William Brangham:
Amna, I think contentious is the gentlest way to refer to that hearing today.
As you said, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, is facing these allegations that were brought up by one of the 19 defendants in her huge racketeering election interference case in Georgia. One of those defendants said, you were having an inappropriate relationship with the lead prosecutor that you selected to run this case, and that, with his salary, he is taking you, Fani Willis, on expensive vacations all over the world and all over the country, and that that's a clear conflict of interest, and you should be disqualified from the case.
So, today, the judge overseeing this, Judge McAfee, held a hearing to try to get to the bottom of this. And Willis and the lead prosecutor who she was having a relationship with, a man named Nathan Wade, they both admitted, as they had in previous filings, that they did have a relationship, a romantic relationship, but they both reasserted that relationship did not start until after Wade had been hired.
And so the idea that she was intentionally hiring a boyfriend to then reap the benefits of it, they rejected that argument. There was one witness, a former colleague of Fani Willis, who testified today that she believed the relationship had started many years before, before Wade was hired.
Fani Willis, in later testimony, said that was a former colleague who had been asked to resign because of poor performance, basically implying that she was a disgruntled former employee.
So I want to play just one clip from today. It was really incredible amount of back-and-forth, conflict with the lawyers, conflict with the judge, Fani Willis herself on the witness stand being — really pushing back on this. Let's play this one clip to get a taste of what this was like today.
Fani Willis (D), Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney: You have been intrusive into people's personal lives. You're confused. You think I'm on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I'm not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.
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