How did Ashleigh Merchant find evidence of Fani Willis' personal involvement with Nathan Wade and the conflict of interest and personal benefit it created for her? For the last few weeks, most assumed that it mainly came from Joycelyn Wade, the soon-to-be ex-wife of the RICO special prosecutor in the Georgia v Donald Trump et al case -- and some of it did, especially the travel receipts that emerged to force the two to admit to their involvement.

However, thanks to texts that Megyn Kelly and Phil Holloway received and published late yesterday, we know how Merchant put it all together. She had assistance from none other than Terrence Bradley, who spelled out the Willis-Wade relationship in detail -- before claiming ignorance and faulty memory on the stand:

BREAKING 🚨🚨

Here are the key texts between Attorney's Ashleigh Merchant and Terrence Bradley that are at issue in the #FaniWillis disqualification battle

They show a congenial collaborative effort between the two as Merchant attempted to investigate facts about the affair pic.twitter.com/CLyX8wD5iT

— Phil Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) February 28, 2024

Click through to see all of Holloway's tweets and attached screen grabs of the texts. Let's give Phil the traffic he deserves on this. I will grab a couple more for specific points, but readers should eventually read through all of them. 

First off, though, take a look at when the conversation began. In the above screen grab, the texts start on September 14, 2023. That's three months before Jocelyn Wade demanded and finally received her estranged husband's full financial records and discovered the travel receipts showing that Nathan Wade had paid for Willis' travel while she paid him $650,000 in fees for the Trump case. 

At first Merchant wants to know why she can't find a complete record of Wade's contract employment. But four days later, Bradley and Merchant are discussing a sexual affair between Willis and Wade, and their attempts to keep it quiet:

The "Chris" referenced here is Chris Campbell, a law partner of Nathan Wade pic.twitter.com/0aQKeX5EAq

— Phil Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) February 28, 2024

And this raises some questions of its own. The defense teams knew about the affair last September at the latest, it's now clear, well before Mrs. Wade finally got Nathan Wade to fully comply with the discovery order in their divorce. Before, it appeared that Mrs. Wade may have informed Merchant of the affair -- but what if it were the other way around? Did Merchant tip off Mrs. Wade and get her to press for the records? 

Mrs. Wade finally got the records in December 2023 regardless, and Merchant quickly received the records of travel on Wade's dime. The texts pick up again on January 5th and quickly become intense. Bradley doesn't just confirm the affair but offers specific details on when it started. When Merchant suggests that it began when they both were magistrate judges, Bradley corrects her and says, "No municipal court." He then adds, "But you can't put where they meant not many people know that" and "I might be one of only not even chris campbell [sic]," referring to Wade's other law partner. 

Bradley then gets even more specific about potential witnesses to the affair and its length. After suggesting that Merchant subpoena "her kids, her command staff ... her administrative assistant" and members of her security detail, Bradley hits pay dirt:

Here's where Bradley helps Merchant ID Robin Yeartie

"She hired a girlfriend, like a bestie, it was her place"

Referring to the Hapeville Condo that is the subject of the cell location date issue

Yeartie testified the affair started in 2019 pic.twitter.com/0K6AJPBE3y

— Phil Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) February 28, 2024

Yeartie testified that the Willis-Wade affair started years before Willis hired Wade to prosecute Trump et al. That testimony demonstrated that both Willis and Wade had filed false claims before the court, and their later denials on the stand would be perjury. Bradley's testimony was supposed to confirm that, but Bradley apparently decided to risk perjury himself rather than follow through on what he'd been telling Merchant for months. 

The text records and the cell phone records, however, back up Yeartie's testimony and directly contradict denials from Wade and Willis. They are bombshells to their credibility and put Judge Scott McAfee in a tough position for the disqualification motion if he's inclined to rule against the defense. Bradley's deceptive-to-the-point-of-desperation performance on the stand this week can't make that any easier, either. It has become obvious that everyone connected to the DA's office has been deliberately deceptive, and regardless of whether the RICO case is valid, it would be a miscarriage of justice to allow it to go forward with the Fulton County DA's office connected to it.

So how did this get reported by the media? Most outlets spun Bradley's flop on the stand as damaging to the defense. Calling Bradley the "star witness" for Merchant, mainstream media outlets claimed that the DQ effort collapsed because of Bradley's bad memory -- even though (a) Bradley was being obviously deceptive and (b) documentary evidence of his knowledge had been submitted to the court. 

And even the one outlet that took it seriously also took credit for the story. See if you can spot what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution left out of its lead yesterday evening:

For months, Terrence Bradley guided a defense attorney as she fished for information that would help her disqualify Fani Willis from the Fulton County election interference case by proving the district attorney was dating Bradley’s onetime law partner.

Hundreds of text messages between Bradley and Ashleigh Merchant, which the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained on Wednesday, provide a window into how the high-stakes effort to oust Willis took shape.

What they obtained? Ahem:

.@cnn & @ajc we await your update to your late evening reports. You can cite us as first with the texts in the #FaniWillis case. Not only did you not have an “exclusive,” it took you all day to match our reporting.

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) February 29, 2024

AJC finally got them and published an hour ago. We only beat them by about 9 hours ⚖️ pic.twitter.com/cy3IdonkrU

— Phil Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) February 29, 2024

If you can't beat 'em, steal from 'em seems to be the mainstream media ethos these days. Either that or Spin it 'til you win it! That's certainly been their mission ever since Merchant first filed the DQ motion against Fani Willis -- to scoff at it, to claim that the defense is racist for challenging Willis, and finally to pretend that Bradley somehow rescued Willis with his embarrassing performance this week. 

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