Texts show witness readily helped build a case to disqualify Trump prosecutors

ATLANTA — Terrence Bradley, an Atlanta-area lawyer, had been billed as the star witness in the effort to disqualify Fani Willis, the district attorney leading the election interference case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia. But when Bradley took the stand this week — and twice earlier this month — he was a deeply reluctant witness.

His testimony did little to resolve a question at the heart of the defense’s attempt to show that Willis had an untenable conflict of interest: whether the romantic relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, the lawyer she hired to help run the Trump case, began before or after he joined her staff.

But hundreds of text messages obtained by The New York Times show that Bradley, a former law partner and friend of Wade, helped a defense lawyer to expose the relationship between the two prosecutors.

The texts reveal that Bradley, who served for a time as Wade’s divorce lawyer until the two men had a bitter falling-out, assisted the effort to reveal the romance and provide details about it for at least four months — countering the impression he left on the witness stand that he had known next to nothing about the romance.

In the text exchanges, which began in September of last year and were reported late Wednesday by CNN, Bradley claimed some knowledge of when the relationship began. He even offered the defense lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, reassurance as she submitted her motion to disqualify to the court.

“I am nervous,” Merchant texted to Bradley on Jan. 8, the day she filed the motion. “This is huge.”

“You are huge,” Bradley encouraged her. “You will be fine.”

Bradley was one of two witnesses called by Merchant to testify, expecting they would say that the relationship started before Willis hired Wade in November 2021. The other was Robin Yeartie, a former friend of Willis and former employee of the DA’s office, who testified in mid-February that the romance started before Wade was hired.

The business partnership between Wade and Bradley soured after Bradley was accused of sexually assaulting an employee, an accusation he vigorously denied during his testimony. Bradley told the court this week that he had not spoken to Wade in more than a year.

Before exposing the romance in her Jan. 8 filing, Merchant asked Bradley in a text, “Do you think it started before she hired him?”

“Absolutely,” Bradley replied, adding that the romance had started when the two served as local judges, before Willis’ election as district attorney in 2020.

But on the witness stand this week, Bradley said he had only been “speculating” about the timing. Although Wade had told him about the relationship, he said on the stand, he did not have direct knowledge about when it began.

The text messages — some of which Merchant described in court after Bradley did not provide the testimony she was hoping for — show that Bradley was trading messages with Merchant about the prosecutors and their romance as long ago as September. Bradley made suggestions about who might know about the romance and be able to corroborate it. He encouraged Merchant to subpoena members of Willis’ security detail and other members of her staff.

When Merchant was writing the motion to disqualify the prosecutors, she assured Bradley that “I protected you completely,” adding, “I kept you out of it.”

Merchant also told Bradley that she was becoming president of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and wanted him to become more involved in the group, including by becoming a program director for an upcoming seminar.

Their mutual trust developed to the point that Bradley agreed when she asked if she could subpoena him.

“You are my friend and I trust you,” he told her.

Weeks later, on the witness stand, Bradley appeared to be dismayed that Merchant had ended up making him a central witness on the matter. They clashed during his testimony when it became evident that his prior enthusiasm for talking about the prosecutors’ romance had vanished.

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