Phony Fani's Phony Phone

Opening up a big Costco size can of worms

Who needs Real Housewives when we have a real-life flash-and-trash court spectacle involving a corrupt billionaire trying to influence elections, a Presidential candidate, the founder of the Black Panthers, an adulterous affair with an angry smoking hot ex-wife, and a Fulton County District Attorney who ran into court with her dress on backward? If you like high drama interspersed with unexpected humor, the Fani Willis saga has everything. But in case you can’t follow the nearly hourly updates, bombshells, and startling revelations, here is a cheat sheet. The crux of the matter is that Fani Willis may be removed—from this case, from her office, from the bar. Who knows?

Fani (whose name is pronounced more like Phony than Fanny) was elected to the office of District Attorney (DA) of Fulton County, Georgia in 2020. Fulton County is where Atlanta is located. Despite serving 16 relatively undistinguished years in the DA’s office as an underling prosecutor, she opted out in 2018 to enter private practice. She ran that same year for a seat on the Superior Court in Fulton County but lost. In 2019, she did a short stint as a Municipal Judge in South Fulton, Georgia. In 2020, the relatively obscure and politically undistinguished Fani Willis ran against Paul Howard, the Fulton County six-term incumbent.

While victory may have been sweet for Fani, who gave her ex-boss the boot, it was also startling. Normally people with no credentials who emerge from out of nowhere do not win elections unless they are extreme Democrats (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez comes to mind; so does Barack Obama).

Fani was one of several people running for DA across the country who got large cash infusions. The office of the DA is one of those marginal political offices that elect people—but nobody ever knows who’s running. Most people cannot name the DA in their own county. Thus, a DA election can put a person into a powerful position with minimal campaign expense. You can probably win a DA race in many parts of the country with less money than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spends on his personal security detail in a month.

Fani got 73% of the vote and promised in her acceptance speech to bring “integrity” among other things to the DA’s office. It was a huge win.

You can check out Fani’s campaign funding; most donations came from individual donors and under Georgia law, smaller individual donors do not need to disclose who they are. However, the law does require that they disclose their zip codes, which gives us a geographical glimpse into who gave Fani about a third of a million to run her campaign. True, there are donors listed from Georgia, but you’ll also find donors from California, New Mexico, Florida, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Texas, Tennessee, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Oregon… well, you get the point. I didn’t even get halfway through the list. Money rolled in, sometimes under $100 per donation, but from all over the map.

This looks kind of suspicious to me. What kind of person living in Edina, Minnesota cares enough about the DA race in Atlanta, Georgia, to send over $50? Why did some person in El Paso send in $25 to get Fani Willis elected? If there were just a couple of these, you might think they were random friends or family of Willis or people with a particular interest in her career (which was virtually off-the-radar when she ran). But there are hundreds of them. Nothing illegal, just weird.

Fani Willis arrived at the DA’s office as duly elected, but not particularly accomplished. She’s not a fire-starter of an attorney or a legal whiz. She hasn’t published on legal theory or prosecuted any big cases. (Her biggest case before this was taking down a cheating ring in some high school…) But once she got into office, she decided to do the unprecedented and bring charges against a former President using the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act. Oh, and this former President was also running against the Democrat incumbent, Joe Biden, and Fani is a lifelong Democrat. Fani rushed in where more seasoned DAs would have feared to tread.

Without going too far into the weeds, Fani Willis decided that she would charge Donald Trump with election interference using the RICO Act. She’s rounded up a lot of Trump associates in the process, since you can’t really charge racketeering without a racket, so she has indicted lots of people to build what she is going to argue is an organized crime syndicate. RICO was never intended to prosecute election interference or anything other than organized criminal networks, you know, like the Mafia or the Medellin Cartel in Colombia. The point of the law is that it gives broad prosecutorial power if it can establish that there was a criminal enterprise. Random people can’t be charged under RICO, only criminals working in unison. For instance, people who are associated with the alleged crime syndicate can be indicted and even convicted merely by being members of the group or having made a seemingly innocuous phone call. If you remember the old Godfather movies, you know that Vito and Michael Corleone never did their own wet work; they never ordered specific crimes to be committed. Instead, they created a hierarchical organization that did crimes based on a wink and a nod from the boss. So the big boss in a RICO case may never have committed murder or even ordered a murder, but he might still go to prison for murder.

Now at this point there are some pretty credible allegations that Fani was working with Nathan Wade to set up her new DA office (Wade had hiring and firing decisions in some cases) and Wade had ties to the Biden White House. He even traveled there. More than once in 2022. We know he was there because he billed the expenses back to the taxpayers of Georgia.

In terms of being a mediocre attorney, Nathan Wade is on par with Fani Willis. This is not to malign attorneys who work in the trenches on ordinary cases; it’s just that these two were setting up an office to bring RICO charges against a former President and confabbing with the White House when neither of them was an F. Lee Bailey or an Alan Dershowitz. Far from it, neither had ever prosecuted big cases. Nathan worked in private practice but had consulting agreements with the DA’s office. Nathan had limited criminal court experience and zero RICO experience. I say this because this is an important point missed in a lot of coverage.

RICO cases are based on very specific and complicated laws. The best RICO prosecutor going was probably Rudy Giuliani who used the laws to bring down the Mafia in New York. But RICO laws are highly complex. In Georgia, if you are ever accused of a crime under RICO and you can’t afford an attorney, they have a special vetting process that requires that you don’t just get any public defender, you get a public defender with specific RICO experience. No other public defender is allowed. Nathan Wade would not meet the qualifications to defend a person accused under RICO, yet he is qualified to run a RICO case? Against a former President? In an election year? With every eye on his every move?

Yet that is what Fani and apparently Nathan’s friends in the White House decided was a good idea. It wasn’t illegal, but it was off-the-charts weird.

Now to add a little spice to the stew. Nathan Wade was married at the time and has only recently filed for divorce. It appears that Nathan Wade and Fani Willis were having an affair. Now a few key points:

• Although it looks sleazy, there is no crime committed if a DA and the prosecutor she hires have an affair.

• But if a DA hires a prosecutor on a contract basis because of the affair rather than because of his merits, well, that could be a problem. At the very least, it’s a type of nepotism.

• And if said DA receives in-kind gifts like posh vacations from the contract prosecutor she hires, that could be considered a kickback. A DA is not allowed to take kickbacks.

• And if the DA and the prosecutor testify falsely under oath about their affair, that’s perjury. Lawyers who commit perjury can be disbarred.

That’s why the court wants to know the timeline—was Fani having an affair with Nathan before she hired him (which looks bad) or did she hire him first and then get involved with him (which admittedly also looks bad but a bit less bad).

The facts are amusing. Fani hired him although he was not qualified, she paid him more than any other contract attorney she hired for that case, and she enjoyed a pretty lavish good time with him. It is hard to know how much of the Atlanta taxpayers’ dollars got funneled into Nathan’s bank account, but it is north of $600,000. And Nathan Wade pads his bills. I know this not only because he was taking in far more money than the other attorneys, but because he once sent a bill to Atlanta for 24 hours of legal work done in one day. I know some attorneys put in grueling hours, but 24 billable hours in a day would make Harvey Specter of Suits blush.

The story gets more amusing because Nathan Wade and Fani Willis took some ritzy vacations together—they went to Belize and Napa Valley wine tastings and they took a couple of cruises. According to Fani’s testimony, Nathan paid using his corporate credit card (he was an attorney in private practice who had a corporate expense account). Now the story gets downright funny. Fani insists that she always paid for her half of their fancy vacays, but she insisted on the witness stand that she always paid in cash. She never kept receipts and there are no deposit records of Nathan depositing these cash amounts which by her own statements were more than once about $2,500. (Also there appear to be no bank receipts of Fani Willis withdrawing money—cash apparently rained down on Fani Willis like manna on the children of Israel in the desert.)

To paraphrase what Alan Dershowitz said on his podcast on February 26, 2024 (The Dershow), “I bet she didn’t really pay him back.”

Much of this came to light when Nathan Wade was asked to testify under a milquetoast judge named Scott McAfee who is so terrified of Fani Willis you can hear his teeth chattering whenever Fani is in the room. Fani hired Judge McAfee, after all, and it seems like Judge McAfee knows the powerful forces Fani might unleash upon him. The first question—and this isn’t really a smoking gun but it’s important—is whether or not Fani and Nathan were an item before Fani hired him for this gig, because a romantic interest might have not just clouded her judgment, it might have allowed her to rig a system so that she gave Nathan money to give back to her (“kickbacks”). Even if Nathan never handed her fat stacks of cash, he could kick back some of the taxpayer money to her by funding some pretty posh vacations.

One thing Fani and Nathan had not counted on was the presence of an ex-wife—that’s another story for another day. The interesting angle here is that ex-wives can be very cooperative with the powers that are trying to go after her ex-husband. Let’s just say a lot of paperwork related to Nathan’s financials was disclosed. And in an ironic note, Jocelyn Wade is fashion-model drop-dead gorgeous.

On the day of the testimony (the famous “backward dress” day), Nathan Wade was on the stand. Fani’s attorneys were still arguing over whether or not she had to testify. Fani’s legal team did not want Fani to take the stand, which is a prudent and typical legal posture. According to Fani, she was in her office and when she heard that Wade’s testimony was over, she burst into the court room, plopped herself down in the witness box, leaned back like she was Boss Tweed going to light up a cigar, and demanded the interrogating attorney and also the judge get her specific papers. I thought she was going to order a drink, too.

Whatever other crimes were committed that day, there was a crime against fashion. Fani had her dress on backward. Here is a close-up of the dress as Fani wore it (and the twisted American flag pin). Below is a catalog picture of how the dress is supposed to be worn—zipper goes in the back. Wardrobe malfunction? At the very least another embarrassment for Fani. (Can you imagine how the media would react if Trump appeared in court with his shirt on backward?)

Fani made a comical entrance—with a dress on backward, fire in her eyes, and a disgust for letting mere legal protocol diminish her ability to boss people around. She commanded the scene and it all went so terribly badly. Had Judge Scott McAfee not been whimpering under the bench, he should have put a stop to this and sent Fani home. It would have been for her own good. But he gave her the rope to hang herself.

• Fani was not scheduled to testify. You’re not allowed to just burst into a court room and demand the court hear you. Even a DA is not allowed to just whimsically interrupt a court proceeding and demand to testify without allowing anyone notice.

• Fani’s sudden appearance caught the attorney unaware; she had no chance to prepare for the interrogation. That gave Fani the element of surprise. I think the attorney who questioned Fani did a reasonably good job but she would have done a far better job if she had been permitted, say, 15 minutes to prepare.

• Fani began speaking out of turn, not as a witness but rather as a person giving a speech, and she called the attorney who was to question her a liar. A person on the witness stand is not allowed to give speeches. They answer questions. Period.

• Fani called the other attorney a liar without evidence. Throwing around unfounded stupid allegations may not be illegal, but it is tacky. Fani didn’t make a point against the attorney, she made a point that she was a jerk.

• It is highly likely that Fani heard Nathan’s testimony which was given right before she marched into the courtroom like Sherman marching to the sea. She stated that she was in her office, but since the hearing was televised, she very well may have been watching it online. When you testify in court, you are absolutely prohibited from hearing the testimony of the others before you. Had Fani’s testimony been done in a legit way, they would have sequestered her to make sure she did not hear Nathan’s testimony. It seems based on her timing and her fury that Fani absolutely heard what Nathan had said and wanted to clear things up. Nathan is in the unenviable situation of having both an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend going after him. (Nathan and Fani allegedly broke up in June 2023.)

• When asked about whether she had listened to Nathan’s testimony, she said she had been in her office pacing. That was her answer—a deflection. Neither the judge or the attorney punched back. Fani eventually said she did not hear Nathan’s testimony, but I think she did.

• From the witness stand, Fani called the attorney a liar more than once. Once when the attorney asked a question, she called her a liar. I’m not sure how asking a question is telling a lie. Judge Scott McAfee was sucking his thumb in his big judge’s chair and let Fani attack the other attorney without saying a word. This should have never been permitted. I bet if I were a witness in a court case and I accused the attorney cross-examining me of being a liar, somebody would have stopped me.

• Fani also objected to a question. Now all I know about the law I’ve learned from Law & Order reruns, but I’m pretty sure the witness is not allowed to object. Fani’s lawyers might have objected but they weren’t there because they were arguing that she wasn’t going to testify. Fani Willis is the author of chaos. But no one stopped from objecting.

If you like innuendo, sleaze, moral turpitude, and criminality, Fani’s testimony was just too delicious. Fani claims that she keeps large sums of cash in her house and she always has. Her father, one of the founders of the Black Panthers, told her to keep at least six months’ cash on hand at all times. This makes me wonder about how the Black Panthers were run… but that’s another story for another day. When Fani was asked where she got the cash, she just gave a nasty smirk and said she worked for it.

But here’s the problem. Fani gets two paychecks by her own testimony—not sure how it works but she gets two checks by direct deposit for her work as the DA of Fulton County. This is her legit salary and it’s documented because it goes directly to her bank. Yet there are no records of Fani withdrawing large amounts of cash from her bank account. She claims that as Nathan was spending exorbitant funds on her for multiple lavish domestic and international vacations, she always paid him back in cash and those payments were in the four figures. Fani even wasted a bunch of court time explaining—with awe and wonderment—that Nathan Wade had a travel agent. She said this as if that would explain everything, when, of course, it explains nothing. And anyone can have a travel agent if they want to throw around money on luxury vacations.

Fani has no record of cash payments to reimburse Nathan. Nathan has no record of depositing them. So on the stand, Fani declared she paid Nathan cash, he spent the cash, and that’s the way the world works. (She also stated that it was a “Black thing,” like all Black families have thousands of cold cash in their homes.)

When she was asked to clarify how this cash system worked, Fani pulled out her pocket thesaurus and announced proudly to the courtroom, “Cash is….[dramatic pause]… fungible.” Fungible just means you can spend it on something of value. It does not explain why Nathan was shelling out thousands on Fani’s good time and she could not substantiate if or how she was paying him back.

Fani also claims that although she had known Nathan for a while—which is logical considering they were both Fulton County attorneys—she said she selected Nathan Wade for this role in prosecuting Trump based on his merits (which cannot be true) and she paid him more than the going rate (which doesn’t make sense). There is proof Nathan was paid more than the other attorneys on the case and far more than the other contract attorney who had actual RICO case experience. This would make sense if Nathan was Fani’s “special” friend. It would also make sense if Nathan was the one guy Fani could count on to milk the system for some fancy vacations and maybe even more cash. Fani not only defends the cash-no-receipts system as valid, she thinks it proves her integrity. She said at one point, “I don’t do my friends like that,” as if asking for a proper receipt was a sign of moral failure.

At one point, the frustrated attorney asked Fani if there was any evidence of some of these cash transactions. Fani stated—and I hope that this goes on the record and causes lots of Fulton County cases to be re-opened—that the testimony of one witness was proof. That’s right! One person says it, it’s true, proven evidence, case closed. The Fulton County DA said that one witness saying anything is proof that it is true.

“Your Honor, I didn’t rob that bank.” “Okey-dokey, case closed, you’re free to go.”

Finally, Fani and Nathan attempted to downplay their romantic liaison. It is worth remembering that it is not illegal for these two individuals to have an affair. (It is kind of trashy, but nowadays one person’s trash is another person’s lifestyle.) However, cell phone data from cell phone towers shows that Nathan was very frequently at or around Fani’s residence at night. A friend of Fani, Robin Yeartie (who is now probably a former friend) has testified that Fani and Nathan had an intimate romantic relationship as early as the fall of 2019. Now all of this is just to bring to light an important question. Did Fani use Georgia taxpayer funds improperly when she hired her unqualified boyfriend for this case? And did Fani and Nathan collude that at least some of the money Fani would funnel to Nathan would wind up being spent on her?

The timeline matters because if it turns out Fani and Nathan lied, (a) it means they committed perjury and (b) it means they may have conspired to bilk the taxpayers. As much as I hate to admit it, (a) is more serious and could get Fani disbarred.

In her defense, Fani disputed the value of using cell phone data to ascertain a person’s location. Information derived from cell phones (which was used on J6 defendants and many others who are now sitting in prison) can be obtained when a cell phone pings or makes contact with a nearby cell phone tower. This type of “ping” is objective and accurate. It is deemed reliable that if Phone X pinged Tower A at 4:00 a.m. that Phone X really did ping Tower A at 4:00 a.m. A cell phone is essentially a tracking device that most of us compliantly carry around with us. Cell records are solid information, because there is no human intervention and the data they convey cannot be easily altered. Pings are considered in most courts to be strong circumstantial evidence.

While pings are exact in terms of time and the cell tower location, the ping goes to a cell phone tower and not a specific address. And sometimes, due to various weird technology things, a cell phone might not ping the nearest tower. To be sure, a cell phone in Atlanta isn’t going to ping off a tower in Madagascar. However most people who live fairly habitual lives are going to have cell phone data that pings off the same towers over and over.

Now just because Nathan’s cell phone pinged a tower near Fani’s home at 4 a.m. does not mean he was at Fani’s house. On the other hand, Fani lived in an urban environment where there are lots of phone towers; cell phone geolocating is considered to be more accurate in cities than in more suburban or rural areas. So we know when and where Nathan’s cell phone was in general, and it was in very close proximity to Fani’s home. Did that mean he was with Fani? Well, it certainly suggests it unless he can offer an alternate explanation.

And we have over 30 of these instances. So whatever was going on, Nathan Wade was doing a lot of it.

The telecommunications footprints in this case are huge—Nathan and Fani were avid texters with over 12,000 texts during their romance—and if the attorneys can prove that Nathan’s cell phone had approximately 35 middle-of-the-night pings in Fani’s neighborhood, he is going to start to need an alibi to argue what brought him to that area so frequently. Did he know other people in the neighborhood that he visited in the wee hours of the morning? Maybe he just hung out at a bar there (oops, that won’t work, Atlanta bars close at 2:30 a.m.). Maybe he was at a 12-step meeting, they might be taking place in the middle of the night in a big city. There may be valid reasons why he had so much late night cell phone action in that area. But without an alternative explanation and added to the fact that they had over 2,000 calls and six times as many texts during their affair, it sure looks like Nathan was spending many nights with Fani.

So what is the problem for Fani? The legal problem is not the affair. It’s the fact that her statements on the stand may have minimized and downplayed the affair, the timeline, why she hired Nathan in the first place, and how they divvied up the money that Fani gave to him courtesy of Georgia taxpayers. If the attorneys dig deep enough, they may find perjury and a perjury charge is a hard thing for a high-profile DA to beat.

The cover-up is worse than the crime. Fani might have been able to survive a tacky-looking adulterous affair, but even terrified Judge McAfee can’t let perjury go unnoticed when it was the DA on the stand. And this was not just any DA, this was the Super-DA who was going to bring back Trump’s head on a silver platter.

But here is the real can of worms. Fani’s office filed a statement last Friday that said the cell-phone-pings “do not prove that Special Prosecutor Wade was ever at any particular location or address.” This is an official statement. In other words, the Fulton County DA says that phone pings are unreliable as any type of evidence. They prove nothing. Nada. Nichts.

That could be a major headache for Fulton County. Imagine all of the cases that will have to be revisited. There are people in Fulton County and elsewhere who have been convicted based in whole or in part on cell phone data. Now we have a DA from a major American city claiming that cell phone data isn’t real evidence at all! Imagine if she had said fingerprints were unreliable. Or DNA evidence didn’t prove paternity.

It might be wiser and less painful to get rid of Fani than to disallow phone evidence in prior court convictions. You see, a sharp lawyer could argue that since the DA said cell phone data was unreliable, the use of cell phone data could not be used to convict their clients. Think of it! Prosecutions overturned, criminals released, restitution demanded, and new cases would become much harder to prosecute if we disallow cell phone evidence, not to mention the lawyer-hours needed to reopen and revisit all of those cases! That’s one big Costco can of worms there.

What could happen to Fani? In a news story as bizarre as this one, I hesitate to speculate. She could be disqualified from the case. She could also be disbarred. She might be removed from office. People have gone to prison for less.

But even if the terrified Judge Scott McAfee lets her off with just a tickertape parade and a few Starbucks coupons, the case against Trump has totally changed. It’s tainted. It’s toxic. It has revealed the Democrat machine going after Trump is a ship of fools. By making an unprecedented election interference case against Trump about two lovers squandering tax money in Belize (and Fani admitting on the witness stand she didn’t even know where Belize was) and showing up in court wearing their underwear on their head … it’s over, no matter what happens.