ATLANTA– Cell phone location data cited in court Friday raises questions about a special prosecutor’s testimony in Georgia’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump, who had a romantic relationship with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis .
The cellphone location data — revealed in a lawsuit by Trump’s lawyers — shows that accuser Nathan Wade visited the south Atlanta neighborhood where Willis lived at least 35 times in the first 11 months of 2021, an investigator said . Wade had stated that he had been there less than 10 times before being hired as special prosecutor in November 2021.
The new filing raises new questions about the timeline of Willis and Wade’s relationship, as Trump and other defendants, who are accused of illegally trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, have argued that both plaintiffs are from the case should be dropped because their romantic relationship created a conflict of interest.
The investigator, Charles Mittelstadt, wrote that records show Nathan Wade visited the area in Hapeville where Willis lived at least 35 times in the first eleven months of 2021. Wade had testified at a hearing last week that he had visited the Hapeville apartment where Willis lived less than a dozen times before being hired as special prosecutor on Nov. 1, 2021.
“So if the phone records showed that you called from the same location as the apartment before November 1, 2021, and that happened multiple times, would the phone records be incorrect?” Trump lawyer Steve Sadow asked Wade during the hearing.
“If the phone records reflect that, yes, sir,” Wade responded.
“Could they be wrong?” Sadow asked.
“They would be wrong,” Wade replied.
Wade also testified last week that he never spent the night at the apartment where Willis lived, and Willis confirmed that. The investigator’s statement says that on two occasions — one in mid-September 2021 and one in late November 2021 — records show that Wade’s phone appears to have arrived in the area where Willis lived late at night and stayed there until early morning Remained.
Willis’ team will respond in a lawsuit, a spokesperson said. Wade did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday.
A motion filed by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman alleges that Willis paid Wade large sums of money for his work and then personally benefited when he then used some of that money to pay for vacations. At a hearing last week, a former friend and co-worker of Willis testified that she saw the two kissing and hugging before Wade was hired.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held a two-day evidentiary hearing last week on motions by Roman and others to disqualify Willis and her office from the case. He has scheduled oral arguments on the matter for March 1.
Willis and Wade both testified at last week’s hearing that they didn’t start dating until early 2022, after Wade had already been hired as a special prosecutor. They also both said they shared the travel expenses and that Willis reimbursed Wade in cash for the money he spent on travel.
Mittelstadt wrote that he used a tool called CellHawk to analyze the data he received from Wade’s cell phone company. He said he focused on geolocation activities near the address of the apartment where Willis had lived by creating a “very conservative geofence, which isolated the two cell towers closest to this address.”
He said the geofence was used to assess whether Wade’s phone had ever connected to those two towers and to eliminate any hits that could have happened during routine travel on nearby highways. He wrote that the report only noted cases where the phone was connected for an extended period of time.
Mittelstadt’s statement also said the analysis revealed more than 2,000 phone calls and just under 12,000 interactions between Willis and Wade during the first eleven months of 2021, with “a prevalence of phone calls in the evenings.”
Wade testified that they met at a judicial conference in October 2019 and spoke frequently as of 2020. Wade wrote in an affidavit filed with the court that he was a member of Willis’ transition team after she was elected district attorney in November 2020. In 2021, Willis asked him and two other attorneys to help her find a lawyer to lead the election investigation before ultimately tapping him for the job, he wrote.