Terrence Bradley, a Georgia lawyer, testified Tuesday about the relationship between Fulton County’s Democratic District Attorney Fani Willis and Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade, the prosecutor assigned to the case against former President Donald Trump.
Bradley, Wade’s former divorce attorney, refused to answer some of Team Trump’s questions on the stand. He cited attorney-client privilege, and he avoided speculation. “I have no direct knowledge of when the relationship started,” Bradley said Tuesday.
However, Bradley sounds a lot different in private, according to text messages unearthed by SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly — and what she found was a bombshell that could undo the whole case against Trump.
Kelly described “a 180 between this person in these texts and the man we saw on the stand.” According to Kelly, Bradley was privately “offering ideas” and “volunteering information.”
Willis saw her office rocked by the sex scandal shortly after filing the racketeering charges against Trump.
Defense attorneys have accused Willis of appointing Wade, her boyfriend, as the special prosecutor in the case against Trump. They’ve also accused her of paying Wade huge sums of taxpayer money, which he used to take Willis on lavish vacations.
Willis and Wade both claim to have split the travel expenses — but they have provided no receipts, and said that Willis paid “cash.” They both testified under oath that they didn’t begin dating until the spring of 2022, after he was hired as special prosecutor in November 2021 and that the relationship ended last summer.
One witness, a former friend and employee of Willis, told the court earlier this month that she saw the pair hugging and kissing before Wade was hired as special prosecutor. But the prosecutor has called into question whether Willis was telling the truth.
Now, Bradley’s text messages seem to have corroborated the prosecutor’s evidence that Willis lied about the timing.
Bradley had been texting Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for one of Trump’s co-defendants.
They said —
MERCHANT: I assume you knew about the trips…. wowowoow
MERCHANT: Insane
MERCHANT: I’m shocked
MERCHANT: Well not really but somewhat
BRADLEY: No I didnt
BRADLEY: When did it happen
MERCHANT: Last trip was this summer
MERCHANT: May or June
BRADLEY: No I didnt know…I was gone by then
BRADLEY: Doesn’t surprise me…they took many trips to Florida
BRADLEY: Texas
MERCHANT: And Napa
BRADLEY: California
BRADLEY: When she moved her daughter there
MERCHANT: I can’t believe they were sooooo carefree
…
MERCHANT: Dang
MERCHANT: They had a full on relationship. Insane
MERCHANT: Just insane
BRADLEY: He went to help her move her [I.e. to move Willis’ daughter to California]
MERCHANT: Why she would hire him is insane
BRADLEY: Yes
MERCHANT: Like just date / don’t hire him.
On Tuesday, Merchant read aloud a text message in which she had asked Bradley if he thought Willis and Wade started dating before Willis hired Wade. In the text, Bradley replied “absolutely.”
When attorneys confronted Bradley on Tuesday about a text message in which he said the relationship started when Willis was working as a municipal court judge, Bradley told the court he had only been “speculating.”
Defense lawyers appeared to grow increasingly frustrated with his lack of answers, with Trump’s lawyer at one point essentially accusing Bradley of lying on the witness stand.
“You do in fact know when it started. And you don’t want to testify to that in court, that’s the best explanation, isn’t it?” Trump attorney Steve Sadow asked. “That’s the true explanation because you don’t want to admit it in court, correct?”
Kelly considered the text messages a game-changer in the effort to remove Willis from the case, even though the text messages hadn’t been written under oath.
“I have here, in front of me the texts. I’ve got 31 pages of the text messages,” Kelly summarized. “I’m sorry, but this is not how someone who knows nothing about an affair sounds. He’s caught. Sorry! Nathan’s caught. Fani’s caught. Terrence is caught, giving it up!”
Take a look at Kelly’s reaction —
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.