Key Witness Against Fani Willis Completely Crumbles on the Stand

A key witness who was supposed to testify against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis seemed unable to answer a single question on Tuesday.

Donald Trump and several of his co-defendants in their Georgia election interference case have accused Willis of an improper relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. Trump’s team says that Willis and Wade began dating in 2019, while the couple says they didn’t start seeing each other until 2022, after Willis hired Wade for the Georgia case.

Trump’s lawyers have argued the romantic relationship provides a legal basis to disqualify Willis and throw out her case against Trump entirely. On Tuesday, lawyers Ashleigh Merchant and Steve Sadow questioned Terrence Bradley to try to establish a timeline of the couple’s relationship. Bradley is Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney, and was meant to be a key witness in the case against Willis.

Merchant had multiple text messages from Bradley stating that the couple began dating in 2019. But when she began questioning him, suddenly, Bradley didn’t know a thing—including when they actually began dating, how the relationship began, and the trips they took together.

When asked why he initially said Willis and Wade began dating in 2019, Bradley said he was just “speculating.” He said he’d actually only had one conversation with Wade about the relationship, and Bradley couldn’t remember when that discussion had taken place. He repeated that he was only speculating so many times that many people on social media began to point out that Bradley seemed more like an office gossip than a credible witness.

Bradley also continually said he couldn’t remember telling Merchant certain details. Merchant kept asking him to confirm things he had previously told her, but Bradley only answered, “I don’t recall.” It got to the point that presiding Judge Scott McAfee told Merchant to move on, because the line of questioning was going nowhere.

Trump’s legal team allege that Willis and Wade had an “improper intimate personal relationship,” and accuse the couple of taking extravagant vacations that Wade paid for in part by billing Willis’s office.

Willis has denied the allegations. She says the relationship began in 2022, after Willis joined the case, and that they each paid their own share of the vacation bill. But the most important thing to remember, Willis has stressed, is that Trump and his co-defendants are currently on trial for “trying to steal an election.”

If Willis is removed from the case, that would deal a massive blow to one of the four criminal trials that Trump currently has scheduled ahead of the 2024 general election. The process to replace Willis, or even decide to completely drop the case, would significantly delay Trump’s day in Georgia court.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who apparently only learned what in vitro fertilization is last week, has a message for the people affected by the Alabama Supreme Court ruling: it’s all good.

The ruling is little more than a week old, but it has already wreaked havoc on Alabama’s IVF industry. Multiple fertility clinics have paused their IVF services, and at least one embryo shipping company has temporarily halted business in Alabama, as well.

When asked Tuesday about the ruling, Tuberville (who, again, has had more than a week to prepare some answers) looked visibly flustered.

“I support that people wanna have IVF,” he told ABC reporter Rachel Scott. His voice rose a bit at the end of his sentence, as if he were asking Scott to confirm that he was even talking about the correct topic.

“The state’s getting ready to pass a law,” he continued haltingly. “It’s gonna be ok. They’re gonna pass it, then it’s, then it’s, then it’s gonna be positive.”

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled two weeks ago that embryos created through IVF can be considered children and are thus protected under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Since it’s common for fertilized eggs not to survive the IVF process, the ruling puts doctors and clinics at risk of being charged for wrongful death of embryos.

When asked about it last week, Tuberville at one point referred to the ruling as a “bill” and said he was “all for it.”

“We need to have more kids, we need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do,” he said of the ruling.

When a reporter pointed out that the ruling actually made it significantly harder for people to have kids, Tuberville became tongue-tied.

The Alabama state legislature is rushing to pass a bill that would explicitly state embryos, fertilized or not, cannot be classified as children. But even if the measure becomes law, it is already coming too late for many people.

Since the ruling, at least three fertility clinics have paused IVF treatment in Alabama. The CDC lists just eight clinics in the state that provide assisted reproductive technology services.

Patients can still ship their embryos out of state and continue seeking IVF treatment elsewhere, although this increases the already considerable amounts of time and money required to get IVF. But Cryoport, one of the leading embryo shippers, said Friday it would pause shipping in and out of Alabama to avoid legal prosecution. This makes it even harder for people to seek out-of-state care.

People who are preparing to undergo IVF will now have to stop their extensive medication routines, which are part of preparing their body for embryo transfer, until they can find a new clinic that will treat them.

Scott told Tuberville Tuesday that she had spoken to a woman named Kimberly in Alabama. Kimberly was supposed to get her fourth and final embryo transfer on Wednesday. But her clinic was one of the ones that has paused IVF treatment, and now Kimberly will have to start the entire process over again.

Donald Trump has an unexpected list of demands for his Manhattan criminal trial, including a plan to keep key witnesses away from the stand.

Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He’s facing 34 felony charges in the case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

But a list of proposed exclusions submitted by Trump’s legal team to the judge on Monday indicates that it wants Cohen and Daniels nowhere near the courthouse, despite their testimony being central to the entire case. The list also contains several other outrageous requests, including keeping prosecutors from showing the jury quotes from Rudy Giuliani from May 2018 regarding the payments, and excluding the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump confessed to sexual assault by claiming he grabs women “by the pussy.” Trump defended those comments in his first E. Jean Carroll trial, and the video again made a reappearance in his second defamation lawsuit brought by Carroll. After both trials, Trump owes Carroll $88.5 million.

Trump also filed to prevent any mention of Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, with whom Trump had a covert affair beginning in 2006, and one of Trump World Tower’s former doormen, Dino Sajudin, who claimed that Trump fathered an out-of-wedlock child with a former housekeeper. On top of that, Trump’s team asked to ban the use of the phrase “catch and kill,” referring to plans uncovered by the Manhattan District Attorney to kill negative press on both those stories about Trump before the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, the district attorney’s office submitted their own motions in limine, asking that the court exclude a campaign finance expert proposed by Trump’s team, selective prosecution claims, and info stemming from a related case against Cohen in the Southern District of New York.

Speaking to reporters after attending his first criminal trial hearing in person on February 15, Trump claimed he “shouldn’t be in a courthouse.”

“Even if he was guilty of something, there is no crime,” Trump said, speaking in the third person, before demanding “delays,” which he will decidedly not get.

House Oversight Chair James Comer is frantically attempting to salvage his witness in the impeachment probe against President Joe Biden—even if that means undermining national intelligence agencies.

On Tuesday, the Kentucky Republican used a Fox Business interview to insist that Alexander Smirnov, whose self-admitted lies served as the only foundation for claims that Biden pocketed millions from a Ukrainian oligarch, was still credible, and that it was in fact the FBI that was “suspicious.”

“If you look, they’ve indicted, even more is coming out, about the informant—what role he played for the FBI,” Comer stumbled. “The FBI paid him to be a spy in Russia. They indicted him because he was communicating with Russia but that’s what they paid him for over 10 years to do.”

“I don’t know anything about Smirnov,” Comer continued about his probe’s supposedly star witness, “but the circumstances around his indictment and his re-arrest and the changing of the original indictment by [special counsel David] Weiss is very concerning, because everything that I’ve had to do with the FBI has been very suspicious throughout this investigation.”

“The trust level that I have with the FBI is zero,” he added.

Comer also used the interview to introduce a man that he framed as Smirnov’s replacement in the impeachment inquiry: convicted felon and current federal prison inmate Jason Galanis, two degrees removed from Hunter Biden by way of the junior Biden’s former business partner and fellow convicted inmate Devon Archer. On Monday, Galanis was reported to have also thrown cold water on the committee’s baseless claims, pledging under oath that Biden never held any role with any business entity in connection to his son.

Two weeks ago, Smirnov was indicted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI, effectively killing the probe. Since then, Smirnov has reportedly admitted to law enforcement that top Russian intelligence officials were involved in the smear campaign against the sitting president.

The Tennessee House of Representatives has passed a bill prohibiting local governments from reappointing lawmakers who were expelled for “disorderly behavior,” a clear jab at two Democratic representatives in particular.

House Bill 2716 passed the Republican-dominated chamber Monday by a vote of 69-22. The measure, which now moves to the Republican-controlled Senate, states that if a local legislature needs to elect a successor for a vacant seat in the state General Assembly, “and the vacancy was created due to the expulsion of a member for disorderly behavior, then the local legislative body shall not elect the expelled legislator to be the successor to fill the vacant seat.”

The bill is a blatant attempt by Republicans to kick out any Democrats they don’t like—and make sure they don’t find a way back into the state legislature. After all, Tennessee Republicans have tried to kick out Democratic lawmakers once before.

If the bill becomes law, it is guaranteed to be held up in the courts. The Tennessee constitution and current state law both give local governing bodies full power to appoint anyone they choose to fill vacant seats, so long as that person is legally qualified to hold office.

The General Assembly’s legal staff warned lawmakers just last week that the bill is not backed by either constitutional language or historical precedent. But Republicans forged ahead anyway.

The bill is an obvious response to the reappointment of Democratic Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson last year. The two men are part of the Tennessee Three, three Democratic lawmakers who gained national attention last March when they joined thousands of pro–gun control protesters in the state Capitol in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville.

Republicans accused Jones, Pearson, and Gloria Johnson of violating House decorum rules and voted to expel the two men, both of whom are Black. The GOP fell one vote short of expelling Johnson, who is white.

Jones and Pearson were unanimously reinstated by their district councils until a special election could be held. When that special election was held in August, both men swept handily to victory.

“It’s real interesting when my colleagues on the other side talk about, ‘We need less government, we need less government overreach in our lives,’” Pearson told The Tennessean about Monday’s measure. “This exact bill, this very legislation, overreaches the Constitution of Tennessee.”

Since their return to the state Capitol, tensions between Republicans and Jones and Pearson have remained high. The two lawmakers have made gun control a key issue, despite Republican rejection. On Thursday, Jones called House Speaker Cameron Sexton “drunk with power” after the Republican posted state troopers outside a press conference, barring entry.

Things started to boil over Monday night when the House debated a separate bill about immigration. Sexton ruled Jones out of order and refused to recognize him again to speak on the measure. Pearson then said he was “tired of racist” and retaliatory measures, prompting Sexton to threaten to call him out of order, too.