Drip, Drip, Drip

This piece at Breitbart both raises and answers some intriguing questions about Fani Willis's relationship with Nathan Wade:

Nathan Wade “made the decisions to hire or fire” employees in Fulton County District Attorney’s Office following Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis’ election victory in November 2020, multiple sources familiar with the Wade and Willis relationship exclusively told Breitbart News.

. . . Wade led a transition team of ten to twelve people who interviewed and evaluated current employees to remain in Willis’ newly won office just weeks after she won the election in November, said the sources, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution due to their direct knowledge of the environment inside the District Attorney’s Office, which they characterized as “corrupt.”

This corroborates the statement by former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes in his February 16 testimony that Wade was present in the 2021 meeting in which Barnes was asked if he was interested in the special prosecutor's role. Several commentators asked at the time why Wade, who hadn't yet been named special prosecutor at the time of that interview, was nevertheless present and apparently involved in personnel decisions.

The answer seems to be that from before she assumed office as Fulton County District Attorney on January 1, 2021, Wade, at least by the account of Breitbart's sources, had been some kind of unpaid consigliere to Willis. That he was in the meeting with Barnes at an unspecified date in 2021 was apparently consistent with that role. But if these sources are correct, Wade must have spent quite a bit of time on this, time that otherwise would have been billable for his law practice. One of the Breitbart sources gave an account of his involvement:

“Willis said everyone in the office was essentially all terminated, and that essentially we had to reapply for our jobs and must submit an application and schedule a time to appear for an interview,” a source said. “We had to reapply and came back in so they could interview everyone — from lawyers to paralegals to assistants to investigators.”

“And in that room, in my interview, there were a lot of people other than Fani Willis. And that was her transition team. I definitely know that Nathan Wade was in that room because he was taking the lead role,” the source stated. “And I was a little confused because I had never seen him before.”

“I had about maybe ten people in the interview,” another source described the reinterview process with Wade. “Nathan definitely was up moving around and taking charge in the room. Wade hired the entire office of 250 employees,” the person said. “I was just telling him my employment background, and they just sit there and looked at me and they said well, ‘you’ll get an email on our decision.’ And that’s what Wade said. And he looked at Willis. They looked at each other. And there was just something so weird going on.”

This environment seems consistent with the previous account of whistleblower and former Willis staffer Amanda Timpson, who confronted Willis in a November 21, 2021 meeting

after the DA’s former campaign social media manager Michael Cuffee planned to use part of a nearly $500,000 grant for travel, computers and “swag,” according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“He wanted to do things with grants that were impossible, and I kept telling him, like, ‘We can’t do that,’” Timpson is heard telling Willis in the recording. “He told everybody … ‘We’re going to get MacBooks, we’re going to get swag, we’re going to use it for travel.’ I said, ‘You cannot do that, it’s a very, very specific grant.’”

. . . [O]n Jan.14, 2022, Willis fired Timpson, who oversaw the office’s juvenile diversion program, and had her escorted out of the building with seven armed investigators, the ex-employee told the Free Beacon.

In an interview with the outlet, Timpson said the purported abuse of the grant was “very similar” to Willis’ office splurging on lavish vacations with private attorney, Nathan Wade, with whom she was allegedly carrying on a “clandestine” affair.

“My case and Nathan Wade’s case are very similar when you break them down point by point,” Timpson told the outlet. “Ethical violations, abuse of power, and the misuse of county, state, and federal funds.”

The firing of Timpson also seems consistent with the accounts of Wade's earlier role of shadow personnel director, where he weeded out potentially disloyal staff. Although he was appointed special prosecutor on November 1, 2021, he seems to have continued his previous role as shadow advisor to Willis after that time. But how did he benefit from this role before November 1, 2021? One way would have been contracts from Willis'soffice to his law firm:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis hired her alleged lover’s law partner to work for her office at a rate of $150 an hour, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation—an arrangement that is raising eyebrows among legal experts who question her spending of public funds.

Christopher Campbell, a partner at Wade & Campbell Firm, has received $126,070 from the Office of the District Attorney since 2021, according to county records. Willis hired Campbell to provide services as a “Taint Attorney,” reviewing privileged evidence beginning in Jan. 2021 at a rate of $150 an hour, contracts obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.

. . . Wade and Campbell’s former law partner, Terrence Bradley, has also been paid $74,480 by the District Attorney’s Office since 2021, according to county records.

Under a separate contract spanning from March 1, 2021, to April 30, 2021, Campbell was also hired to provide services as a “First Appearance Attorney” at a rate of $65 an hour, according to the document.

. . . “This is a mystery in and of itself,” Atlanta-based criminal defense attorney and legal analyst Philip Holloway told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I have no clue why any DA’s office needs to pay a private lawyer to handle ‘first appearance’ calendars. Any assistant DA could easily do that. They are already on the payroll and it is the most simple of all tasks.”

Testimony from both Wade and Bradley at the February 15-16 evidentiary hearing indicated that income to the firm was split three ways, so that the fees paid to Campbell and Bradley would also have been paid one third to Wade. This suggests that this was at least one back-channel way to funnel payments to Wade for his role in Willis's office. But there has been at least one other question about Wade's performance as an attorney:

Wade was hired by the Cobb County Sheriff’s Department in June 2020, after more than a year and a half of brutally critical media coverage about the deaths of predominantly Black inmates, including one who begged repeatedly to be sent to the hospital for nearly eight hours while struggling to breathe.

. . . [Deputy Chief] Allen wrote that she retained Wade’s law firm to review cases "that have involved alleged excessive use of force, deadly force, discrimination or neglect ... with a fine-tooth comb.”

When Wade finished his investigation later that year, he released no formal public report about what led to the deaths at the notoriously dangerous lock-up.

Asked about his findings for a local TV news investigation, Wade conceded that he created no “documents, communications, or records memorializing, reflecting evidence, or relating to the work,” according to the news station, 11Alive.

“I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it. That’s what I have,” Wade told a lawyer for 11Alive who was trying to obtain Sheriff’s Department internal records about the probe through public records act requests. That outcome was condemned by local criminal justice reform activists and defense attorneys, some of whom said Wade’s investigation helped the Sheriff’s Department use the pretense of an ongoing investigation to deny public access to potentially embarrassing records.

So Wade is an interesting guy with an interesting background. Over the weekend, Congessman Jim Jordan announced that the House Judiciary Committee has been speaking with Amanda Timpson:

“We haven’t heard back from her yet — we’ll see what we get from her — but there’s a whistleblower in her office who we have talked to, our committee staff,” he said.

. . . "We'll see where it goes," Jordan added.

It looks like indeed we will. I suspect that the sources who spoke to Breitbart are close to Timpson and the House Judiciary Committee.