only case that I can find actually talking about when someone crosses the line on public comment Because you're alive.
Because you're alive.
There has to be an implication of saying a particular defendant is guilty.
And it even denied it, right?
So have you found any case in Georgia where they actually said that a prosecutor had gone too far in their public comments?
Does one exist?
Well, number one, thank goodness it doesn't happen often.
Sadly, it's already happened here.
Now, in Williams, the...
the prosecutor had one response to an inquiry the court found it was improper but did not have this pattern now it doesn't necessarily mean a comment about the the Guilt or innocence, although that was the pattern in Williams.
It's the improper comments by a prosecutor.
For example, in Williams they cite the nature and consequences of forensic misconduct in prosecution of criminal case, a 1955 Columbia Law School article, and how...
Prophetic that was.
When William cites that case in that law school article, they talk about an awful lot more than simply comments about specific guilt or references to guilt.
What you have here, Your Honor, is a comment, and we can look at it.
It doesn't apply only if a prosecutor said, I think the defendant is guilty in my mind.
No.
It's more pernicious than that.
What we have here is someone who sat down and drew up a plan for two reasons.
Drew up a plan for two reasons.
And what she did reminds me of what the court in STV Texas talks about, and that is that pretrial can create major problems for a defendant, indeed more harmful than publicity during a trial.
For it may set the community opinion as to guilt or innocence.
That's what we have here.
That's exactly what we have.
And the court in Estes talks about the power of the television camera.
So what do we have and what did this prosecutor do?
What she chose to do is sort of what was criticized by the Supreme Court in Shepard v.
Maxwell.
Legal trials are not like elections.
To be one for the use of meeting halls, the radio, or the newspaper.
That's exactly what we have here.
What we have is a deflection.
What this is all about is more insidious than just making the comments that she's made.
It's a deflection.
What she chose to do was to say, okay, I have done my best to hide the relationship with Nathan Wade.
And Nathan Wade has done his very best by filing false documents in his divorce case.
to hide his relationship with Ms. Rose.
That's for a different reason, though.
And so what did they do?
Well, when Ms. Merchant filed the motion to disqualify, now the game plan has to change.
The game plan, I call the deflection, begins to take place.
The deflection is when the district attorney sat down and wrote out, look at the list, I'm sure the court has.
When you look at that video, it's in evidence of her speech at church.
She has written out everything and she's reading from it.
Okay, so what?
She chooses to deflect.
The court asked earlier, wasn't she really responding to the motion that had been filed against her?
Would that she had?
Because if she had, she would have looked the members of that church in the face and say, I have been, there's been an allegation that I had a romantic relationship with Mr. Wade, and ladies and gentlemen of this congregation, it's true.
She didn't do that.
With a superstar.
She chose to deflect and to do two things that are reprehensible.
Blame race?
For any lawyer, but particularly for a prosecutor.
She chose to pull out the race card and the God card.
That's what she did.
And she wrote it out.
She went on to deflect away from the allegations.
The judge is going to say, I don't care about any of this.
Why, in her public discussion with God, why are they only attacking one?
Oh, your hard-headed child.
Can you imagine what she did?
And then she goes on to say, God, isn't it them playing the race card when they only question one?
Now, if she had been truthful with that congregation, truthful with the community, she would have said, I had a relationship with him.
In church.
Good, bad, forgive me, whatever.
That's what she should have said.
But she chose to deflect and say, them, the reference to them and the others and they.
It's obviously a reference to the motion filed by Ms. Merchant.
They choose to go after the black man.
And she then goes on, again, deflecting away and deflecting to what I call the third rail in American society, choosing somebody on the other side of being a racist.
So-and-so is a racist.
They're racist.
She was the one playing the race card in a way to try to deflect from her own conduct.
She goes on to say in her discussions with the Lord, Is it that some will never see a black man as qualified no matter his achievements?
Never prosecuted a felony.
What is she saying?
The listener is not necessarily in that audience in that church.
The listener is in Fulton County.
The potential jurors who will come into a courtroom and say whether or not they can fairly judge the evidence or judge the defense in this case.
She chose to inject race...
Into the minds of the listeners and virtually everybody in this community and literally everybody in this country has reviewed and analyzed her speech that she made in a premeditated way.
And in bringing in not only the race card, but also in bringing in the religious matter, this is exactly what Hammonds v.
State in our Supreme Court talks about condemning as an inflammatory appeal.
To the jurors' private religious beliefs.
Why would she do that?
To deflect.
But now, not only is she deflecting, but she is then going forward and, in a way, telling the community, telling the congregation that God is on her side, not on the side of these people.
These people?
God, she said.
What do you mean, these people?
Pray for their souls.
I, meaning God, qualified you.
I qualified your imperfect law itself.
I see you in every hour.
Do my work.
Ezzo, she's telling the folks in her very, very, very implicit way, injecting into the minds of the jurors, God wants me to win this case.
God wants me to prosecute this case.
And why is he going, and why are these others...
Going after the black man?
Well, the answer is very simple, as we said in our brief.
We didn't mention Mrs. Cross, the white female, or Mr. Floyd, the white male, because there was absolutely no evidence, and is no evidence, of a personal romantic relationship with them in which he obtained these benefits.
That's the reason why we did not do that.
So she goes forward with her.
With the deflections, that's exactly what she does when she goes forward and she talks about a planned interview time and time again with authors of a book, Find Me the Votes, where she's talking about a case that's going to be tried in this courtroom.
It's reprehensible.
So in that specific instance, setting aside the fact that she was willing to go on the record, Or a case that even reached the jury.
What specific statements from that book do you contend cross the line?
Well, for example, she's saying, you know, she goes on to talk about all the calls that she gets from people calling her racial terms.
And, you know, all the calls are racist.
What she's trying to do, and I think there's a reference in there to MAGA people, whatever.
In that, what she's really saying is that those people calling me up and making those claims or those...
Those horrible racial slurs to me are really people on their side of the fence.
That's what she's doing.
And there's no reason, Your Honor, ever for a prosecutor to sit down and go forward with this kind of interview.
She did it and fined the votes.
But then what really happened here is this hiding of the relationship.
Because in hiding the relationship, They have done such a good job.
Mr. Wade filed false documents in his divorce case on May of 2023, talking about, have you ever had sexual relations with a person during the course of the marriage or including the period of separation?
He's still married.
He doesn't have a divorce decree, but his answer is none.
Then he's asked whether or not on any occasion she's entertained or been entertained by a member of the opposite sex, in this case a woman, from the date of the marriage to the present.
Talking about place and time and all that.
What is the answer?
None.
Why does he do that?
He does that because he doesn't want to tell about the relationship that he has with Ms. Willis and the benefits that he has gotten and that he gave to her.
And what these answers are are absolutely reprehensible that a member of the State Bar of Georgia would file these answers that are inaccurate.
What does Ms. Willis do?
Ms. Willis, on her financial report on whether or not she has gotten anything of $100 or more in value from a prohibited source, The court asked earlier about what a threshold might be.
Well, for the financial report, it's $100.
That's it.
It's a little all over the place.
...of all of the benefits that she received from Mr. Wade.
All the trips, all the entertainment, all the three nights in the luxury suite in Aruba.
All of that, none of that is here.
And they say, oh well, maybe it all balanced out, even though I can't prove it with the cash.
Well, that's like saying, did I give the court a Christmas present?
Well, maybe I gave the court a Christmas present, and the court gave me one back.
The court has to fill out a form whether you got a Christmas present from anybody.
You say, I got one from Mr. Gillen.
You don't say, nah, well, I gave him one back, so it really evens out.
They're false reports.
And because they're false, what they had to do is they had to say, uh-oh, Ms. Merchant has caught us.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to get, in our response, we're going to get Mr. Wade to file a false declaration, which he does.
His declaration in this case is false.
And the evidence showing that that is false as it relates to the timing, you know, and the court asked earlier, why?
Does it matter, you know, if the relationship was before or after November 1, 2021?
The answer is, they think it's important, and frankly, I do too.
Because when she's hiring somebody and she's not telling the people who are going to be paying the tab up to $700,000, hey, I just hired my boyfriend who's taking me on a trip to the Caribbean and taking me down to Aruba and taking me to California.
Hope you don't mind.
No disclosure whatsoever.
And the money flows off.
But because they got caught, they then commit what I think is an additional component of forensic misconduct, and that is fraud on this court.
When they filed that affidavit, and now it's been proven, I think, beyond virtually any doubt, any doubt that the relationship occurred prior to November 1, 2021, and the benefits...
That were there and we don't have to run around and I love the you know that you know We've got all the records showing from from from mr. Wade about the payment for these trips for the cruises for the flights all this stuff What's the only way is they sat?
Cash.
We got it.
Cash.
Untraceable.
That's the only way that they can save themselves.
Pay no attention to the records.
Pay no attention to the airlines and to the flights and vacations and cruises.
I paid him back in cash.
Show us your receipts.
How did you take cash out of the bank?
Didn't deposit it.
Never.
I don't have any.
Well, show us the deposits that he had.
Don't have any.
Never.
We don't have any.
What we have here is fraud on this court, which has been shown, I think, overwhelmingly by the evidence.
And overwhelmingly through not only the testimony of the e-mails and the text from Mr. Bradley to Ms. Merchant, as well as all the documents that they had no answer to other than the, just trust me, I gave him money, it evaporated, I don't know where it came from, and he doesn't know what he did with it.
Please trust us and believe us because it's our only way out of the trap that they set for themselves.
These people, sadly, and I hate to say that, as the court knows, I was a prosecutor for about three and a half million years, it seems, in the federal building and I was an assistant DA beforehand.
Prosecutors don't act like this.
Lawyers don't act like this.
Criminals act like that.
These people, Your Honor, it's a systematic...
These people.
And they need to go.
Oh, boy.
Thank you.
Okay, good.
But they're missing two big points.
A, yes, that Terrence Bradley was unqualified.
Not Terrence Bradley, sorry, Nathan Wade, in the Bradley text.
Never prosecuted the film.
I'm going to cover a few factual details without overly rehashing what has already been said.
Okay, let's hear it.
During the pendency of this investigation in this case, Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis basically lived Ron and Leach's lifestyle of the rich and famous.
And they did this riding on the backs of the defendants in this case, funded by the taxpayers of Fulton County in the state of Georgia, with the money that was paid to Mr. Wade through the contract that Ms. Willis got him.
That money flow, that is the personal interest that you asked about.
She was personally benefiting.
From the position, from the job, from the scope of the investigation, from the scope of the indictment and how they conducted it.
And we know this, we know from the records that have been submitted before the court that Mr. Wade paid at least $17,095 towards this relationship.
That does not even include the various dinners.
The day trips that both Wade and Willis admitted to, so that number is likely even higher.
We know from the documents that Ms. Willis only paid $1,394 for an airline ticket.
We know from Ms. Yurdy, who was pretty much uncontested, there was no evidence presented by the state disputing her time frame, that that relationship started in 2019.
She saw them kissing.
She saw them hugging.
This is good.
Fact-based, evidence-based testimony.
Whether or not they had sex before January of 2022, I do not know.
They admitted sometime in early 2022, and I found it curious that they both, Wade and Willis, just went straight to the sex.
So maybe that's when they started having sex.
I do not know.
But the relationship predated that.
And their combined and overly suggestive...
Focus on that is a red herring to this court and to the defense that that's what they want you to focus on.
They want you to ignore all the evidence that the relationship predated that.
The relationship started in 2019.
The relationship continued through 2020.
The relationship continued through 2021.
Looking at the cell phone communications, just in the first 11 months of 2021, over 2,000 calls, almost 9,800 texts.
I don't even think lovestruck teenagers communicate that much.
The November 29th and November 30th escapade.
Phone call from Ms. Willis, between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade, 11.32 that night.
Shortly after midnight, the phone starts traveling down from where Mr. Wade lives.
It ends up where Ms. Willis is staying, and he's there until roughly 4.55 a.m.
None of the excuses, none of the explanations that Mr. Wade gave going to the Porsche experience, going to dinner, going to the airport, none of that explains that.
I'm pretty sure the Porsche experience isn't open in the middle of the night.
I'm pretty sure that there weren't any restaurants that he drove 30 to 45 minutes to go eat at in the middle of the night, right after he talked to Ms. Willis.
I won't go into it.
But the documentary evidence, the objective evidence, undercuts everything that both Wade and Willis said.
When you look at Ms. Yurie, again, she unequivocally said that relationship began in 2019.
She saw physical evidence of a romantic relationship.
Mr. Bradley.
Confirmed and gets to the second one.
began in twenty nine and only he and one of the first two january you know temporary amnesia this house triggered temporarily after a gate banks called him we can question that but we do have statements from him that specifically said that relationship predated mister wade's appointment by miss willis
You asked, well, and Mr. Wade, you asked what the materiality would be.
How much is enough?
Well, clearly $17,000 is enough.
But Fulton County has told us, has told Mrs. Willis what the materiality is.
It's $100 in a year.
She twice signed declarations, certifications that she did not receive any gifts.
And even under her strained explanation, there were monies, there were gifts, there were dinners, there were excess contributions flowing her way that exceeded $100.
Campaign cash?
Her excuse.
Or, I'm sorry, her explanation.
Well, I just paid it in cash.
That just...
Does not stand to reason.
It does not hold up to the light of truth.
Anyone that has ever been in a money laundering trial, a forfeiture trial, if that's the explanation we give the state, they laugh.
Oh, I just gave cash.
I have no records for it.
I have no source for it.
The only thing that she could say that was a source for the money, because at times she said she was down to $500 to $1,000.
The only explanation she had is, well, Sometimes I go to Publix and I may get an extra $50.
That shows up on your debit card or your credit card.
Did they bring those records in?
No.
Did they bring her bank accounts in?
No.
Did they bring any documentary evidence in?
No, they did not.
And why is that important, Judge?
Yes, the burden is ours.
But under OCGA 24-14-22, If a party has evidence in such party's power and within such party's reach, by which he or she may repel a claim, and they had that power,
Ms. Willis had that power, Mr. Wade had that power, that they can repel the claim that we have made against them, but they admit to produce it, or if they produce weaker evidence, then you, as the fact-finder judge, it is in your power...
To disregard that and a presumption arises that that documentary evidence that is in their possession that they failed to produce supports our claim.
And that is something that the state relies on regularly in criminal trials.
And that is something that the court should rely on in this case when formulating its factual findings.
And we know that both Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis have some difficulty expressing the truth when it comes to Their relationship in these cases.
We know Mr. Wade lied in his interrogatories multiple times.
We know Ms. Willis falsely certified that she hadn't received any gifts from anybody.
And Mr. Wade clearly was a prohibited source.
He was someone doing business with Fulton County.
Anything over $100 in a year, she had to put down.
And she put zero.
And it defies imagination that she could somehow forget.
About all these trips, all these dinners, all these day trips, and not put that money down.
You had asked, I think it was Mr. Gillen, did she say in that church speech or anywhere else that the defendants were guilty?
And I think she did in that church speech.
She said in that church speech, And she was talking about a conversation that she apparently had with God, talking about herself.
She said, this leader has a trial conviction rate of 95%.
She said, the trial team this leader put together has a conviction rate of 95%.
I do not see how anyone, and I think that was purposefully intended by Miss Willis, I do not see how anyone can listen to those two statements and not take that Miss Willis is telling everyone In that church, and everyone that's going to hear that in the media afterwards, that these defendants are guilty.
That is what she was saying.
She is a prosecutor.
She's familiar with the U.S. v.
Burger.
Every single attorney that's ever been a prosecutor is familiar with the dictates of that U.S. Supreme Court case.
That is a foul blow.
That is improper.
And she violated pretty much every tenant.
A prosecutor must bye-bye to seek truth and justice in a particular case.
So, Judge, when you're looking at this, the uncontroverted evidence shows that they had a relationship prior.
The uncontroverted evidence shows that Mr. Wade lavishly spent on Ms. Willis.
The uncontroverted evidence shows that the money that he was spending on Ms. Willis This contract that he had, and I'm not just talking about the contract as a special prosecutor, but there's also those other questionable contracts that no matter whom his partner seemed to be, they also got.
There is a direct financial benefit that Ms. Willis received from this.
And Judge, looking back at what Judge McFernish said, if merely hosting A fundraiser for a political opponent of a putative defendant creates not only the appearance, but an actual conflict.
And what Ms. Willis has done since then, in this case, creates an actual conflict.
But again, as prior counsel has stated, we only need to show the appearance of the conflict.
And we have done that by preponderance of the evidence.
In fact, I believe we've shown an actual conflict.
But nonetheless, The result should be that Ms. Willis and her office should be disqualified from this case.
We still have a few more minutes.
I think Mr. Cromwell may have something to say.
Thank you, Your Honor.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, Your Honor.
Harry McDinkill for Mr. Clark.
I'm going to talk further about conflicts.
And I'm going to assume the most difficult standard for us to meet, which is actual conflict.
But before I begin that, I want to add just a little bit to what has already been said about the standards that apply to prosecutors.
Our appellate courts have said often the administration of the law, and especially that of the criminal law, should, like Caesar's wife, be above suspicion.
And should be free from all temptation, bias, or prejudice so far as it is possible for our courts to accomplish it.
The first occurrence of that that I can find is Nichols v.
State more than 100 years ago, 1915, the most recent Registe v.
State in the Supreme Court in 2010, although they don't refer to Caesar's wife.
That requirement is also embedded in the prosecutor's statutory oath.
15-18-2, which requires impartially and without fear or favor, discharge my duties as district attorney and take only my lawful compensation, so help me God.
The general rule on conflicts of interest for lawyers is in Rule of Professional Conduct 1.7.
And we all know, it's all drummed into us, that we cannot have a conflict of interest.
And if we do, we have to withdraw or we will be disqualified.
The basic idea is that a conflict of interest impairs the lawyer's independent professional judgment.
That's the test of a conflict and whether it can be waived and whether it's disqualifying.
And that conflict is not just financial.
It can be any conflict that impairs your...
Independent professional judgment, and you see that in McLaughlin v.
Payne.
The court asked what was a personal interest for purposes of disqualification.
It's anything that impairs professional judgment.
That's reflected in the ABA standards that were quoted by Mr. Merchant, which list the prosecutor's personal, political, financial, professional, business, property, or other interests.
Or relationships, and that's really embedded in the prosecutor's oath to act impartially.
And the earlier disqualification order by Judge McBurney was based on political interests, not financial.
What my colleagues have described as forensic misconduct is also cognizable as a conflict of interest based on that footnote in Williams' case.
right now.
This guy's good.
It's a conflict of interest arising from their individual personal interests in perpetuating and concealing their relationship.
There are six different actual conflicts of interest in this case, any one of which warrants disqualification, but collectively.
Practically compelling first the financial conflict.
It's already been covered second the personal ambition political ambition and Probably the weakest.
and concealment of the relationship and the money.
There you go.
Fourth, the speech at the church.
Fifth, the motion for protective order that the DA filed In Mr. Wade's divorce case, sixth, the way the state has conducted the defense of this motion to disqualify especially the hearing.
On the financial piece, the court asked for a limiting principle and asked about materiality.
The limiting principle is whatever impairs the independent professional judgment of the lawyer.
That is applied routinely.
We have a county code section that flatly prohibits gifts from contractors.
Period.
We have, by analogy, the federal bribery statute, which has a threshold of $5,000.
18 U.S.C.
666.
This is good.
The court asked about burdens and inferences.
The court can draw a negative inference from the state's failure to produce evidence to support the invisible magic cash balancing theory based on State v.
Thomas, 311 Georgia 407, particularly footnote 19. As to the timing question that the court asked about, There were two contracts for Mr. Wade executed after they acknowledged the relationship.
This is the point.
Exactly.
One of them afflicted or conflicted under county and common law.
That's even by the rule of defense.
The second conflict is her political ambition for which she was previously chastised by Judge McBurney.
And that's also present in this book.
The inside flap of this book says that they were given Quote, exclusive access to thousands of secret documents, emails, text messages, and audio recordings.
The court has twice denied defense motions to unseal special purpose grand jury materials.
She helped herself to get the glory of this book.
I introduced certified copies of a number of county code sections.
I'm not going to walk through those, but I'll tell you why they matter.
The stack of law from the state constitution down to the county ordinances imposes a regime on the DA under which she has three obligations.
She has to go to the county commission to get approval to pay him like she did.
She cannot accept gifts from a prohibited source.
She has to disclose the gifts that she received.
She didn't.
She evaded all of those requirements.
Section 2-69 of the County Code prohibits gifts from prohibited sources, which he was.
There is no boyfriend exception.
The disclosure forms, the evidence is sufficient for you to find that her disclosure form for 2022 is false and that it is a false writing.
That's an actual conflict of interest between her duty He went to the gravy train.
pattern of concealment.
It's a story you see in many divorce cases.
The husband is hiding things from his wife.
How much money he's making, the other woman, And what he's spending on the other woman.
And he got on that stand, lied in his interrogatories, and he got on the stand and he lied about lying in the interrogatories.
And the lawyers for the DA, the DA's office, they just sat there and let him do it.
They did nothing to correct obviously perjured testimony.
In and of itself, that warrants disqualification of every one of them.
The reason they lied and covered it up was to avoid the trouble they're in right now.
That served their personal interests to the detriment of their public duties as prosecutors.
The speech at the church.
I want to focus on why she did that.
Mr. Dillon talked about that.
She did it to deflect attention from her own misconduct and that of Mr. Wade.
She violated her public duty as a prosecutor to serve her personal interests and the personal interests of her boyfriend.
That is a disqualifying conflict between her personal interest and her public duty that is actual, operational, and materialized, and it rests on undisputed facts.
The next thing that she did that was a disqualifying conflict of interest was the emergency motion for protective order.
She filed in the divorce.
I filed a certified copy of that as Exhibit 37. She sought a protective order under the APEX doctrine on the grounds that she's the DA.
The whole filing is expressly predicated on her status as DA.
In fact, she never lets you forget it.
She says it 27 times in 12 pages.
In that filing, speaking as DA, she said, The circumstances, quote, suggest that defendant Joycelyn Wade is using the legal process to harass and embarrass District Attorney Willis and in doing so is obstructing and interfering with an ongoing criminal investigation.
Seems to be exactly what she was doing.
On page 11, she asked for six months to, quote, complete a review of the filings in the instant case, investigate and depose relevant witnesses.
With regard to the interference and obstruction this motion contends.
There's no sugarcoating it.
That's a clear violation of rule of professional conduct 3.4H, which prohibits lawyers from making threats of criminal prosecution to gain advantage in a civil case.
This guy's a thousand percent on fire.
She abused her power.
She abused her position to threaten her boyfriend's wife.
With criminal prosecution to gain advantage for herself and her boyfriend in her boyfriend's divorce.
She violated her public duties not to make that kind of a threat in order to serve her private personal interests and those of Mr. Wade.
Another actual operational conflict.
The last category is the conduct of the defense of this hearing.
Oh, let's hear this.
This is going to be good.
There are a lot of objections made from attorney-client privilege during Mr. Bradley's testimony.
Most of those objections were made by the state.
But the privilege being asserted does not belong to the state.
It belongs to Mr. Wade.
Okay, let's hear this argument.
That shows that the DA's office is serving the personal interests of the DA and Mr. That's an interesting argument.
That's an interesting argument.
That they've engaged in since the beginning.
But now they've enlisted the entire office in the enterprise.
In the written response to the motion to disqualify, they said this, and I quote, should be absolutely clear, there is no evidence that DA Willis derived any financial benefit from Mr. Waite.
That's on page 15. Flat out false.
Ten lawyers in this case put their name on that, starting with the DA.
So throw another log on the bonfire of conflicts of interest.
The problem here is the DA cannot distinguish between her personal interests and ambitions on the one hand, and her public duties as a prosecutor on the other, and apparently neither can anyone else in their office.
Of the six conflicts I've identified, only one is subject to a conflict and the others.
This is a case study in what happens when you operate under a conflict of interest.
It's put an irreparable stain on the case.
Think of the message that would be sent if they were not disqualified.
If this is tolerated, we'll get more of it.
This office is a global laughingstock because of their conduct.
Yes!
Testify whoever you...
What's this guy?
What's his name?
Yes!
They should be disqualified and the case should be dismissed.
Checkmate biatches.
No questions, Judge Mack?
There's not much oxygen left in the room.
We delineated the times based on the whole presentation.
That was amazing.
Best presentation.
Would you have to consider some time for us in rebuttal?
No.
Okay.
Well, then, can I reserve what I had five minutes for rebuttal?
Sure.
That's fine.
All right.
Thank you, Your Honor.
That was the best one there.
Let's take a quick five, and we'll be back at 2.40ish to be here from the state.
Thank you.
Alright, so that was very good.
Five minutes.
International laughing stock.
There is no other way to describe it.
And you let the judge know.
It's not just...
We'll listen for some hot mic stuff.
We'll listen for some hot mic stuff.
Your Honor, if you disqualify Fannie Willis, you're racist.
If you disqualify Nathan Wade, you're racist.
Leticia is next.
Oh, I can't wait to see if that happens.
Can the DA Office's lawyers be subject to RICO?
That's the meme and the joke.
Okay, so...
They put it on mute?
Okay, so I'll bring this off in the back now.
So there is breaking news.
Hold on one second.
How long is the break?
Five minutes, is what he said.
And this judge has been good with actual five minutes.
Let's read some super chats, shall we, while we're doing this?
We're going to catch up.
The judge is white, and the three perjurers who appeared in the case are black means the judge must walk on eggshells.
There's no justice.
No, they got around that because the defense team which partook in the perjury, which partook in the filing of false affidavits, are white.
So they can walk around that.
Uncover the taint counsel.
Then we've got Megan.
This man is great.
Thank you for the coverage.
Megan, thank you very much for the super chat and the fire and popcorn emojis.
No one watching this can defend Fannie.
Libs are too lazy to watch.
They will get their rage from what MSM tells them.
All lies.
Yeah, CNN.
No one corroborated Ashley Merchant's allegations, except, you know, witnesses.
Sorry, I got that.
All the best, Viva, from Q Frager.
Oh, the other one was from Bear Paw.
Theophrastus, criminals and corrupt politicos always deal in cash.
Alec Dolben, Viva, real-time thoughts on which way the judge is leaning.
Hold on.
Oh, fanny's entered.
She got the dress on the right way.
She got her flag right side up.
I think the judge was giving them a bit of a harder time early on to show his impartiality.
I'm not changing my prediction.
The judge is disqualifying Fannie Willis.
Nathan Wade.
I don't think he's dismissing the charges, but he's definitely disqualified.
I'm going to do all of the rumble rants afterwards and all of the locals' tips and questions.
But we can't not stare at fans.
Look at her.
A superstar.
Hey, how you doing?
Hey.
Is it the same dress?
Not that I judge people for in the same clothing all the time.
VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com Yeah, I'm pretty good on body language.
She's neither confident nor happy.
Why would she come only for...
Oh, oh, who's that?
Who's that?
Is that...
That was Nathan Wade.
Was that Nathan Wade?
This is more exciting than bird watching.
I'm supposed to be coming up with that.
This is a very good job.
Okay, let's see.
I'm just going to go post.
Everyone?
Okay.
Yeah.
Right now.
Okay.
Okay.
Can you do one second there, people?
just posting the audio of the...
how do I say with the audio?
Where's the audio?
Hold on, I'm trying to Okay, we're back.
All right, we're back on the record.
Stay ready?
Yes, Judge.
I've just been trying to get to where I can share my screen.
We need to add you as a host, then.
What's your profile name on the Zoom?
Your screen name on the Zoom.
Adam Abad.
Just making sure.
It's going to be fair with it.
All righty, here we go.
I'm not going to start without.
All right, floor is yours.
I want to start with some of the things that were addressed over the last hour and a half.
Something Mr. Merchant referenced as it related to the comments that the state made in regards to the good faith basis in which was submitted to the court, in which defense counsel claimed the evidence would show.
And I would strongly bring to the court's attention that the claims that were made were material misrepresentations.
And what I will say to the court, and why I say that to the court, is because the representations that were made by counsel was that Ms. Daisha Young, Ms. Sonia Allen, Mr. Dexter Bonds, Investigator Hill, Investigator Green, Investigator Ricks, all of these people would be called and Mr. Bradley would be able to impeach their knowledge.
By saying that he specifically, in his presence, or to him, said that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade were in a romantic relationship, and that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade were cohabitating, that they all knew that.
And I would submit to the court, we didn't hear from any of those individuals.
Mr. Bradley impeached no one.
And I say no one, because he did not impeach Mr. Wade.
In order to properly impeach a witness, you have to confront the witness with the specific statements.
Mr. Wade, and you can look back at the YouTube of the entire hearings over the last couple days, Mr. Wade wasn't once confronted with a statement that he claimed or said, or that is claimed that he said to Mr. Bradley.
The way you properly impeach somebody, you have to confront the witness here with Mr. Wade, and once...
He makes a statement that you believe to be inconsistent and you have a witness who can prove that inconsistency.
Nervous and confusing.
That's when you call that witness.
Nervous and confusing.
And when Mr. Wade was on the stand, not once was he asked, did you tell Mr. Bradley this in a confidential conversation in your conference room that was not covered under attorney-client privilege?
That was not asked.
The specifics of that conversation was not asked.
So any testimony that Mr. Bradley testified to is impermissible.
It is improper impeachment because they did not confront Mr. Wade with it.
So that's where the state would begin with the comments that Mr. Merchant made about me referencing his wife as lying.
I never called Ms. Merchant a liar.
I never used those words.
I don't know why she made the material misrepresentations.
It could be because Mr. Bradley lied to her.
I don't know the reason.
But I can submit to the court that those were material misrepresentations that were made to this court on the day, a few Mondays ago, as everyone was arguing the motions to quash certain subpoenas.
I'd also bring to the court's attention that during that motion to quash subpoenas, certain subpoenas, Ms. Yurdy's attorney appeared, Mr. Partridge, and he made very clear on that Zoom.
that Miss Yurdy had absolutely no knowledge of a romantic relationship and absolutely no Excuse me.
We heard what she said.
He's telling her what she knew.
So what I would submit to the court is those are considered adoptive emissions that his client has made based on the statements he made.
Because of the representations she made to him.
What the hell is he talking about?
I know that sounds convoluted.
It is.
But what I would say to the court is, Ms. Yurdy told Mr. Partridge, because Mr. Partridge told the court, that she had absolutely no information about romantic relationships.
Does this guy know what to do?
But wait, are you making an argument I should make inferences based on?
Now these would be attorney-client privileges or communications then.
She's communicating with Mr. Partridge about what her upcoming testimony is.
That's why she's hired him.
And you're telling me I should infer things based on her communications?
Despite what she said to the court.
They're not attorney-client communications anymore when he discloses them to the court and everybody else as they watch the Zoom and attend the hearing.
The difference is there was no request to go in-camera.
There was no request to go to have a private conversation with you as was done with Mr. Bradley.
That would have been the proper procedure.
So yes, I'm asking you to infer that 100%.
Infer, notwithstanding her testimony.
best inconsistent.
You're a joke.
Because the testimony of Miss Yurie when she testified was vague Very little description when asked up in a very leading manner Is it is it true or or do you know that miss?
You saw them do things.
relationship from 2019 into the time you were fired for her excuse me you were forced to resign from the district attorney's office in March of 2022 she said yes and then further when pressed by mr. Seydow he talks about why she believed they were in a relationship and what was interesting from miss Yurdy's testimony that they were
Pretty close friends up until she left the DA's office.
She asserted to the court that on a yearly basis, Ms. Willis said, I'm in a relationship with Mr. Wade in 2019.
Oh, by the way, I want to tell you again in 2020, because we're in a new year, I'm still in a relationship with Mr. Wade.
This is terrible.
In 2021, the assertion is...
Ms. Willis then went back to Ms. Yurdy and confirmed, hey, I just want to reconfirm me and Mr. Weiner still in a relationship.
That's not what she said.
That's not what she said.
It's absolutely absurd.
Say it again.
More importantly, when Mr. Sadow asked her about why she believed that they were in a romantic relationship based on her own observations, she said something.
He actually asked her, do you see him kissing or hugging?
She said yes, but there was no...
A description or qualification about when it occurred.
Oh no.
What she actually saw.
Tongue and mouth.
Was it a kiss on the cheek?
Things of that nature.
Oh my God.
Disregard it.
Frame her testimony from that standpoint.
Oh yeah, we will.
Addressing her credibility.
As the court is going to do with each and every witness that you heard during the testimony of all the witnesses during the hearing.
I'm going to see if my screen will share.
This guy says, don't listen to Yuri's actual testimony.
Infer the opposite based on what she said to her attorney in prepping for this.
Holy crab apples.
And by the way, this is convoluted, confusing, and unconvincing.
Utterly unconvincing.
I had one more thing to say about what he just did.
That's okay now.
And by the way, I just posted the audio, now that I know that it's not a private exhibit, the audio of the voicemail that a waiter left, alleging that he saw Nathan Wade and Terrence Bradley having lunch five weeks ago, despite them saying they hadn't seen each other in two years.
Talk a little bit about the standard and the burden here in this instance as it relates to defense counsel and the claims that they have made and the motion to disqualify.
And as I was doing a whole lot of research, I came upon this law review article from Cornell scholarship reading or publication.
And they made very clear that courts have been relatively reluctant to exercise their power to disqualify prosecutors for any reason.
And that goes along with the standard what state would submit to the court is that the defense has to show an actual conflict.
And in this instance, they have to show the actual conflict would be that Miss Willis received a financial benefit or gain and did it based or got it based upon the outcome of the case.
It doesn't make any sense.
It makes absolutely no sense.
And during the three days of the extensive testimony of all of the witnesses, And the prolonged examinations of the witnesses by multiple of the defense counsel, they still got nowhere.
We're in the same position we were in on Monday.
The same assertions that were made on Monday have no answers today as before, Your Honor.
They were not able to provide any evidence as to the contrary of Ms. Willis and Ms. Wade's assertions of when their relationship began.
There's absolutely no evidence that contradicts that the relationship did not begin later than around March of 2022, Your Honor.
I further submit to the court, because of this failure, that their assertion or their request that, one, the indictment be dismissed.
There's absolutely no evidence that the defendants in this case, their due process rights, That's not the basis for dismissing it.
Not a single shred of evidence was produced through any of the exhibits or the witness testimony showing how their constitutional rights, their due process rights, were all affected by the relationship that began in March of 2022 with Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade.
And because of that, the motion to disqualify should be denied.
Ms. Willis, as the District Attorney of Fulton County, and Mr. Wade, as the Special Prosecutor assigned to this case, should be allowed to remain on this case and continue, and continue to prosecute the case to the end, Your Honor, until the trial is set by the court and is to begin.
Now, the issues, obviously, you've heard a lot from Defense Counsel as to what the issues are for you to, I guess, determine.
And here would be the state's contention is that you must find that there's an actual conflict if you are or are to come to the conclusion that you should disqualify Ms. Willis and the district attorney's office.
And looking at...
Sorry, I can't hold in all the bullshit that I'm spewing.
It's McGlynn V. State.
M-C-G-L-Y-N-N.
This guy knows that the case is lost.
It's a 2017 case.
In that case, it talks about the standard of proof that the defense or the burden that the defense must show and go to show an actual conflict.
They say it's a high standard of proof which is definitely not a preponderance of the evidence which is a much lower burden for any party who's trying to meet that standard of preponderance, but it's very Clear that what it is is that is a high standard of proof for both when determining whether there's an actual conflict and when there's forensic misconduct and This guy's confusing everything here.
Hold on, I've got to take a note.
I want to go through some of the cases that defense counsel has referenced.
They argued here today and in their filings.
And I guess the bright line standard or the standard and the grounds for which disqualification is appropriate for your honor to be determining in all of the cases as it relates to disqualifying the elected district attorney.
It's already happened, though.
Yeah, appearance.
There's been some sort of forensic misconduct.
Those are, I guess, the two areas that, Your Honor, that is in your purview when you are looking to resolve an issue regarding disqualification.
It's a problem this guy can't finish a sentence.
Now, in a recent case, Levy State, which is 224 Georgia.
I'm sorry Lexus 31 I'm it's a February of 2024 case I'm here out of our appellate courts and in that case of justice Pinson wrote that a trial court did not abuse its discretion by failing to disqualify an assistant district attorney acts in an actual conflict of interest and that Totally different.
ruled on by the George Court of Appeals about a month ago, Your Honor.
Now, the cases in which defense counsel has relied on I would submit to the court the sites are misleading, are inapplicable, and some of them actually support the state's position.
And what I would say to you is that the defendants in many instances combine language from the multiple cases and kind of what I would say is misstates the law.
As it relates to what the law, what is required in order for an elected district attorney and their office to be disqualified.
And what I would submit to the court is...
Let's go back to that.
Show me how.
Yes.
Show you how.
So I think the first one they cited was battle versus the state.
Certainly a conflict of interest or the appearance of impropriety.
It would be the grounds of disqualification.
Appearance!
Dude, answer that!
Answer that!
Oops, I'm sorry.
Did I just misstate the law to you, Judge?
Let me just...
There are a number of these cases that seem to exclusively rely on the appearance of impropriety.
Right.
Did I just misstate the law?
There's some ambiguity here that sometimes Whitworth gets cited to Ventura and we've got this quote that comes up where it's just they only cite to an actual conflict that must be involved.
They acknowledge the ambiguity.
You're saying there's no ambiguity whatsoever.
I am saying that, and why I am saying that, why I would submit that to the court, is in all of those cases, they do reference the appearance of an impropriety, but they reference that because they also find there's an actual conflict.
Oh my goodness, dude.
Nice skating.
Your position would be, your review of the case law, there's never been an appellate opinion that relied only on an appearance of a propriety.
As it relates to a prosecutor, a district attorney, yes.
That is what I'm saying.
What I would say is in those cases, they do reference the fact that there is an appearance of impropriety.
Oh, he just got hammered.
But they reference that fact because when you have an actual conflict, there's always an appearance of impropriety.
So then why would they talk about an appearance?
Oh my goodness.
I guess that is the main example of what I reference as they kind of combine the language from separate and different cases and tell you that the standard is an appearance of impropriety.
And I would submit to the court that is not the standard.
And in my first reading, I would submit to you the law is not what you see it.
I did notice that the cases each referenced the appearance of impropriety, but also that that appearance arose from the fact that the court found an actual conflict in each one of those cases.
So I won't belabor the point.
Yeah, don't, because you're lying.
You're misrepresenting the law.
But what I would submit to the court in reading those cases is that...
I found that they kind of fell into five categories, that some didn't concern disqualification at all, some that determined...
Dude just lied to court.
I mean, that's appreciated.
...that were about, I call it divided loyalty, which is a conflict that arises from representing a, becoming a prosecutor and then having represented the defendant prior to becoming a prosecutor, and then whether there's an actual personal interest in the outcome.
And then others talk about whether the defendant was denied a fundamentally fair trial at the conclusion.
This guy's mixing up a bunch of legal concepts.
A judge can reprimand him.
He really did just misrepresent the law, knowingly.
These are some of the cases that the judge is not going to know.
Within their brief that had absolutely no application to the issue that we're here before your honor today.
The first.
MacGyver v.
State has nothing related to the disqualification of anyone.
I think some of these are just relating to kind of aspiring for broad language about standards to prosecutors.
So point taken there.
But if there are more...
All right, keep going.
So...
As it relates to one of the cases that was referenced here earlier, and is also referenced in some of the briefings by the defense counsel- He's giving a PowerPoint presentation?
...
is the Registon v.
State, which is 287 Georgia.
We can't do that.
All of the cases that fall under this, what I would call category, is about an attorney who formerly prosecuted a defendant in Does anybody understand what he's talking about?
...or similar charges.
And that would be why the courts found that disqualification would be necessary because of the relationship that existed between the former client and the now person who's being prosecuted, Your Honor.
Oh my gosh, this guy.
The next series of slides.
Just goes through what has been addressed as it relates to the standard that is required when dealing with the issue of disqualifications.
And the state would contend and submit to the court that the defense must show an actual conflict in order to have the district attorney disqualified.
And that actual conflict has to be in the form of...
Showing that Ms. Willis, in this instance, received a financial benefit or gain in relation to the outcome of the case.
Not the outcome of the case?
That involve personal interest, Your Honor.
It's all based on a contingency fee.
This guy's out in left field.
This is terrible.
How much they're paid, or a bonus, for example, is dependent upon the outcome of the case.
That's how one is to show that there's a personal interest in the case.
We have none of that here.
Now, it's in the court.
We have actually no evidence that Ms. Willis received any financial gain or benefit.
Where were you?
Are you an idiot?
All of the money back in cash is related to the trips, and it didn't pay back in cash.
This guy's working for Trump.
All right, let me explore this one a little bit.
So, in addition to, you know, you're saying it's only an actual conflict, are you also saying it's only if the financial interest is affecting the final result, the outcome, that's the only one we should be worried about?
Say it again.
Say it again, lawyer.
Or is it that the prosecution as a whole is what we should be looking at in terms of a stake?
So what I'm thinking of, I'm just going to try and come up with some hypos here.
What if ADAs are given a bonus for every motion to suppress they win?
$1,000 per Fourth Amendment claim they win.
Well, now they've got an incentive if one of their officers is lying not to tell you that, because they want to win that motion to suppress.
But maybe that doesn't affect the outcome, because you can win a motion to suppress or lose it.
That doesn't decide whether it's going to be a guilty or not guilty verdict.
But doesn't that affect the prosecution of the case, if not the outcome?
Yes, I would definitely agree that that would be an instance where disqualification would be necessary and appropriate because it's a situation that involves a contingency fee, and I would submit to the court that it actually does end up affecting...
It could, based on how important the motion to suppress it is, right?
But if it's...
How about if it's political animus?
But I guess, so you're saying it's maybe not so much just the whether it's a...
Guilty or not guilty.
Dismissal.
No process at the end of the day.
It is actually the conduct of the prosecution that should be looked at throughout the course of the prosecution.
Correct.
As it relates to how it affects the prosecution, which I would submit to the court, ultimately is going to affect the end outcome of the case.
If you have a contingency fee based on winning or how, you know, if you win a motion to suppress and it's, you know, if you win, you get, you know, a certain, a bonus as your honor referenced.
I think that That is ultimately going to affect the end outcome of the case because, as Your Honor just said, if there's an instance where an officer is lying or where there isn't a good faith to go forward with the motion, the prosecutor would go forward regardless because of the contingency which not only affects the prosecution at that point of the proceedings but ultimately is going to affect the entire case because if...
If they were to win a motion to suppressor, I guess the motion would be denied and the evidence wasn't suppressed, knowing that they didn't have a good faith basis to go forward affects the ultimate outcome of the case.
Look at Sato in the back, by the way.
I think it's twofold, as Your Honor has referenced.
I think it's at that part of the, I guess, the procedure or the proceedings would definitely qualify for a reason necessary to disqualify.
A prosecuting agency, but ultimately that action during the procedure will lead to the ultimate outcome of the case being or hinging upon a contingency fee like the ones in the cases referenced by counsel and the state that are on the screen.
So getting into the language again, which you just had up there with greater amusements and amusement sales.
Greater amusements is what it does.
You refer to the appearance of conflict.
Why do you think that's dictated?
I think the quote from that one is, it guarantees at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Why is that dictated?
It seems very central to the holding of the case.
Because in...
I don't disagree with your honor, but in that case, an actual conflict was found, and the appearance...
They didn't find that.
I would disagree with your honor.
My reading of the case is that an actual conflict was found, but because of that actual conflict, an appearance of impropriety was seen, and that That's the reference.
This is an implacably bad.
...of that case in relation to the argument that an actual conflict is required.
This is impossibly bad, people.
He's misrepresenting the cases.
Misrepresenting the law.
And that's a series of cases.
And misrepresenting the facts.
That was referenced by the defense counsel as well as Nichols.
The state are both instances where there's a personal interest in the case due to the situation and where at one point they were opposing parties.
And, of course, there's a personal interest of stake as it relates to prosecuting an opposing party in a civil claim, which are what both of those cases reference, which shows that there's an actual conflict of interest that relates to the personal gain of the specific prosecuting agency.
See.
And what do you make of Nichols' reference to, you know, it's an older case, sometimes the language can be, we're not accustomed to seeing that there's, you know, they refer to the metaphor of Caesar's wife, and generally when that's used as an ethical standard, that's something that goes beyond just an actual conflict, right?
Isn't the beyond reproach getting more into appearance world?
There's no question it's the appearance.
What are they arguing about?
Isn't it getting into the appearance aspect of things when we're talking about Caesar's wife?
I think it goes based on the language of the holding in that case, where it literally says that the individual had a personal interest in obtaining a fee by forcing a settlement in the civil case.
and using the criminal case as leverage.
So that's not an appearance of impropriety.
That is an actual conflict of interest in which arises because of We're arguing in circles here.
Don't do it, Wildchild.
You'll be unconscious.
I guess the representations of defense counsel as it relates to the standard or the burden that must be shown and why the state would submit to the court and the most recent Look at his hands.
Look at his hands.
He's gripping the table.
He's going to faint.
He's going to pass out.
Please.
Please.
It would be hilarious.
Don't hit your head.
He's going to collapse.
Look at his hand.
Look at that.
He's losing circulation in his fingers.
His heart is having difficulty pumping blood.
Earlier, what's been referenced by all parties, that the grounds in which a district attorney can be disqualified is where a conflict of interest is found and where there's forensic misconduct that is found.
Those are the two grounds that are to be, I guess, within the purview of the court as it relates to the issues here.
And again, I go back to the most recent case that You said that,
And we don't, he disagreed with you.
Disqualified because the cases make very clear and through the precedent relating to this issue that a disqualification of a district attorney is the last, for lack of better words, ditch effort that should be exercised as it relates
I think the case law is very clear that every effort is supposed I don't agree with you, sir.
I don't agree with your understanding of the law.
So, what I would reference to the court, as was brought up earlier in Lyons v.
State 271, Georgia 639.
A 1999 case where it talked about a theoretical or speculative conflict will not impugn a conviction, meaning that speculation, conjecture, things of that nature, assumptions are not enough for anything to arise to an actual conflict.
And what I would submit to the court as well, that that goes to the fact that what has to be shown is an actual conflict.
If it's speculation...
Is there any qualifier there, though, that's in a post-conviction context?
No.
We're talking about, you know, competent evidence.
We're obviously in a pretrial phase here.
I've wondered how much important to give that sentence when we're in a pretrial realm.
That's assessing whether to overturn a conviction.
And usually that's, you know, kind of an entirely different standard where we assess as a totality.
I think this lawyer just made the case for Roman and Ashley.
Just a thought, if you have any reactions.
Well, I think what Your Honor said is pretty on point in the sense that if it's found that if the trial court either applied the wrong standard or should have disqualified the district attorney, it leads to an automatic reversal, like you said, and it goes back to the trial court.
And I think that is...
Very enlightening in the sense that that's only done if an actual conflict is shown.
And the fact that it can't just be theoretical, speculative, or assumptions that would lead to the appearance of a conflict that would lead to just that.
I'm borrowing kind of from, as we've been doing the other pretrial motions, special demurers seem to get different treatment.
Pre-trial and post-trial.
Post-trial, they get more of a pass unless you can show some issues.
And I'm wondering if that same principle applies here with disqualification.
But I don't have the answer to that.
Well, what I would also say, and I don't remember the exact line, but I know in Judge McBurney's order, he does address some of the concerns as it relates to the standard as it's applied post-conviction versus free trial.
How long is he going to let this guy go on for?
During free trial issues.
And what I would say to the court is that So you signed in support?
Because I didn't think the state was all that pleased with the analysis he applied.
Oh my god, they're laughing at him.
Well, I'm citing what you specifically referenced as to the standard that is to be applied pre-trial and post-trial, whether it makes a difference.
And what I would say to the court is the answer is no as it relates to the speculative nature of the allegations or the claims made by defense counsel.
As it relates to whether a conflict actually exists, Your Honor.
They just laughed at the lawyer in open court.
What I can't do at the moment is point exactly to the page.
So then don't cite case law that you don't know.
The state's argument.
I can give you the page number as it relates to Judge McBernie's order.
I think I know what you're talking about.
The footnote where he references the appearance standard.
This judge is doing the lawyer's job for a whole cow.
On page 42, it's a 1996 case where the court says, nevertheless, the conflict must be palpable and have a substantial basis.
In fact, a theoretical or speculative conflict will not impugn a conviction which is supported by competent evidence.
Now, I understand as it relates to the post-conviction factor or the status of the case being a post-conviction based on Your Honor's earlier inquiry, but I would submit to the court that as it relates to The issue of disqualification, that the standard is the same, whether it's post-conviction or pretrial.
This is a judicial train wreck.
This is a judicial train wreck.
...Bornstein, which is 247 Georgia 406, the 1981 case.
In that case, it says the appellees have not shown us a case where a per se rule was applied to disqualify an attorney on the basis of...
An appearance of impropriety alone.
Georgia cases cited by the appellate do not stand for the proposition that a trial judge is authorized in Georgia to disqualify an attorney solely on the basis of an appearance of propriety, which further goes to the state's submission to the court that the standard is that an actual conflict must be shown,
and that conflict that arises shows that there's a personal stake of the district attorney as it relates to their personal Didn't understand that.
That wasn't even a sentence.
I think he actually stopped that sentence before it ended.
The case that's been referenced by all parties here today, Whitworth v.
State, 275 Georgia, Appeal 790, 2005 case.
In that case, it says Whitworth's complaints are largely based on speculation and conjecture.
Applying any evidence standard to the record, it is clear that the trial court did not abuse its discretion and denying Whitworth's motion to disqualify Morgan based upon his personal interests in his conviction.
That is totally different.
Why don't we pass the speculation and conjecture aspect of this, though?
I mean, the original and the core of the financial allegations is that there is a relationship and that money has changed hands.
There's no appearance anymore.
There's maybe still an open question of where the ledger stands.
But I think it was conceded that that balance could run in one way or in the district attorney's favor.
Is that contested?
Is he going to admit the appearance?
What's not contested is that a relationship did develop.
And that purchases were made back and forth.
That's the state's position.
That is the state's position.
But they were made back and forth.
The purchases were made back and forth either to...
Equal the money that was spent by one party or the other, and if that wasn't done, cash was exchanged in order to equal the costs that were paid by either one of the parties.
Right.
But that's...
That's the explanation.
Whether it was...
A fact.
You know, split even, or whether it goes...
A little bit one way or another, or whether it's all the way $10,000 one way or another.
That's a fact and issue as a result of the hearing.
But it's no longer just the theory that money changed hands is no longer speculation or conjecture.
Well, I agree that money actually changed hands.
End of story.
Bam.
Thanks.
Speculation and conjecture, but whether that money that changed hands had any...
Let's hear it.
Let's hear it.
That was highly irrelevant, had nothing to do with the exchange of money between the district attorney and Mr. Wade.
The point of that line of questioning was to, again, embarrass and harass the district attorney in a way that was very public, in a way that was to impugn her character as it relates to...
That line of questioning in front of the court, in front of anyone watching the proceedings as it unfolded.
That's not...
Nobody cares about the lien.
That was just to show that she was spending money elsewhere.
Whitworth, I would again submit to the court, requires that an actual conflict must be shown, which is why...
Repeated, repeated.
Speculation and conjecture is again a reference because speculation and conjecture leads to or equals an appearance of impropriety, not necessarily an actual conflict, which I submit to the court is what is required based on the case law.
This is the worst thing I've ever seen.
And I've judged teen debates.
And it says, "While the prosecuting officers should see that no unfair advantage is taken of the accused, if he is not a judicial officer, those who are required to exercise judicial function in the case are the judge and the jury.
The public prosecutor is necessarily a partisan in the case.
If we were compelled to proceed with the same circumspection as the judge and jury, there would be an end to the conviction of criminals." Which goes to the premise that the appearance of impropriety is to apply to judges, Look at Sato in the back.
which the Sutherland case is referencing, then there would never be a criminal prosecution because the state is always going to appear biased as it relates to getting justice for the victims or righting the wrong as it relates to the crimes in which the defendant is.
Been indicted or accused of.
Yeah, you might want to shut up now.
Can you please sit down?
And you're fired.
Also.
Oh jeez, I've just been fired in real time.
This is embarrassing.
Oh my goodness.
Fanny wants to go fishing with you this weekend.
I want to move into I guess the evidence.
Oh yeah, but that's not a bad thing to do.
Saw and heard.
During the last couple of days, three total days of testimony, as it relates to the witnesses.
You heard from Ms. Yurdy, who the state would contend as a disgruntled former employee.
You heard from Terrence Bradley, also someone who disgruntled...
Sexually assaults her.
The text messages in the state's opinion show that he is vengeful.
You heard from his own testimony here, sitting before the court, that he...
All he did was speculate, and any information that he had and garnered and then passed on to Ms. Merchant was mere speculation.
I believe he said that over and over again.
Oh, he said it over and over again.
After the lunch meeting with Bradley.
My recollection is around 15 times he said he had absolutely no personal knowledge of a romantic relationship between the DA and Mr. Wade.
You also heard from...
The special prosecutor, Mr. Wade, a former judge.
You heard from the 80th governor of the state of Georgia, Roy Barnes.
You heard from the first female elected district attorney of Fulton County.
And you heard from her father, who was a 40-plus year practicing attorney in good standing when he left the practice of law.
And what I would submit to the court is that Miss Gertie's testimony was nothing more than inconsistent at best, based on what I referenced to the court.
earlier as it relates to the representations that were made by counsel prior to Are those in the evidence would his responses during a motion to quash which weren't subject to cross-examination by defense attorneys weren't even part of the evidentiary record of the hearing Again, I'm just...
Trying to understand what the hell you're saying.
I would agree that what I just said was the evidence is not an evidence.
Out!
Kick him in the butt on the way out.
I just told you it was evidence, and now I would agree with the court.
It was not in evidence.
It's clear that what was represented as to why she would not, I guess, be an appropriate person to testify was that she had absolutely no knowledge of the romantic relationship.
That was the basis of why her counsel was saying that she shouldn't have to testify.
If accepted, where did the incentive arise between Monday and Thursday for her to completely change things around?
Where did the incentive arise?
She was fighting so hard to avoid the, for going down that road you proposed, she was fighting to have, not to come in here and testify at all.
And then she comes in here and testifies.
Why would you testify the way she did if she didn't want to testify so strongly?
If we're going down this road of trying to just...
Do it!
Try to make sense of verbal diarrhea, Judge.
I don't know if I'm quite following that theory.
Why would she come in and then answer the questions?
It's irrelevant.
Just discredit her.
The reason she didn't want to testify but submit to the court is because this is an incredibly public forum where she would have to testify.
Why did she come in and testify the way she did?
And I think...
The change, I wouldn't qualify it as an incentive.
What I would qualify it as, is ultimately when she was forced to testify...
Right.
Oh, she came in and testified because she was angry.
...as to why she testified in the manner in which she did.
When asked by Ms. Merchant as to the reasons for her leaving, she kind of danced around the issue.
And then as Miss Cross asked her about whether she resigned or supposed to leave, she was fired, she came out and said she was given the choice you can either resign, but either way you're leaving.
You're fired or you can resign in a manner in which she wouldn't be officially fired whatsoever.
So I would submit to the court that there's actually no incentive.
An incentive is not why.
Ms. Yurdy's testimony changed, or the state would contend her testimony changed.
But the reason she testified the way she did was because of her bias towards the DA, which gave her motive to what the state would contend is to be less than honest before the court.
I'm eating a piece of salt to continue waking up.
Why would she have fought it if she had such a bias and wanted to say these untruths?
good question this is one of come on national television and have to be exposed to the things uh...
that i don't know anybody who wants to testify before accord in a normal trial nor proceeding but one of what i would qualify in this high profile the nature Everybody would be able to watch and learn what she has to say as it unfolds in the courtroom.
And I'd further submit to the court.
There is reference to she left the DA's office in the text message that was submitted in, I believe, what is it?
Defense Exhibit 39, that it's because she released confidential information.
In the DA's office, from the DA's office that led to her firing, but she wasn't.
And I know I'm, just because it's more conversational, which I appreciate, I know I might be giving you off script, so I don't want to use up all your time if you need to get through some other things.
Use up your time!
Terrence Bradley, and I believe the one thing that the state and defense counsel can agree on, that he was less than honest at times during the proceeding and during his testimony.
He, when pressed or asked by Mr. Seda why he was fired, he basically chalked it up to a dispute between partners in a business.
But when pressed by Ms. Cross, it was clear that that wasn't the reason.
And what I would submit to the court, what has been referenced by defense counsel as I'm baffling as to why the state would go into such a topic area.
The state, as all counsel has, when appearing before the court, has a duty of candor.
And when Ms. Cross knew she was going to have to cross Mr. Bradley, she knew he lied.
And she had a duty of candor to the court, in the state's opinion, to expose that.
It goes to his credibility and the statements that had been represented by defense counsel that he allegedly had made in the past.
So it was important to bring that to the court's attention because when a witness is testifying, the court is assessing their credibility and determined whether to believe the veracity of the statements made by the witness or not.
So that is the most important factor when determining whether somebody is telling the truth or lie.
Furthermore, he reluctantly, when press finally admitted that he paid off the assault victim, eventually got started with an escrow account, led to he did pay off the victim in that case.
He testified over a span of three days, and like I referenced to the court, he must have said 15 times that he had no personal first-hand knowledge as it relates to the relationship between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade.
More importantly, when pressed by counsel, he could not pinpoint a time in which he knew that the relationship occurred.
There were many instances in which he described That very well could have fallen within the time frame that was testified by both Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade as it relates to the relationship beginning or transitioning into dating in March of 2022 and into the end of the relationship in August or the summer of 2023.
And as I reference to the court, I can't believe he's still going.
And hasn't succeeded in doing anything but undermining his own case.
are kind of clear or very clear as it relates to his disdain towards Mr. Wade which due to the fact that you know he was expelled or exiled from a thriving law practice and it was clear the practice and Mr. Wade sided with the alleged sexual assault victim which is clear this wasn't assaulted her due to the fact that he paid her off objection and This is outrageous.
And as I referenced earlier, Ms. Merchant represented to the court that Mr. Bradley had personal first-hand knowledge basically of it all, of everything, and that he would be able to basically be in a peaching machine.
I think your honor referenced him as the star witness when you were addressing the claims that were made by Ms. Cross in relations to Ms. Merchant's representations to the court.
And what I would submit to the court is that all Mr. Bradley's representations as it relates to whether or when the relationship between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade began and whether they cohabitated.
But that was a promise that was also made that he would be able to impeach the investigators as it relates to cohabitation was mere speculation, gossip, and innuendo.
And this is your honor.
The impression I got, and we can correct this while we're all here together, is that they, Mr. Bradley, directly overheard a statement from each of these individuals that they could be impeached with.
Ms. Murchin, is that accurate?
Directly overheard?
Which ones are we talking about?
Well, essentially, they kind of seem to be all of them.
You said Allen, Vaughn, Young, and then the investigators, Hillgreen and Ricks, could all be directly impeached by statements overheard by Mr. Bradley.
Yes.
In reference to your question, the unequivocal answer was yes.
And when Your Honor is looking through the text messages, I would submit to the court that the text messages don't even say or indicate what was represented to the court in relation to the good faith basis for this motion to disqualify as it relates to the testimony of the ability to impeach witnesses through Mr. Bradley.
Oh, my God.
What's been referenced by all counsel is...
I just came across an interesting decision.
Absolutely.
...involving a vote.
...whether the relationship existed prior to Mr. Wade's hiring.
And the question in itself involves speculation because it asks, do you think it started before she hired him?
And he says absolutely.
He doesn't say he knows.
He doesn't provide any context as to how he knows.
Who cares?
And through his testimony with the court, the source of his information...
Is Nathan Wade?
Was unclear.
No, it wasn't.
What I would say to the court.
As to a lot of things, other than the one conversation that allegedly occurred between Mr. Wade and Mr. Bradley, I would submit to the court that that conversation never occurred.
That would be the state's contention.
And how do we know that?
We know that because that conversation was not confronted, or Mr. Wade was not confronted with that conversation.
And that is evidence circumstantially, and I'd even say direct, as to that conversation non-existent.
Because based on the representation made by defense counsel, it would be clear that that would be a conversation that would have been relayed to, because it wasn't privileged.
As Your Honor found, that would have been relayed to Ms. Merchant.
And if that conversation happened, you better believe that would have been a conversation that defense counsel would have confronted Mr. Wade with and against.
And the reason they didn't do that was because it didn't exist.
Again, you heard from Mr. John C. Floyd III, the district attorney's father.
As Your Honor heard, he was a well-respected member of the legal community for over 40 years.
But the importance of his testimony was to provide the court with corroboration as it relates to the years leading up to the relationship that transitioned into dating between the district attorney and Mr. Wade.
What he testified to is that he moved into her South Fulton home in 2019.
The evidence of his moving into that home at that time was his Georgia driver's license, an official government document.
He further testified that not only did it just Ms. Willis and himself live at the South Fulton home, but that he often would see on numerous occasions the significant other of Ms. Willis that was not.
Mr. Wade.
He referenced that that person had a nickname of Deuce and that he kept a lot of his belongings in the garage of Ms. Willis.
He specifically said he kept a lot of his disc jockey equipment, is how he referred to it before the court.
He made very clear that he had never seen Mr. Wade at the South Fulton home that is owned by Ms. Willis.
He made clear that He lived in that home with Ms. Willis and Ms. Willis alone other than her two daughters who would occasionally visit that home until after February of 2021.
But what precipitated the soon move of Ms. Willis to what I would reference as safe houses for her protection was a protest that occurred before her home in February of 2021.
He then expressed to the court that Ms. Willis moved in the spring of 2021 and that due to these threats that were taken very seriously, he'd only seen his child 13 times.
But he stayed in the house.
He said, in reference to the questions by defense counsel, that were in a...
And I'm just going to be straight up with the court.
It was...
They were trying to make Ms. Willis a liar, is how I would submit to the court, in the sense that she testified that she was concerned for her safety and her family's safety, which included her father and her daughters, and that Mr. Floyd remaining in that home kind of rebutted all of that, made it so it wasn't true.
But he testified that...
He stayed in the home because it was the home that she had put her blood, sweat, and tears in and was able to buy.
This is so bad it's comical.
I'm putting out a tweet.
He told the court that he bought extra security equipment.
He even went as far to tell the court that he slept in different rooms on different nights because he felt his safety was in such a concern.
That's totally logical.
That line of questioning was done in an attempt to...
Discredit Ms. Willis, but failed.
How the state would characterize it.
Then he testified about the first time that he did meet Mr. Wade, which is in 2023, here at the district attorney's office.
He talked about how he kept cash in his home and why Ms. Willis kept cash in his home.
What the court should take note of is The state didn't ask Mr. Floyd about the cash in his home.
That came out through the cross-examination of the defense counsel.
So there was, I guess, an implication that Mr. Floyd only did so due through his preparation with the state and his hearing and seeing news articles and clips related to the testimony that had occurred prior to him.
But I would submit to the court that it's telling that that information came out through questions that were asked by defense counsel, which gives credibility to the statements that were made.
And he further explained as to why he taught his daughter to keep cash in the home as it relates to financial independence and having a safety net.
It was further testified that he had multiple safes and that he gave Ms. Willis his first lockbox, or her first lockbox, for...
And what I want to make clear is during Ms. Willis' testimony, it was pressed about the cash and where she kept it.
Did it follow her, where she laid her head, and things of that nature, trying to further discredit the practice that she had as it relates to keeping cash in her home and why she had the ability to pay cash to Mr. Wade and other people and for other situations.
What the court should take note of is that there was no evidence that controverted that at all.
It's irrelevant.
All of that is irrelevant.
Ms. Willis' claim and practice of keeping cash in her home.
There was none.
In fact, the only evidence was that it was substantiated through the testimony of her father, Mr. Floyd.
Furthermore, you heard from Governor, former Governor Roy Barnes.
Roy Barnes.
His testimony was significant and important.
Significant and important.
Tell us.
How I would pray, Your Honor, is it debunks?
Let me, on this point, and I think you might have had a more recent opportunity to review his testimony than I have.
You say on the slide that she was the first choice to lead the prosecution.
Was that actually his testimony?
No, it wasn't.
It was his testimony.
He was asked, and Wade was there with him.
He was asked to lead.
Yes.
That's my recollection, that he was asked to lead the prosecution.
Wade was there with him.
He was asked to fill the position that Mr. Wade is currently in, which is the lead prosecutor.
It was said in that way as well, as it relates to the testimony of Mr. Barnes.
So I think it would be very clear.
My recollection is that he said lead, but what I can submit to the court that I know he also said that he was asked to fill the position that Mr. Wade is currently filling for the state of Georgia, which is the At that time as special grand jury prosecutor, right?
Yeah, the special, I guess, yeah, as the special prosecutor lead the investigation, which led to He also indicated that the reason he turned that job down was because it didn't pay enough.
He said he had mouths to feed at his law firm and that he also didn't want to live the rest of his life with body yards because he had lived that for the years in which he was the governor of Georgia.
Furthermore, he confirmed the qualifications of mr wade which i still quite interesting and confusing as to attacking mr wade's qualifications in that it's almost as if miss mr roman's counsel is asking that the state put a prosecutor on the case that she sees to be more qualified to attempt to convict her client.
It's an interesting argument and it's one that makes no sense.
Furthermore, if you were to believe the claims and allegations as it relates to Ms. Willis' personal stake in the prosecution, the receiving of financial benefits...
In games, then you'd have to believe that she was also dating Roy Barnes, the former governor, and Gay Banks, in addition to Mr. Wade, if she has this grand plan scheme in order to profit off of the prosecution of this case.
Because that's what they're saying.
Or they're saying that she telepathically or prophetically was able to know That Mr. Barnes and Mr. Banks would turn down the position so she could then hire Mr. Wade.
It's ridiculous.
It's absurd.
It's absurd.
It's preposterous.
It's outlandish.
It's desperate.
It's a desperate attempt to remove a prosecutor from a case for absolutely no reason.
Absolutely no reason.
Your Honor.
He expects the judge to believe that.
How stupid do you have to be?
Harassment, conclusion.
And embarrassment.
Embarrassment conclusion.
This slide, and we've been through a lot of the testimonies.
And I should be clear there, it was not introduced in evidence that Mr. Banks turned her down, right?
How's that part of the record?
Well, I'd ask the court to take judicial notices, has been asked repeatedly.
Unless the district attorney had testified to that, I don't recall offhand.
I will be frank with the court, I don't recall it.
Ms. Willis testified to that exact fact, but I know that Mr. Banks represented that to the court during Monday's hearing as it relates to the allegations that were made.
I understand your honor's position as it relates to that.
I'm trying to make sure we know exactly what is in the evidence and it's not, but regardless.
This is more painful than my rubber band ligation procedure.
No, it's not.
I guess the issues that led up to the actual hearing of this case.
So I understand your honor's position, but it did come out during a proceeding that was prior to the actual hearing.
This slide is just a chart showing kind of the testimony of both the district attorney, Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade, as it relates to how they met, how or when Mr. Wade became the special prosecutor, when their relationship evolved into a romantic one.
Talking about the trips in which they took after their relationship evolved into one that became romantic and when it ended.
And what, again, I would submit to the court is that those facts were consistent.
And the only person who contradicted that when the relationship started was Miss Yurdy.
And what I would bring to the court's attention is that it was represented to the court that Miss Yurdy...
It was a witness, other than Mr. Bradley, who could bring to the forefront this issue of cohabitation.
And when pressed and when asked about it, Ms. Yerty had absolutely no information as it relates to this alleged cohabitation.
It was false.
She said she had no information.
She was asked about trips.
She said she had no information about the trips.
Yet, she's such a good friend that Ms. Willis confirmed each year that Mr. Wade and her continue to be in a relationship.
Do they not understand this is an abject disaster?
Do they not understand what's going on right now?
This guy's holding on to the podium.
So he doesn't fall over.
Most of them were exhibits that came from the sealed divorce of Mr. Wade and Ms. Jocelyn Wade, contracts for legal services, trip itineraries, and the tenor.
I don't think I can drive through Georgia anymore on the way home.
I'm going to get pulled over.
All right, today the only text messages that were before your honor were defense exhibits 26 and 27, which it's the assertion of defense counsel that what those show is that Mr. Bradley was an informator, or was, Had information as it relates to the relationship starting prior to March of 2022, and that's just false.
Those text messages do not contain that.
It does not pinpoint, just as Mr. Bradley couldn't, when the relationship actually started.
And furthermore, you have the testimony and the evidence of the text messages that it was mere speculation.
If you, as your honor, reviews the full chain of text messages, it is clearly Ms. Merchant and Mr. Bradley going through what I can describe as nothing else other than a mere fishing expedition between the two of them at first, because it's asked about certain members of who would have information as it relates to specifically, for one, Ms. Young.
It is asked whether she would have information, and he had no idea.
He said he assumed he was speculating.
And that is the same as he did.
Bullshit!
All of that was speculation.
And you know it was speculation because not a single one had been testified.
That's telling.
That's telling.
Because if it wasn't mere speculation, if it wasn't mere gossip, and if it wasn't mere conjecture, each one of those people who were subpoenaed would have been called to testify, like District Attorney Willis was, like Mr. Wade was, in order to be confronted and then impeached by Mr. Bradley.
Can you...
You've heard, obviously, about the phone records.
Please.
You just hit $20,000 live on your honor.
You also have the affidavit from the employee who worked at the winery who confirmed that Ms. Willis did in fact pay in cash.
Up to more than $400.
I understand that this is part of the proper of the state, but it's important because that is a witness who the state didn't go fine.
That is a witness who went to CNN in order to confirm what Ms. Willis testified to, further giving her statements credibility and credence.
I'm coming to a tweet after this.
Oh my goodness.
They accuse their enemies of doing what they're doing.
Relevance.
Would you have a response to the cell phone records?
I'll get to that now.
I'll get to it later.
But I have several foundational concerns as it relates to the cell phone records.
I don't think I've ever, as Mr. Sadow's motion makes very clear, the state uses cell phone records routinely.
And I would agree with that.
We use them routinely.
But we use them with an expert.
They're always challenged.
Right.
So, like I said, in the interest of time, setting aside the foundational concerns.
Just bring your own expert.
I thought you were asking about them.
Focusing on the substance, I'm assuming that it would be admissible in the guise that he's proffered.
Maybe you have that further up, but what's the reaction to that?
So, what I would say initially is that due to the fact that they were analyzed by someone who was a non-expert, Analysis, first of all.
A non-expert is up to voir dire.
It's clear from the state's review that the normal practices that are used to check the use of which kind of data is being used in reference to the two specific dates, I believe it's September 10th and 11th and November 29th and 30th.
The affidavit that is used to say that Mr. Wade remains in the area of Haightville, because again, during the hearing, the address for the Yurdy condo never came out.
It was just that it was the Haightville condo.
The actual phone number for Mr. Wade was never established.
And the documents that were provided to the state...
That were certified business records did not have a subscriber page, so we have no idea that the number belongs to Mr. Waite.
Now, I understand Your Honor wants to look past the foundational issues, and I can appreciate that, but the foundational stuff is very important as it relates to the miscibility of the records.
No doubt about that, but how they were able to survive those foundational concerns, do you have any reaction?
Yes, I do and I will skip forward so I don't waste time.
So, what's interesting is that the records that were provided were for, they start in January of 2021, and they go, I believe it's to November 30th, I think is what the, of 2021, the span of the records.
And you heard from all of the witnesses, including Ms. Yurdy, that Ms. Willis did not move into...
The hate bill addressed until April of 2021.
That was the testimony from all of the witnesses, April of 2021.
And that she lived in her South Fulton home from when she met Mr. Wade in October of 2019 up until when she had to move.
And the assertion by the defense counsel is that Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis began a relationship right after they met in October of 2019.
What's interesting and what's telling...
Is that Mr. Wade's handset doesn't once appear in anywhere near the area of her South Fulton home.
But they're dating.
But they're in a serious relationship.
And if you were to believe what the defense counsel says, that they have been in a relationship from October of 2019 up until she moves in April of 2021.
So, you know, a year and a half or so.
But he never once enters the area of her home.
They want you to believe that that's a lie, which is why Counsel for Defense continued to press District Attorney Willis and Mr. Wade as to whether he had ever been to that South Fulton home.
Well, this corroborates that that was not a lie, that he had never been to that home.
And it's more than suspect if you've been in a relationship, as they claim, for all this time, but never once, never once went to the house.
Actually, no, it's not.
And the father confirmed he never met him.
What would also bring to the court's attention in the states.
He's actually disproving his own case.
From January of 2021 to March of 2021, those times when Ms. Willis did not live again at the hateful address, she didn't move there until April of 2021, that his handset appears in that area 23 times.
How do you reconcile that with this testimony that was alluded to, I think, by opposing counsel, the reasons he gave for being in the area?
Would those line up to 23 times?
I think, you know, it didn't have too many reasons for being there, right?
Well, I think that's the point.
I would say yes, that is the point.
He referenced that that's an area that he, it was not uncommon for him to be in, and clearly that is the case because Ms. Willis didn't live in that area.
I could destroy him in cross.
As to what Mr. Wade indicated to the court.
I guess after Ms. Willis moved into the condo in April of 2021, they appeared 35 times.
Now, I want to make clear to the court, both Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade never denied that he had been to that condo before.
The specific testimony that was elicited by Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade was that he had never laid his head with the direct quote at that condo.
These records don't prove that they've laid it anywhere.
If you were to believe the analysis or if you were to give credence to what the non-expert says as it relates to Mr. Waite's handset in September and November for the three to four hours that the phone is alleged to have remained, that doesn't disprove anything that was testified by both.
Mr. Wade and District Attorney Willis.
It was that he visited there.
The specific hours of their visits was not something that was pursued during the questioning of both of the parties.
So what I would also submit to the court is that if you look at the days as it relates to his better days are over.
No more cruises.
No more vacations.
He was a superstar.
voice records, it's not SMS or text messages, it's data records.
And it is not uncommon for an expert to testify as it relates specifically to AT&T records that that actual data record is unreliable as it relates to I noticed that too.
Nathan had two cells on the table.
I noticed that too.
Nathan had two cells on the table.
It's not the voice and the SMS, which I know, Your Honor, as has been referenced, was a prosecutor not only here in this county, but for the federal government where this kind of information is commonly used.
I could have done a better job for Fenn.
As it relates to put somebody in an area, and again, not in a specific location.
I'd also bring to the court's attention, as it relates to the validity of the affidavit and the analysis done by the expert that was hired by Mr. Sadow, is that not once does it reference the fact that AT&T records commonly have duplicate and triplicate entries within the call detail records.
Is he testifying now?
And that is something that is seen in these records.
Then get your own expert to say that.
This is not evidence.
And that is something that leads to the incorrect number of times that has been alleged that Willis and Mr. Wade were in communication through text and voicemail.
And I'd also submit to the court that that number doesn't prove anything again.
Doesn't prove that anybody's in a relationship.
It proves that they were in communication with each other.
I think Your Honor can use your own life experience as it relates to people you work with, friends that you're close with, and the number of times that you make calls to any of those people.
I can submit to the court that I...
I have a friend who I've been friends with for 15 years and she worked in the office previously with me.
Based on our professional relationship and our personal relationship, the friendship that we had had and still have, that we talk 30 times a day.
Dude, there might be other reasons why you're having conversations with a woman without it being a sexual relationship.
The number of times that Miss Willis and Mr. Wade have spoken to each other, whether it's through...
No validity whatsoever.
I'm not presupposing this guy's sexual orientation, but there might be a good reason why he can text a lot with a woman without it being an affair.
There's been a true cost to Ms. Willis as it relates to her life, that she had additional expenses that she had to endure because of her position in the sense that she told the court that she had a mortgage.
But on top of that mortgage and a house she didn't live in anymore, she had to pay for a safe house that her home was vandalized.
A sexy safe house.
And there were racial epithets and sexual bigotry that were spray painted onto her.
her house.
No evidence of that was actually reduced.
The concern of her safety in her life is something that was testified to.
And the fact that this job has led to the isolation and separation of her from her family and friends, which was given credence and the credibility of those statements were provided by her father, Mr. Floyd, that he had only seen his daughter 13 times since all of these instances occurred.
The natural nature of the statements and the falsehoods that, for example, in these text messages that were perfectly...
Sadow in the back can't believe what he's listening to.
As relates to Ms. Willis's daughter, subjecting her position in school, that she flunked out of college, which isn't true, which in fact she has graduated from an HBCU, but what's been leaked to the media is the fact that she Leaked, that she flunked out of FAMU or whatever?
Flunked out of school, and someone other than her father removed her, which again, the validity of which was never shown.
Thank you for reminding the world of this, Avathe.
And all the while, Ms. Willis facing these costs has been able to continue to do the work Unrelated to this case, which is shown in the fact that Atlanta's murder rate and violent crime rates have decreased while she has been in office.
What was shown through the testimony of all of the witnesses and through the evidence that Your Honor heard was that there wasn't an actual conflict, that the defense failed to provide any sort of actual conflict in relation to Ms. Wade's...
I guess the relationship that transpired from the relationship between her and Mr. Wade and that there was actually no evidence of a financial benefit that she gained as it relates to the prosecution of this case and the ultimate outcome of the case.
The corroboration of all of that is the things that Your Honor is very much aware that she could have, I guess, financially benefited from.
Stretching out the case, for lack of better words, the special grand jury recommended that 39 individuals be indicted.
But through her sifting through the special grand jury's report and all of the evidence with the team that indicted the case, they only went with 19 of the defendants.
They only went with 19. Gone with all 39. Based on the defense counsel's assertions, She could have made more money.
to certainly find these financial gains that are claimed through the allegations of Defense Council.
More importantly, Painful.
Why would Ms. Willis repeatedly ask this court to set a trial date as soon as possible if her motive in prosecuting this case...
They were broken up already, might be one answer.
It doesn't line up.
It doesn't make sense.
It does if they had already broken up.
It doesn't make sense for a reason.
Because it doesn't exist.
More importantly...
Is this clown doing a filibuster?
This office has several multiple RICO, as well as large-scale cases like this one, and much larger.
There's a lot of high-profile prosecutions.
If Ms. Willis'ultimate goal by hiring Mr. Wade was for her financial benefit, then she would put Mr. Wade on every single one of those cases.
So she could certainly revel in the riches and lavishness.
First of all, she put him on a taint?
She put him on a first review that they were getting money from?
I don't know that to be a lavish hotel.
Most people, when they go to Napa, if they want to lavishly experience Napa, stay at the Ritz-Carlton.
The Four Seasons.
Things of that nature.
Not a Doubletree.
So the allegations and assertions that Miss Willis is living the lifestyle of the rich and the famous is a joke.
Absolute joke.
This man is going to get arrested for defaming Doubletree.
As it relates to what you heard and the secondary issue.
It's the forensic misconduct.
And for lack of better words, what has to be shown is that the statements that were made by here, Ms. Willis, related to the prosecution of the case and ultimately the guilt or innocence of the defendants.
We have none of those statements.
There's been no evidence.
Nothing has been provided to your honor as it relates to Ms. Willis' specific statements made.
Well, Ms. Willis' job is to instill confidence in the community as to how well she is doing as it relates to her constitutional duties.
And that was exactly what was done when she referenced that she had a 95% conviction rate in the previous year that she was serving as a district attorney.
More importantly, It's been the allegations about race and religion being imputed in her speech.
And those comments were directed at the defendants at this table.
And if you listen to the speech, those comments are directed at two elected or political officials.
I believe it was Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ms. Bridget Thorne, who is He's asking the judge to believe the unbelievable.
and I haven't seen them in my work as it relates to this case, Your Honor.
So those allegations that Ms. Lewis- No validity.
None.
Don't believe your lying eyes, judge.
This is an issue that Judge McBurney has previously ruled on when these same allegations were alleged as it relates to extrajudicial statements made by Ms. Willis, and it involved a statement that the words fake electors were said by Ms. Willis, and he found there was absolutely no conduct that was impermissible as it relates to forensic misconduct.
Oh my goodness.
Are you done yet?
Please, please stop.
He's already dead.
I guess to drive home the point.
No, don't.
You've driven nothing.
At no point in any of the statements that were made and that are alleged here as it relates to the speech that she made at the church, at no point did she mention the guilt or innocence of any of the defendants.
Again, was merely responding to comments made by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Bridget Thorne, two other political officials, therefore making her comments not even close in the realm of any sort of forensic misconduct.
She was invoking racism, just not with respect to the Trump sentence bullcrap.
What I find interesting is that defense counsel wants to make these allegations that Ms. Willis committed this forensic misconduct by the statements that she made in her defense.
As two unrelated, in this case public officials, criticized the job that she was doing.
I find the hypocrisy interesting in the sense that video proffers released to the media by Defense Council, emails between counsel released to the media by Defense Council, statements have been made by Defense Council in relation to this case.
We had the unredacted version of the cell phone records of Mr. Wade released to the media by Defense Council with his private and personal information causing the threat of harm to both Ms. Willis and Ms. Von Wade to increase.
The most recent instance was the text messages that Your Honor hadn't ruled on their admissibility prior to their release and it was made clear during the hearings that the ability to The full chain was something that they were unable to do.
But they figured a way, and the minute they figured a way, they released the information to the media simultaneously with turning it over to the state and the court.
Tough noogies.
It's a public hearing, baby.
He almost fell over.
He almost fell over.
The decision should be denied.
Knock wood.
The legal requirements.
That are required in order for the district attorney to be disqualified have not been satisfied.
The defendants have failed to raise any issue legally or factually to satisfy the legal standard for disqualification.
They must show an actual conflict.
Wrong.
been unable to show that the prosecution of this case was at all a result of political bias which has been accused or accusations have been made as well as demonstrated that the prosecution of this case was motivated by any means or any way because of malicious prosecution and they haven't been able to prove that this case was one of selected prosecution for political benefit or gain.
Bullshit, but I don't think they argued that.
A Bate in the background.
Not a Bate.
Please, leave.
Leave.
Courts have been generally unreceptive, if not non-receptive, attempts to disqualify prosecutors based on pervasive and institutional conflicts, which makes clear that the burden standard is very, very high that must be met in order for an elected district attorney to be disqualified.
And that burden, that standard has not been met.
An actual conflict has not been shown.
He's not going to make a ruling today.
In conjunction with that, there's been absolutely no evidence that the district attorney has benefited financially.
No, except for the $10,000.
Benefited financially in conjunction with any outcome, whether it be now or ultimately as it relates to the prosecution of this case.
Sit down.
Because of all those reasons, Your Honor, we would respectfully request to deny defense counsel's motion.
To disqualify the elected attorney, Ms. Fanny Willis.
Oh, get me the hell out of here.
And Fanny Willis is going right now.
I don't want to make any jokes that can be misunderstood.
That's what it says.
That was the worst thing I've ever heard in my life.
And I once got into an argument with a stop sign.
They're not going to be able to get to my points.
I'm going to do rebuttal.
Specific rebuttal.
One, the state somehow makes an argument that we should have asked Mr. Wade questions about his relationship and his communications with Mr. Bradley when they objected over and over and over.
And Wade's counsel objected over and over and over, claiming that everything that Bradley was told by Wade was attorney-client privilege.
Your Honor made determinations thereafter to Bradley.
He didn't get the opportunity to call Mr. Wade back to the stand.
So to claim that you can't impeach him because you didn't ask him when they objected to us, asking him, obviously, is a false position to take.
As disingenuous as it can be.
Now, if the court wants to open it up, we'll be more than happy to call Mr. Wade back to the stand.
But, as the record stands, there could be no confrontation of Mr. Wade when both his counsel and the state are arguing that it shouldn't be done.
Second.
I want to share my thoughts here.
Let's use a little common sense here.
Good luck with that.
Forensic misconduct received about two minutes worth of discussion.
The rest of it is all on conflict.
Forensic misconduct dealing with the way the state Yeah, assuming you can impugn someone's character to the degree that constitutes forensic misconduct.
Why is that?
I'm sorry, say that.
Assuming you can impugn someone's character to the degree that it constitutes forensic misconduct.
I think that is, I guess the...
The state's primary position was that they weren't talking about you at the church.
Right.
And if you go listen to it and watch it, it starts off by saying, why does Commissioner Bridget Thorne and so many others, and then it refers to they attack him for being black.
They attack him, not anyone else, just they attack the black man.
They're not talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
They're talking about us.
And you know how everybody knows that?
Because not a single story from the media reported anything other than Fonnie Willis accused the defense and defendants of being racist.
Now here's the common sense part of this.
If you follow the state's position on forensic misconduct, Fonnie Willis could all day long talk about race.
She could say the defendants, I'm not saying they're guilty or not guilty, but they're racist.
They're racist.
They're racist.
And according to the state's position on forensic misconduct, that wouldn't be a problem.
Obviously, that makes no sense whatsoever.
The issue here that we've dealt with on forensic misconduct is not simply the church speech.
It's why she did it, how she did it, calculated, and all the other things that we talked about with the testimony of Wade and Willis in this case.
Let's go to the relationship issues and the cell phones briefly.
I'll try to say something quickly when they're not talking.
I can't do it.
No one knew that there was a relationship between Wade and Willis.
The father didn't know.
The father didn't know until seven weeks ago.
So it's weird that he didn't go to her house?
Ever.
They concealed it from all parties.
As of 2022, they were dating.
Sad I read my mind.
Well done, Sata.
Suggest that somehow, in the beginning of 2021, January, that they should be going to her house?
Whatever it was, into April, that they couldn't have met in Hapeville, they didn't meet anywhere that would allow the public to see them.
That's the reason why they were dating for two years, and her father didn't know until seven weeks ago.
By their own admission.
Yes.
Remember the testimony?
Who else was there between?
Besides Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis.
Both of them agreed.
No one, no one ever went there except them.
They didn't go to where Daddy was in Ms. Willis' house because Daddy was there and Daddy would know.
No other prosecutors knew.
No one knows except who.
The one person that knew was Bradley and Yurti.
Yurti was best friend.
At that time with Miss Willis and Bradley was the partner of Wade.
Now...
The only way that Wade can walk...
I'm sorry.
The only way that...
Uh-oh.
What did I just do?
Hold on.
What'd I just do?
What'd I just do?
That's not the right one.
Cheese, Luis.
Cheese.
Who has the best motive of anybody to lie?
Cheese Louise, I'm an idiot.
To stay on this case, for whatever the financial reason may be, they do.
Okay, we didn't miss anything, but what the hell did I...
My fat fingers did something.
Who wanted to stay on that case?
They did.
All right.
Thank you, everybody.
Judge's mind is made up.
I think it's been very much made clear by the argument made today is that there are several...
Legal issues to sort through.
Several factual determinations that I have to make.
And those aren't ones I can make at this moment.
And so I will be taking the time to make sure that I give this case.
Full consideration is due.
I hope to have an answer for everyone within the next two weeks.
Until that point, if there are any other issues that come up, council can reach out.
And we'll have an order posted on the docket.
Thank you all.
We're off the record.
Well, that was...
Okay.
Oh, my goodness.
That was torturous.
Absolutely torturous.
When Abate says, oh, it's weird in a relationship that they wouldn't go to her house.
The father, they admit that they were dating as of 2022.
They admit it and still kept it secret.
That was their own testimony.
I'm a very secret person.
They kept it from her father for two years.
I'm gonna close it up.
That's it.
I think that's all we got.
Just in case we hear anything.
And now we're done.
That was Fanny Willis' testimony.
I'm very private.
I kept it from my father.
Even when we were admittedly dating, he never came to my house.
And then the guy has the audacity.
It's a dishonest argument.
Holy cows.
Everybody, that was the most painful thing I've ever seen in the legal world.
I cannot...
I'm trying to think of...
Any trial that we've live-streamed, commentated on, that had a worse sequence of events than that.
And I can't.
Oh my goodness.
Now, before I do...
Okay, I'll do one thing before I get to all the Rumble Rants, all of the Super Chats, and all of the tips.
I was just, you know, Googling.
Googling Abate.
And if you Google Abate, you'll find a decision...
At the hearing on the motion, Glenn testified as follows.
At the time of Thomas' trial, she had a pending shoplifting charge from Carroll County, which would be a felony because of her prior shoplifting convictions.
The prosecutor who tried Thomas' case, Fulton County Assistant District Attorney Adam Abate.
with an investigator about two weeks before the trial to ask them about her Altima.
I guess that's the car.
Glenn told Abate that she did not remember if Thomas had the Altima on the night of the murder.
Abate told her that if she did not cooperate, she and her mother would be subpoenaed.
Fine.
After that interview, Glenn talked to the attorney representing her on the shoplifting charge and decided to meet with a prosecutor again.
She talked to Abate at the courthouse during Thomas'trial.
During that discussion, Abate noted that he was aware of Glenn's pending felony charge and said, quote, I'm sure you don't want to go to jail, end quote.
He then told Glenn that if she answered the state's questions, quote, as they wanted her to answer them, then her case will go away.
On cross-examination at the hearing, Glenn testified that her trial testimony was not true, but she did not provide more details.
That's who we're dealing with in terms of Abate, the lawyer who you just saw.
Not Skate, who you just saw fall through the ice and struggle to break the ice from underneath for two hours.
Okay.
We're still live, right?
We're still live here?
Let me see this.
Now, I want to get to all of the crumble rants that I didn't get to, and then we're going to get to...
Oh, my God.
That was painful.
So, Satout crushed it right at the end, and he got it.
Oh, my goodness.
Let's read these and see if there's going to be any questions.
Well, hold on.
Okay, so before we do that, judge says a couple of weeks.
Cynically, I don't even think it's cynically.
I think it's strategically.
If he waits until nobody enters the race to challenge him in his campaign for election, I wouldn't blame him for that.
But two weeks, and we'll see what his ruling is.
His mind is made up.
And by the way, if his mind wasn't made up before Abate started pleading, his mind's made up now.
Holy shit.
Abate's closing arguments, it was like watching something terrible, like watching Leonard Part 6 on repeat forever and ever and ever.
Wesley1924 says Fanny never ran so fast in her life as she ran out of that courtroom.
Cupertruse says, not very private with deuce.
Blazer230 says, wait for the judge to say, Mr. Abate, do you want to stop now?
Yes, Your Honor.
KarmaG19, Fannie needed an unethical lawyer.
This is her boy.
We talked about this.
Clients end up with lawyers who reflect their values for good and for bad.
A thousand percent.
And as evidenced by that wonderful court case, you just Google.
It's amazing.
The internet is just amazing.
No wonder why they want to censor it.
And prevent us from having these open discussions where we can reveal the corruption, the actual corruption in real time.
JBAR1025, Attorney Phil A. Buster reporting for duty.
He would have been better off going for five minutes.
They haven't proven what is needed to be proven.
Oh, no.
I have text messages with girls all the time, and it doesn't mean anything.
I'm not saying this to be funny.
Glib, make fun of it.
I have never cared about someone's sexual orientation before.
If it turns out that the person who says I can have 20,000 text messages with a girl and it not be an issue happens to be gay, you might have your explanation right there.
I have a long-running theory that boys and girls, heterosexual boys and girls, can't be friends.
It doesn't work because there will always be someone who falls in love with the other.
That's why...
Actually, I should take that back.
You can be best friends.
But only with the one that you choose to marry and settle down with for the rest of your life.
Fanny needs an unethical boy.
This is her boy.
Every convict in Fulte County, prosecuted even in part by cell data, is now filing an appeal, says Mitsunave.
New monthly supporter from GMA2 is now a monthly supporter.
Welcome to our above-average community.
Booyah!
the win okay the win the win nimu the win the The Winamaka Power Glider says, I want to leave and come back.
How long will he continue to stall?
Homie...
No, that's not Homie Mother.
That's Momie Heather says, Brooke says, later, oh my God, there's more of this disaster.
He was the only one that pleaded for the state, which is amazing.
Fannie Wade?
Yeah, so this guy is the state attorney, I guess.
That is Fannie Wade's attorney, Nathan Wade.
Didn't say anything.
What's his face?
Nathan Bradley wasn't there.
Wow!
Randy Edward, classic Chewbacca defense.
This is Chewbacca.
What does my Chewbacca have to do with this case?
This is ridiculous.
My client must be acquitted.
I've never actually seen that episode of South Park.
Florida man, zero death watch.
Is it common for a judge to interpret like this in closing?
Is it because he is serving the role of judge and jury?
I've never done a trial like this, so I couldn't tell you what's normal.
But from what I've seen, no, the judge is just...
He doesn't want to interfere too much.
It's closing arguments.
It's not evidence.
You're not supposed to object during closing arguments.
So he's just trying to do his best to not show bias in his questions.
The guy needs his own bobblehead.
Ooh, JPizzy, 40. He's going to get one.
Travelmom46 has heard on talk radio that the judge who took President Trump off latest ballot was a traffic judge.
I hear the dog.
I hear the dog.
She's gotten into something.
And I don't know what it is.
I hear you, Pudge!
Waiting for the judge to say, Mr. Abada, do you want to stop now?
Fry for Fulton County DA.
Dude, I don't think I'm moving to Georgia anytime soon.
Although I hear it's beautiful.
And the cost of living is substantially less than Florida.
California Conservative 76 says, is, you know, a valid argument?
No, but you know it is a valid argument.
Someone should do a remix, like a dubstep remix.
Milt, no, Mitt Snave says, did he just admit that Yurdy was fired in retaliation for whistleblowing?
No.
I think he admitted that she was disgruntled because she was fired or told to leave for a disagreement.
I don't think so.
Fannie allegedly laundered $600,000 minus $75,000 with her boyfriend in exchange for three fully expensive Look, anyone can be beautiful if they've got a good personality.
I'm not saying that to be romantic.
I genuinely believe it.
And if they smell good.
Gotta smell good.
Yes, the olfactory sense is the most important sense.
Allgoodguy says this is not an appearance of impropriety, but actual impropriety.
Therefore, it has the appearance by nature.
Yeah, what is the lesser and included?
Something can have the appearance of impropriety without it being improper?
Well, could something actually be improper without it having the appearance of impropriety?
I can think of an example, but we don't need to get all Zenonian here.
This lawyer spent a lot of time kicking a dead horse and trying to find split hairs.
The law says you cannot take a gift of $100 or more without reporting it without regard to being paid back.
And she's at $10,000.
You are fired, says G3O.
Andy Pearson says, I wonder if Fannie is paying this guy in cash.
It's a state...
He works for the state.
He's on an annual salary.
So they just took him off some morning perjury in other cases to do this one.
A6Z6JSNY Why?
Why would that be your name?
Okay.
It says, Dude is insecure, unprepared, clings to his stupid slides.
He knows his case is weak at best.
They sent the youngster to do the talking because nobody else would want to embarrass themselves like this.
Yeah, the question that I had with Phil Holloway in the pre-show.
Did Anna Cross leave or did she get booted for having blown the case the way she did?
How Not a Lawyer says, Superstar911.
Brooke327.
Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.
I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.
Classic Billy Madison line that will never get old and will never not be applicable to situations like this.
Wasn't this guy a lawyer in My Cousin Vinny?
No!
They were actually decent lawyers in My Cousin Vinny.
W. Claxton 3721 says, Interpretation, Your Honor, yeah, but you know, this looks terrible, but don't worry, it only looks terrible, it only looks like we lied under oath.
He was wrong in his interpretations of the case law, wrong in his interpretation of the law, trying to tell the judge cases said something they didn't say.
He is scared, says a 6 '4 midget.
Yep, and I'm a 5 '6 giant.
Boom!
Checkmate, 6 '4.
Nice to see you again.
Mark my word, says, Your Honor, the dog ate my law library.
LLCHR714.
Rick Flares.
Woo!
Gino463.
It sounds to me like the judge just wants to see how bad this is going to get.
CooperTrue.
Shoutout in chat to BuhSoJo10906.
Baffle them with bullshit.
Freddy Farkas says, I'm an appellate lawyer.
This guy's making me feel real better about my own oral argument ability.
Miznav says this guy is a diversity hire.
This attorney got his law degree from the University of American Samoa, Robin A.H. He got it from the upstairs law school.
Hi, everybody!
I got my law school from wherever it was.
This is what happens when your attorney is a diversity hire, says Wesley1924.
SweetiePieCW says, this attorney is so bad, I could do better, and I am not an attorney.
Ah, but did you stay at a Doubletree?
Dude's going to get sued for defamation by Doubletree.
I'm joking.
Mustacheologist.
I am 100% straight, but that landlord from Three's Company just gave me a law and order boner.
What's MOHAP?
What's MOHAP?
What does MOHAP mean?
Happened on purpose?
Might have happened on purpose?
Might have happened.
I don't know what that stands for.
The guy killed it.
Maybe a future guest.
Bulldozer.
Yes, SATA.
I'll see if I can find him.
Crazygram64.
We need this lawyer to go against Trudeau in Canada.
Mitzname says, I think the defense has done a good job of coordinating their arguments to build on this.
Oh, the last guy.
That might not have been SATA.
It was the last guy.
I took notes.
I have to go clip that.
Ashley has to finish.
This is BS.
She didn't testify.
She didn't argue at all, actually.
6 '4 midget says, he's doing more gish galloping than arguments.
This is from way back in the day.
RussOn9 says, Bruh, Sato gave the judge his argument, the supporting evidence, and made his job easy.
That's how you do it.
Don't preach to the judge like this guy.
That was the guy who followed.
RussOn9 is now a monthly supporter.
Do I have a bell?
You get the trucker convoy.
I want to talk to the truckers.
RussOn9, then we got Denis.
Okay, let's put this back here.
We got Denise and two.
I want to watch you both.
Good logic, and I'm watching both at the same time with Joe on a five-second delay.
Oh, that's my kid.
That's the thing behind me.
Balls to your partner.
You're assisted the wall.
Your ass against the wall.
If you've never been fracked by the Atlanta DA, you've never been fracked at all.
How are we doing here?
Kind of like spoliation of evidence.
Burden is on them to prove that it was not a material benefit.
What says Isolde?
Six-Foot-Midget says Dick to hoe.
Well, WClaccid372.
I bet my money the additional witness is one of the security from her original security detail.
It would be a slam dunk.
I'll get to that witness.
I posted the tweet while we were live.
Be controversial.
If there's anybody you would want to prosecute a RICO case, it's an ambulance chaser with zero family experience.
Why did they do this to themselves?
I don't get it.
King of Biltong!
I sent you my P.O. Box address today.
And I'm going to go get it the second it's there.
I'm such a senile buffoon to say, I'm going to do it, and then something happens and then I forget.
Apparently it's also called ADD, but I don't know.
Good afternoon from Anton's in Roanoke, Texas.
Free shipping for your Biltong with code VIVA on www.biltongusa.com.
Antonusa.com.
We will ship yours out on Monday, Viva.
Hope you enjoy it.
Thank you very much.
I'll go to my post office, make sure it doesn't sit there for too long.
Don't want anybody stealing my stuff at the post office.
Mitznay says, how many people convicted in Fulton County based on even partly on cell data are filing appeals since the DA has now stated that cell data is not reliable?
Then we go, oh, we did it.
HPGKME says, it was remember your privilege, not ethics, I thought.
And then we got Jay Carbis.
Jay.
And now we're going to go all the way back up to the top.
Oh, Diane Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Fannie Willis walk into a bar.
Okay, I'm not sure I get that.
I am sorry not to burst your bubble, but Dershowitz is probably right.
Oh, so apparently Dershowitz says they're going to get rid of Wade and nothing's going to change.
Dude, I think, well, I don't know if Dershowitz said probably right.
Hey, quiet you.
I don't know who that guy is.
Did Dershowitz say that they're going to get rid of Wade but not Fanny?
And if he did, I'm going to just disagree with him.
And if he still maintains that after having seen this, well, we'll see who's right and wrong at the end of the day.
I am sorry to burst your bubble.
Oh, what's going on here?
Quentino352 says, Please cover this and comment.
A judge actually ruled that failing to prosecute Antifa means prosecuting far-right groups is unconstitutional.
Screen grab.
I don't know what you're talking about, but I'll find out before I venture a guess.
My client Fannie didn't lie.
Her cell phone and all of her defense's witnesses lied.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton.
We'll see if it pays off.
Blue Devil, I felt bad for the stenographer.
I feel bad for me.
I feel bad for all of you.
I don't, actually.
That was fantastically hilarious.
I mean, we'll never witness...
It would be hard to witness something more of a disaster than that closing argument.
Fannie never ran so fast.
Okay, so we got that.
Good.
So that does a rumble.
Oh, my goodness.
That was painful.
And let's now go over to...
There's far too many.
My goodness, these are...
I'll see how many we can do here.
Is there a chance that the DA and their various members to be disbarred for this?
I would say if there's no corruption and no politics being played, yeah, they've lied under oath.
I mean, it's like the guy said in his argument.
They've brought shame.
They've brought ridicule.
They've made Georgia prosecution, whatever, the DA, look like a laughingstock to the entire world.
Vladimir Putin is saying, as bad as you guys say we are, and we might be bad, you are not just worse, you're worse at it.
So, yeah, I mean, if there's any objectivity, I would say yes, but what do I know?
I'm just a Quebec Chinook lawyer who is only following this crap thoroughly and picking the brains of bigger legal brains than me.
Is the judge blackmail proof and not compromised?
Seems a little milquetoast.
Did he contribute to the Fannie campaign?
He contributed $150 back in 2000, and I think we all agree that that's irrelevant.
That doesn't strike me as someone who really supports Fanny.
That strikes me as someone who wants to be able to play the I donated to her campaign card, so don't dare accuse me of anything.
That was from C 'est la vie.
Oh, C 'est la vie.
Nice.
C 'est la vie.
It's life in French.
Crooks or libertarians keep cash around the house?
Crooks or libertarians?
That was musically assured destruction.
Oh, I like that.
That's good.
The fact that he takes two weeks...
Doesn't fill me with hope.
No, that means his decision's made up.
But, like we discussed with Phil Holloway in the intro, he might want to wait until after and no one definitively runs against him before issuing his ruling.
That was worse than Rittenhouse prosecutor and her defense objecting to his own questions.
Every now and again, you gotta take a beating.
That was Klaus out of that...
That was Justin White.
Okay.
Then we've got C.M. Thomas, Soros School of Law Scholarship Program.
Crazy Yada says She Willis said specifically that they came after the only black man and not the other white attorneys.
Absolutely.
I think I brought these up.
We try to imagine being a...
We are tired.
Imagine being the stenographer.
Yeah, they're only dictating it.
Has there ever been...
I'm not reading that.
This guy talks like William Shatner if he drank four espressos.
Oh, you might be talking about me.
You should probably stop talking if defense counsel is smiling the entire time.
And by the way, you know what we're going to do?
No, here's what I can do.
I'll do it afterwards.
Okay.
Superstar.
Okay, wow.
Let's just keep going for a little bit.
They could not take on more casework because they were on vacation at least one week each month.
Put yourself in his shoes.
What do you do?
Have you been in a no-win situation?
I kind of feel bad for him.
What I would have done?
Kept it shorter and said unreliable regardless.
There's no problem with having a relationship.
And it wouldn't have changed anything.
I mean, my argument would have been this.
It wouldn't have changed anything.
I can't even make that argument.
Because she had to find a way to launder the money to him.
She could have just hired him as external counsel for another file.
You know, I'm not even sure I could steal, man, what he should have said.
It's that bad.
I used to think lawyers were kind of intelligent.
Dude, once you understand that they are neither more intelligent nor more honest than the average person, you might understand the only thing that they have is a monopoly on the practice and the arrogance that goes along with that.
Fulton is not sending their best.
Is the January 6th cell phone data now inaccurate?
Okay, this is what we're going to do.
I need to do something exclusive with our VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com community.
Come on over to Locals.
I want to show the world, however, some of our...
Chat will not upload memes, says...
Fulton rarely sends their best, Viva says, and very ginger.
Chat will not let me upload memes, says GinVR.
I wanted to show, because I saw...
Oh, I might not be able to go back all the way for messages.
Does anyone have any questions that I didn't get to?
If you have any questions that I didn't get to, come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com and we're going to go have our exclusive afterparty in Locals.
Locals link.
Come on over.
And that's it.
Let's see here.
One hour, 15 minutes and counting.
That was painful.
Wade has two phones.
I noticed that.
Anyone else notice that?
Oh, no.
He learned his lesson.
Leave the phone.
No, you leave both.
Well, you leave both phones at home.
Or at least take your nookie-nookie phone and leave it.
Again, believe the phone records when they show he wasn't with her.
Disregard them if they show as they were together.
Absolutely, I know a guy.
It's a good argument.
Attorney...
I'm not reading that.
You had one job.
Your backdrops...
My, this old house color.
I don't know, man.
My wife ordered it and it's beautiful.
I don't know what that means.
Stop!
Your case is dead already!
Yep.
Oh, poor guy is up there fighting for his future as Georgia attorney.
He knows the big boss is...
She's pissed with him.
I mean, what were the notes they were passing?
Dude, shut the front door?
Bags under my eyes.
Oh, she's breathing his neck, floundering away.
It was objectively terrible.
And if my boss were there, my superior, my mentor watching me, I'd say, all right, well, I'm not getting hired back.
I want Shane Gillis reenacting this lawyering.
I award you zero points, Bush Bruckle, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Want to be straight with the court?
I heard a dog.
They picked this guy because he's never going to quit talking.
Fanny can't get disqualified if the hearing never ends.
Oh, that's not a bad strategy.
Okay, let's see.
Do we get any more?
You missed the last part, Viva.
Judge was so bored ignoring the lawyer, shuffling paperwork.
LOL.
No, he wanted to get the hell out of there.
I arrived late.
I'm going to have to go back and watch this torture.
Also, MOHAP.
Okay, people.
What does MOHAP mean?
Am I getting in trouble for bringing this acronym up?
Now I'm going to go look up MOHAP and I'm going to get canceled because I have no idea what it means here.
Hold on a second.
meaning.
Ministry of Health and Prevention?
No, that can't be what it is.
Urban Dictionary?
Wait a minute.
Why do I think I might have looked this up before?
You learned something new.
I don't think I knew that.
I think if I had ever known this before, I would never have forgotten this.
Apparently, MOHAP stands for Michelle Obama has a penis.
There you have it.
Now Viva is cancelled from all future events.
Well, that's funny.
Please cover this.
Okay, so we did that.
All right.
Let us go for an afterparty at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
I feel bad.
What are we going to do now?
We have to wait for a judgment.
So the proffer on the cell data, I don't think the judge needs it, which means that the judge doesn't need it To render his decision, if he was on the fence, he would have said, yes, bring it, maybe it'll change my mind.
He's getting rid of Fannie and Nathan Wade, and he doesn't need the cell data.
He's got Yurdy, who testified, Bradley, who testified, and the other testimony that makes no sense.
He's got $10,000 in unreimbursed cash vacation stuff.
He's got the alleged bullshit defense if I gave it all back in cash.
He's got the $100 rule.
What was that?
My hand just disappeared.
There it is.
So I think he's got his mind made up.
Stumbling and hesitated speech matches his earpiece.
Great memes to come after this.
Holy crap.
Guessing Fanny strategically has an income poop doing closing so she can blame him.
Poor performance.
Yeah, blame it on the white dude.
That'll work too.
If only Nathan Wade had done the closing, she would be absolutely allowed to stay on the file.
Wouldn't the state have to recall Wade for rebuttal because Bradley's testimony came after?
It's not after to call back Wade and impeachment.
I don't know.
Please stop your case.
All right.
Come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com, everybody.
Thank you for being here with me.
This was fantastic.
Come on over to Locals.
And I'm going to go over the...
Yeah, I think I shared it on Locals first.
No!
I'll do it here because it's important.
This is the, you know, a little birdie.
A little birdie tipped me off to something.
And that birdie tip-off was that...
Oh, sorry.
They wanted to proffer by new evidence today was a voicemail left by...
A waiter at a restaurant who said, I've been watching this trial, and when Nathan, I think it was Nathan Wade who said, I haven't seen or talked to Bradley in two years, Terrence Bradley in two years, and then somebody says, oh no, I waited on them five weeks ago, give or take.
We'll go over that on Locals because I need to pick the Locals brain for that.
Link to Locals, we're going to talk about that evidence, but I'm going to say this, thank you all for being here.
Oh wait, I've got to figure out how to end it without ending it ending it.
I'm going to end it on YouTube, end it on Rumble, and come on over to vbarnslaw.locals.com.
Thank you all for being here.
This was glorious.
I don't know when we're going to see...
Oh, here we go.
Did you already listen to the voicemail Megyn Kelly just posted from The Waiter?
I'm not saying that I had it before Megyn Kelly, because I don't know, but I'm saying I had that, and I need to make sure that I could publish it without getting in trouble.
So, I'm not interested in being first to any scoop.
I just want to make sure that what I'm communicating, I'm not...
Unlawfully communicating.
Yes, and we're going to talk about that over on Locals.
Well, now you tell me.
Wait, oh, so he only...
Michelle Obama had a pen.
Yeah, I mean, everybody has a pen.
I got a pen right here.
And my pen is blue.
Here.
I have a blue pen.
All right, I'll shut my big mouth now.
We're going to talk about that over on Locals, so come on over there.
Is there a chance that DA and their various members to be...
We got that.
Okay, done.
So, judgment to come.
Sunday night show to come.
We're going to have...
We're talking about Amos Miller on Sunday night.
Post that interview with Robert Barnes at the Lancaster Patriot.
Share it with everybody who's not yet paying attention to that story.
Sunday night's show is going to be banger wanger, speaking of Mohap.
And that's it.
Thank you all for being here.
It's been glorious, entertaining, a little painful, a little stomach-turning, but that is How the Cookie Crumbles.
Everybody, ending on YouTube right now, ending on Rumble in two seconds, come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com and I will see you all Sunday night.
And yes, I will put out a nightly recap, shorter video.
Tonight, I've been neglecting my child for long enough.
I think I'm going to go play with him after I talk with locals.
So, ending on YouTube, ending on Rumble, and I'll see you on Locals now.
That's one down.
We're going to Rumble.
Rumble's going to be down.
And then we're going to talk about the voicemail.
VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com.
10 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year if you want to support the work that we do, or you can just be a member.
No support necessary.
And you get tons of stuff.
Okay.
Done.
On Rumble.
Bam.
Holy sweet, merciful goodness, people.
That was painful.
Let's play the audio recording.
And I think I just got a shout-out from Tristan Tate, if I'm not mistaken.
▲
Export Selection