Whatever's Become Of Hunter?

In recent weeks, both Joe Biden's son Hunter and his brother James have given closed-door depositions to the Comer Committee, and the transcripts have been released. On Thursday, the New York Post ran the headline, After years of denials, Hunter Biden FINALLY acknowledged Joe was ‘the big guy’ in $5M China deal. The next day, it had the story Joe Biden got $40K from China funds, brother James admits in bombshell impeachment interview.

Nobody noticed. Last fall, this would have been much bigger news. I think there are several reasons. One is that by this point, the whole Biden family boodle has been factored in; the part of the public that follows the news has inferred everything there is to infer, and it's moved on. Second, while there's a there there, it's never turned into anything big. Joe got $40K from China? Heck, Nathan Wade go $600K from Fani, and that was for piddling stuff like wine tasting tours.

Third, the Hunter-Joe-James story had nothing to do with Trump, and that may be the secret. Trump's steady rise in the polls began with the federal and Fulton County indictments and the New York joke civil cases in the middle of last year, and those all had to do with Trump. Trump is an interesting guy, Joe Biden is a nebbish. Former Clinton intimate Dick Morris says at 2:00:

[T]he charges against Trump are so noisy and so all-encompassing that they eat up all the room in the election and suck all the oxygen out of the room. After you finish debating whether Trump led a revolution or not, and after you finish debating whether Trump intimidated a woman who he raped or not, what are you gonna do, talk about his stand on Social Security, talk about his stand on dealing with China? There's no place for the other issues in the dialogue.

In other words, it's all about Trump, plus the comic-book villains who're made to order to serve as his foils: Judge Engoron, Fani Willis, Nathan Wade -- and the problem is that more are lined up like Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Jack Smith. Trump may as well be campaigning against the Joker.

As the famous statement attributed to Clausewitz and others goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Republican strategists came up with a perfectly reasonable idea that dated back to 2020 and the first reports of the Hunter laptop: hit Joe with all the Biden family scandals. The good part of that plan was that it could attach to any generic Republican candidate, and it's actually been a rationale for the Haley campaign: Biden and Trump are equally awful, and Haley is the one remaining alternative.

The problem the get-Hunter strategy has had to confront, though, is that Joe is a nebbish, so is Hunter, so is James, and so is Hunter's BFF Kevin Morris. These guys aren't worth Trump's time; he's got more interesting things to do, and that's what the YouTubers and others, up to and including Alan Dershowitz, are gleefully following. Hunter has been overtaken by events; the generic Republican strategy of going after Hunter was never more than so-so, and as Trump moves steadily closer to the nomination, he isn't going to need it. That's for Nikki to try to salvage.

The Hunter strategy may in fact, though, have had some secondary effect. From the little we hear, Joe has been at least in part preoccupied with Hunter's legal problems, and the baggie-near-the-Sit-Room scandal appears to have forced Joe to move Hunter out of the White House -- for whatever he was worth, Joe seems to have needed Hunter as an important adviser/enabler. If that had even a minimal effect in distracting Joe from better uses for his time, it served its purpose, but the focus now is on Joe himself. The Hunter strategy for generic Republcans was never going to be a winner, and now it's beside the point.

Plan A Continues To Collapse

Conventional wisdom is very slowly coming to accept that Plan A, securing a conviction in a Trump trial before the election, has effectively disappeared: whatever the outcome of Judge McAfee's decision in the Fulton County RICO case against Trump and his co-defendants, the losing side will appeal. The most conservative prognostications are that the judge will disqualify Wade, the special prosecutor, but not Willis, who would keep her position as DA, but she'd need to find someone new to serve as special prosecutor.

That could be a problem, since Wade had been baked into the process from the start. A second contract prosecutor on the case, Anna Cross, disappeared from the proceedings for unkown reasons after attacking Terrence Bradley on February 16, when it had been assumed she would continue in a lead role. Instead, Adam Abbate, an assistant DA on the regular payroll, was called up from the secnd team to represent the DA's office in Ms Cross's absence; his performance was abysmal:

Closing arguments from prosecutor Adam Abbate have been marked by long pauses and halting answers as he at times struggled to answer questions from Judge Scott McAfee.

In one particularly awkward exchange, McAfee asked Abbate why District Attorney Fani Willis would at first fight her subpoena to testify at last month’s evidentiary hearing, only for her to change her mind and answer questions voluntarily. Abbate cited the very public nature of the hearing and how intrusive many questions were.

So in what looks to be the best case for Willis, if she stays on the case, finding capable prosecutorial talent and bringing them up to speed before the election could be a problem, as the defendants will continue to find reasons for further delay. But if Willis herself is disqualified, the whole case is likely out the window.

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court's decision to hear Trump's immunity claim will significantly delay the January 6 trial under Judge Chutkan, originally seheduled to start on Monday:

“The surprise is that it took the court the better part of two weeks to reach this result, from which no justice has publicly dissented,” [CNN Supremne Court analyst Steve] Vladeck said. “The justices couldn’t reach consensus on a way to resolve the matter without giving it full briefing and argument.”

“It’s hard to read any tea leaves into whether that makes the court more likely to side with former President Trump when it finally resolves his immunity claim, but it certainly means that, even in the worst-case scenario for Trump, the January 6 prosecution will be delayed for at least another 3-5 months. That’s a pretty big win for Trump even if he ends up losing this case,” Vladeck added.

This drives Politico to wishful thinking:

Almost immediately after the court’s order, a consensus seemed to form among the pundit class: that it will now be impossible for Trump’s trial in Washington to take place before the election. Here is the reality — tentative and messy, perhaps, but true nonetheless: Trump’s trial in Washington can still start before November given the time available on the calendar. Trump’s trial also should start before November given the intense public interest.

. . . Let’s assume, however, that the justices issue a ruling in June that rejects Trump’s bid for immunity, which is what should happen on the merits. The situation at that point will get much more fraught, and it will fall to Chutkan to make some difficult choices with no real precedent.

. . . [I]f Chutkan can manage it, she should hold the line. It should not have fallen to her to make this happen, but if Trump’s criminal case comes back to her this summer from the Supreme Court, she should do her best to put the case on the quickest and most reasonable trial schedule that she can devise, even if some on the Supreme Court are working overtime to help Trump to prevent this from happening.

This set of assumptions has the same flaw as the White House's original lawfare strategy: it assumed that with indictments in mid-2023, one or more cases could come to trial and result in a conviction, if not during the primary season, at least by November. This ignored Murphy's Law on one hand, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but also the simple nature of the legal system, in which defendants will always try to delay trials, and they often succeed in doing this for years.

Another victim of Plan A's failure is Nikki Haley. A good part of her continued campaigh has been based on a perceived contingency that Trump could in fact still at least come to trial in one or another case before the election, and she could become the fallback candidate, but that contingency seems less likely with each passing day:

When Haley exits the race, which could come as soon as next week, after Super Tuesday, the former U.N. ambassador will have outlasted every other one of Trump’s serious rivals. But her incentives to remain in the race are vanishing, and Haley has only pledged to continue campaigning through Tuesday. Even if Trump were to be sidelined for some non-electoral reason — an unforeseen health event or a conviction in his first criminal trial, which is scheduled to start this month — few Republicans think Haley would be the choice of a majority of delegates at a contested convention.

So far, there doesn't even seem to be a good set of possible alternatives for either the Democrats or never-Trumpers on how to proceed given the current developing circumstances.

But Who Was The Mastermind?

In my post on Tuesday, I offered an overall theory of the Willis-Wade case that tries to account for some of the inconsistencies I see. Willis and Wade were runnng a grift, but if they were the grifters, who was the griftee? By consensus, neither Willis nor Wade is particularly intelligent, and they aren't self-starters. They basically do what they're told, as long as cooperation has rewards, although they seem to settle for fairly pedestrian levels of grift -- a wine tasting tour in Napa, or a trip to Panama City Beach on the redneck riviera, for instance.

But who gave them the initial project of prosecuting Trump and something like 18 codefendants, using RICO, in Fulton County, if they didn't dream it up themselves? It's hard for me to think someone like Fani could mastermind this; the consensus so far is that as incompetent prosecutors go, she's about the best Trump could hope for. Somebody else simply has to be behind the whole scheme, and it's hard not to think it was connected to the White House's lawfare strategy. But who?

Breitbart news has had a series of stories over the past week that gives a credible candidate. Citing anonymous sources, they ran this story on Monday:

One significant figure is overlooked in the Fulton County scandal concerning Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis and her alleged lover and fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, the sources said: Meet Jeff DiSantis — the county’s Deputy District Attorney with professional experience far greater than the average county employee. DiSantis worked on Willis’s 2020 campaign, sources told Breitbart News, and was the former Executive Director of the Democrat Party of Georgia with extensive knowledge of campaign finance law.

. . . Sources credit DiSantis with colluding with the White House to target Trump. “DiSantis did this,” one source told Breitbart News about the Trump case. “He’s the one. He is the one pulling all the strings. He was the one that walled her [Willis] off. He was in every important meeting. He is the brainchild behind this. That is the connection to the White House.”

In fact, if you go to the Fulton County DA website and drill down, DiSantis is one of only three non-African-American faces of nine pictured on the page showing Willis and her immediate staff. An excerpt from the gallery is below:

Breitbart ran an update yesterday:

Democrat operative and Fulton County’s Deputy District Attorney Jeff DiSantis received four payments totaling $131,335 for providing consulting services to Rep. Gabriel Amo (D-RI), a former Biden White House aide who worked with local elected officials, Federal Election Commission records show.

The money flow is significant because sources with direct knowledge of Fulton County’s office told Breitbart News DiSantis is a Biden plant inside a Fulton County office to target former President Donald Trump.

DiSantis’ payments were previously unreported.

DiSantis was working at county DA’s office while operating a consulting firm named “20/20 Insights, LLC.” Sources told Breitbart News deputy district attorneys would likely have to sign an oath that prohibits them from working outside their county employment agreement. DiSantis’s oath, if he signed one, remains undisclosed.

It is also curious that DiSantis contracted with Amo, who worked in the Biden administration as the deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs before running for Congress in 2023. There he worked as the principal liaison to mayors and “local elected officials,” according to his White House bio. Amo also served as an adviser on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and later served on his transition team.

“That is the connection to the White House,” one source told Breitbart News. “DiSantis did this. He’s the one. He is the one pulling all the strings. He was the one that walled her [Willis] off. He was in every important meeting. He is the brainchild behind this.”

DiSantis is a wealthy and successful Democrat operative. He ran Willis’ 2020 campaign and raised $4 million dollars.

So under this theory, DiSantis was calling the shots, and Wade was just the executive officer, choosing the rest of the staff and running the office. Wade and Willis were allowed a fairly minimal skim -- by the current estimate, less than a million -- while DiSantis appears to have been drawing down much more in overall baksheesh for a period of years as the Democrat Gauleiter in Georgia.

Typical of Southern Democrats, the white guy is the one actually running the show. On the other hand, if he was running the show, he clearly hired the wrong people for the job, whatever their DNA. We'll have to see how this all shakes out.

Whole 'Nother Terrence!

I've echoed the puzzlement of several commentators here over the past couple of weeks -- why did Anna Cross, the counsel in the DA's office representing Willis and Wade, suddenly, gratuitously, and viciously attack Terrence Bradley on the witness stand by bringing up the sexual harassment allegations against him, when Bradley appeared to be doing nothing to damage their interests? After all, he was trying his hardest to have his testimony excluded on the basis of attorney-client privilege.

Let's start with what's obvious. Ashleigh Merchant, the attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, is a blonde bombshell. As it happens, she is also one of the most prominent Georgia defense attorneys -- one of her cases, entirely unrelated, was featured on A&E's Taking the Stand just two weeks ago. Nevertheless, that notwithstanding, I suspect Judge McAfee, and likely many other judges, feels his day goes just a little bit better any time she's in his courtroom. She is aware of this and takes full advantage of it.

This is a normal male impulse. As an avid fan of On Patrol: Live and the previous Live PD, I can't avoid noting that almost all the departments that allow the show to follow their officers feature one or more female officers who are in fact stunningly attractive -- at least one does beauty pageants on her off duty days. I've remarked to my wife that if I knew one of those officers would be the one to pull me over, I'd make an illegal left turn and risk a ticket right in front of her just to get ten minutes of her time and attention while she asked me questions about myself.

So let's apply this to the case of poor Terrence Bradley, who came off in his testimony Tuesday as "a combination of imbecilic and an amnesiac" and in fact appeared to be a staunch Willis-Wade loyalist. Why were they out to get him? The answer is Ashleigh Merchant. He'd been texting her back and forth since last fall, and the difference between then and yesterday is, as one commentator put it, "a whole 'nother Terrence".

Bradley’s testimony on Tuesday, when he frequently couldn’t remember details and seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning, stands in stark contrast to the tone of his prior text messages with Merchant.

The additional text messages [released yesterday] show Bradley calling Merchant his “friend,” offering unsolicited advice, and also bashing Willis and Wade, Bradley’s former law partner.

Bradley left their law firm in 2022 after allegations surfaced that Bradley sexually assaulted an employee at the firm. Bradley denied those allegations while testifying at an earlier hearing over Willis’s potential disqualification.

Over months of texts, Bradley on a number of occasions disparaged Wade and Willis, calling them “arrogant as f” in one January text to Merchant.

Bradley also indicated that he didn’t want to be directly connected to the allegations and expressed a desire not to be named as the initial source of the information.

“I protected you completely,” Merchant told Bradley about the draft of her motion to disqualify. “Not that you need protection,” Merchant texted. “But I kept you out of it.”

“I really appreciate you keeping me out of,” Bradley replied.

So the answer to the question of why Willis and Wade would have their counsel trash Terrence in public is that Terrence had been trashing them behind their backs for months, and they'd belatedly become aware of it despite Terrence's best efforts. And a good part of the reason for that is that Terrence had been charmed by a beautiful woman who was also very smart. In fact, she was both pretty enough and smart enough to use Terrence to get to Willis and Wade -- the dirt Terrence so eagerly gave her became the foundation of her case for her client and was bound to become a public record, with Terrence as the source.

Terrence, an attorney, should maybe have had an inkling, although it looks like the Wade Bradley Campbell law firm were personal injury attorneys and not well informed about other areas of the law. Terrence, Wade,and Willis were outsmarted by a very pretty attorney who was also very smart. The attack on Terrence from Wade and Willis was delayed payback, and I can't completely blame them, except they all let themselves be outplayed by a highly skilled operator.

I Love A Contrarian

I wasted more than two hours yesteday watching Terrence Bradley's testimony in the Fani Willis-Nathan Wade hearing. I watched the usual commentators, but Michael Lebron, who posts on YouTube as Lionel, had the best series of takes in the link at the top of this post:

First of all, I don't want to be a killjoy, and I don't want to ruin anybody's fun, but much too much has been made of his testimony. I'm sorry, I know that's horrible to say, I know people think like this is the most important -- it's not the most important thing in the least. . . . What it was is an abssolute cluster[redacted] in terms of lying on parade, the likes of which nobody has ever seen. And it was a beautiful combination of lying and absolute stupidity.

. . . This is a grown man. This is a lawyer who is a combination of imbecilic and an amnesiac. . . . I've never seen this before. . . . This guy is just a buffoon. . . . I'm thinking maybe he's like jumping on the grenade. Maybe he's, he's, deliberately acting this stupid so that we'll forrgetr Fani, Fanny, whatever her name is, and Wade, and forget about . . . and meanwhile, what they forget about is Trump. Trump's not even in this anymore.

Bradley has been a puzzle all along. Commentators after his February 16 testimony, in which he struggled to do exactly what he did today, answer no substantive questions, were stumped by why Anna Cross, the counsel for Willis's office, then proceeded systematically to assassinate Bradley's character by bringing out allegations of sexual harassment against him. The commentators more or less assumed this would destroy any further support and cooperation Bradley might give to Willis and Wade, and once the judge ruled attorney-client privilege didn't apply, Bradley would feel free to spill all.

Didn't happen. Omerta continued to prevail throughout the day. Another commentator, David Freiheit posting as Viva Frei, ploints out at 6:30 below,

Notable as to who was there and who wasn't there, Fani Willis was not there. Anna Cross, the attorney who opened up this entire can of worms, also not there. Who was there? Nathan Wade was there. Nathan Wade was there and as I observed at the time, at some point during the testimony was standing up, staring down at Terrence Bradley on the stand, I won't say menacingly, because that's subjective, but definitely staring him down. . . . In fact,he was staring him down for a good portion of his testimony, as we saw from a few moments where they panned through the room and saw Nathan Wade in the courtroom.

. . . And then I guess after Nathan Wade got the assurance that Terrence was gonna play ball and not rat him out, Nathan Wade was gone.

All anyone can conclude is that Wade in particular had some even greater hold on Bradley that went beyond the character assassination in the sexual harassment allegations that were brought out on February 16, and Bradley was most assiduously toeing the line. That Bradley had been heavily coached, despite his insistence under oath that he hadn't been, seems to have been plain to the Trump defendants' counsel as well as likely to Judge McAfee.

The bigger question is whether, or how, Bradley's non-testimony will affect Judge McAfee's conclusions. I'm inclined to go along with Lionel, that it's de minimis. But Alan Dershowitz posted his reactions:

At 3:02:

I saw with my own eyes how he testified, and how he provided very revelatory information about it. The information, the revelatory information was not necessarily in his testimony, it was in his texts. It was in the texts that he had written to the lawyer which he confirmed as true. You could not come away from that two-hour hearing without absolutely believing that this guy, Terrence Bradley, had told the lawyers for Trump's codefendants thaat the relationship definitely began before he was hired as special prosecutor, which they have sworn is the opposite. You could not escape that. And the judge knows that.

At 5:40 he assesses:

I'm just not sure what the judge is going to do in this case. This is very hard, this is a judge in Fulton County. Will the judge have the cojones to actually look the elected district attorney in the eye and say, "I have listened to your tetimony, I've listened to your boyfriend's testimony, I've listened to his lawyer's testimony, I do not believe you." Will he have the nerve to say that? I don't think so. I don't think so. But if he's an honest and decent judge, at the very least, he'll find that they are recused. If I had to bet widows' and orphans' money that I couldn't afford to lose, on the outcome, probably a safe bet would be that he will recuse the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, because that's easy, she can get somebody else, saying there's an appearance of injustice. . .

This leaves out the practical issues of replacing Wade before we get to any other problem. Fani isn't very bright, but she's bright enough to know that whomever she appoints to that job has to be absolutely beholden to her and in her pocket, as Wade clearly was, especially in the wake of this whole kerfuffle. An outsider would presumably be coming in having to deal with dirty laundry all over the place left over from the highly compromised Wade-Willis relationship, and Willis would need to be able to rely on the replacement to keep things under cover.

That would be a hard choice for Fani, and it would likely provide additional openings in additional discovery for the Trump et al defense. And it would leave aside the question of how long it would take Wade's successor to come up to date on the case -- and in fact, it would leave aside the serious question of whether Wade himself had actually done much on the case before being removed.

And that in turn leaves aside that however Judge McAfee rules, the losing side will appeal. This whole case is out of reach if the intent is to get a conviction before the election.

It Looks Like The Whole Fulton County Case Was A Grift

As pieces of the puzzle straggle in, I was impressed by the juxtaposition of Nathan Wade's non-report report on the Cobb County jail death scandal from 2020 with what we now know about the timeline of his relationship with Fani Willis. As I linked yesterday,

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.

The link said Wade was engaged to pretend to do a report in June 2020 and finished not writing it some months later. We don't know how much he was paid, nor exactly when he finished, but it's worth noting that by November of that year, he was working with Fani's transition team following her election as Fulton County DA. We do know, as I linked yesterday, that following Ms Willis's taking over the DA's office on January 1, 2021, Wade's law partners got contracts from her office, Christopher Campbell at $150 per hour starting that month and Terrence Bradley for $74,480 over the course of the year. In March and April, Campbell had an additional contract for $65 an hour.

It appears that Wade and Willis were attempting to keep their relationship secret, especially during this period, although Wade's presence and influence in the office was well known to the workers there. Although Willis didn't give Wade any direct contract, the contracts to his partners would have entitled Wade to a third of their billing under their partnership agreement. Thus, at least from January 2021, Wade was receiving indirect payments from Willis, although accounts of his role in the office suggest Wade was the individual who actually selected his partners for the contracts.

In April 2021, Willis moved into Robin Yeartie's condo in Hapeville, which appears to have been used to maintain the secrecy of her relationship with Wade. The Mittelstadt affadavit reported 35 assignations between Willis and Wade at this condo before November of 2021.

It seems to me that what we're seeing is a relationship based on secrecy that embraced not just sex but money, pretty much from the start, and at least from June of 2020, Wade had established himself as a grifter who was collecting fees for not doing things. By the time the Cobb County grift ran out, he had apparently become fully involved with Willis, who by implication in her testimony on February 15 was broke after spending $50,000 on an election she lost. Wade was not only going to keep her warm at night, he was going to make her rich again.

The record shows that Willis was routing cash to Wade before he was named special prosecutor, but once the budget became available for the RICO election interference case, they started riding the gravy train. The question I've had for some time is how this plum landed in Fulton County onto the laps of Willis and Wade -- yes, the White House was pursuing a lawfare strategy against Trump in general, but with so many opportunities at the federal, state, and local levels, why Fulton County in particular?

A Breitbart story from yesterday gives at least a clue:

The Biden administration planted a Democrat operative inside a Fulton County office to target former President Donald Trump, multiple sources familiar with the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office exclusively told Breitbart News.

. . . One significant figure is overlooked in the Fulton County scandal concerning Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis and her alleged lover and fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, the sources said: Meet Jeff DiSantis — the county’s Deputy District Attorney with professional experience far greater than the average county employee. DiSantis worked on Willis’s 2020 campaign, sources told Breitbart News, and was the former Executive Director of the Democrat Party of Georgia with extensive knowledge of campaign finance law.

. . . Sources credit DiSantis with colluding with the White House to target Trump. “DiSantis did this,” one source told Breitbart News about the Trump case. “He’s the one. He is the one pulling all the strings. He was the one that walled her [Willis] off. He was in every important meeting. He is the brainchild behind this. That is the connection to the White House.”

. . . Sources also revealed that DiSantis was a member of Willis’s transition team after she won the election in November 2020. DiSantis helped Wade select employees for the new office. “DiSantis was there in the capacity to be a political strategist, hiding in the DA’s office,” a source told Breitbart News.

But here's the problem. Wade already appears to have been the kind of guy who'd bill for doing nothing, while one frequent observation about Willis, given her performance on February 15, is that she isn't very smart. More than one commentator has asked why Trump would want to remove Willis as prosecutor if she's as incompetent as she now seems. What on earth was the White House expecting to get from this team? They weren't going to work very hard, and they weren't going to work very smart, but they sure were going to bill for their services, and that's exactly what they did.

The most I can think is that the White House was aiming for quick indictments and then convictions before the 2024 election in politically reliable jurisdictions, and if the convictions were overturned later, it would be after the election when it didn't matter. If so, it wouldn't matter if the prosecutors were corrupt and incompetent.

That was at best a miscalculation.

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.