This is additional taxonomy that helps us with analytics
Former President Donald Trump's legal woes hit overlapping hearings today — with courtrooms in both New York and Georgia considering cases.in his New York criminal case centered on hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign.
Trump has pleaded not guilty. Judge Juan Merchan affirmed the trial will begin on March 25. In a separate hearing, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is set to testify in response to allegations that Trump andThe court takes 5 minute break while Merchant makes copies of some exhibits that Willis wants to refer to during her testimony.Wade is done. Merchant calls Willis to the stand. Merchant says there’s conflicting testimony that Willis can clear up about when the relationship started, among other things.In 2020 and a portion of 2021, Wade was battling cancer and said the Covid pandemic kept him from leaving sterile environments. So, he says, he didn't date Willis — or anyone at all.During cross-examination, Wade testified that 99% of his work in 2022 was on the election interference case. He said that his monthly income in 2022 was $14,000. In 2023, his monthly income was $9,000. Wade says his income has decreased, even after he began to hit his cap on billable hours . "This invoice makes me cry," he said."There’s so many hours here that I worked at I couldn’t, I couldn’t get paid for," Wade said. He says he can’t just stop working when he hits his cap. Asked to look at another invoice with more nonbillable hours, he said,"If I was gonna get a benefit" from his relationship with the DA,"I'd like that benefit."Wade is asked if he filed for divorce on Nov. 2, 2021, one day after he was hired as a special prosecutor on the Fulton election interference case. He says after his wife had an affair in 2015, they agreed they’d stay together until their youngest child graduated high school. The reason he formally filed for divorce on the day he did, he says his wife was only in town briefly. There’s an attorney/client privilege objection. Wade says he’ll answer. “Joycelyn had relocated to Texas and was in Texas for months. She was only here for a brief period of time to drive our daughter’s car back with her," he said. She was served at that time, he said. He says it was purely coincidental that the divorce was formally filed on the day after he signed his contract with the county."Forgive me, I'm a man. We don't do the date thing," he said. He also said they have not had sexual intercourse since they split up, but they are close friends."Probably closer than ever because of these attacks," Wade said.Gillen and Wade spar over an invoice from Nov. 5, 2021, where Wade billed 24 hours for preparing cases for pretrial. Gillen repeatedly claims that the invoice shows Wade billing 24 hours of work in one single day. Wade says he never billed 24 hours of work in one day and the invoices were billed by the date they were completed. So 24 hours billed can be spread across multiple dates.Gillen pressed Wade about cash that Willis paid Wade as part of a trip to Belize in March 2023. Gillen asked if Wade went with Willis to an ATM. Wade said Willis had cash already. "So when she would give you the cash, did you have a little place in your house where you stack up all this cash that you apparently got to repay you for these benefits that you bestowed on her?" Gillen asked. Wade took issue with the line of questioning:"If I answer that, I'm putting myself in jeopardy. If I tell the world that I have cash someplace in my home, let's think that that could be problematic." He said sometimes they would have the cash on the trips and he would spend it and sometimes they would put it in the hotel safe.Craig Gillen, the lawyer for Trump co-defendant David Shafer, repeatedly pressed Wade to clear up language he used in his answers from an interrogatory from his divorce. Gillen asked Wade if he had sexual relations with Willis before May 2023. One of the prosecutors from the district attorney's office objected several times but the judge overruled. McAfee said he wants Gillen to establish what Wade said in the interrogatory before moving on and said that"words matter" and they need to establish what did or didn't happen. Wade said he answered no on the interrogatory. "Let’s just get down to it. Did you or did you not by May 30, 2023, have sexual relations with Miss Willis, yes or no?" Gillen asked.When asked about who paid for their trips, Wade said that Willis insisted on splitting costs, saying that she is a"strong, proud woman" and that her independence was at times a point of contention in their relationship. Wade clarifies they didn't always split every individual purchase 50/50; there were times when he would book flights and she would pay for excursions.Merchant asserted that Wade was paid $300,000 by Fulton County in 2022, which Wade disputes.Wade is testifying that any money paid to his law firm first was used to pay firm expenses, then was split between Wade and his partners.Merchant asked a series of questions about Wade and Willis taking trips together. Merchant said Wade alleged that Willis paid for one flight. He says that’s not true, that they split costs roughly evenly. There’s a distinction between booking a flight and paying for a flight, he said.Merchant asked Wade to share whether he is in possession of any receipts from travel with Willis. In response, Wade argued that he doesn't have any receipts, but he does have credit card statements, which he uses for his taxes.In response to a line of questioning by Merchant, Wade said that his relationship with Willis began in March 2022. Wade said that he first met Willis in 2019 at a judicial conference where he was teaching a course. He said the next time they spoke was about a month or so later, on the phone.Addressing cameras after the hearing, Trump reiterated his allegations of bias in the case, calling New York"a rigged state, a rigged city." He lamented that he was"going to have to sit here for months on trial" but that he would"campaign in the evenings." He also addressed his controversial comments on NATO, saying that European countries were more reliant on the pact that the U.S. because"we have an ocean in between." He accused countries of laughing"at the stupidity of the United States of America" for continuing to fund the alliance.Moving on to Wade’s recently filed affidavit saying that he and Willis’ relationship did not begin until after his hiring as special prosecutor.Wade says his marriage was broken in 2015 but they didn’t get a divorce because his children were in school. After he dropped his daughter off for college, he filed for divorce. So, he doesn't consider it an affair because the marriage was broken and he was free to date other people. He reiterates that he doesn't have any travel receipts for his trips with Willis. He says he uses his business card for everything.Wade said in response to Merchant's question that he doesn't have receipts from the times he traveled with Willis. Wade said he traveled with Willis in 2023 and 2022. He said he does not recall traveling with Willis in 2021.Merchant asked Wade about a December 2023 interrogatory where he noted that he did not have any tangible evidence of his relationship with Willis and that he did not have any receipts from gifts or travel with Willis. Merchant also pointed out that in a subsequent January 2024 interrogatory, Wade changed his answer to those questions. Wade says he changed his answers to assert privacy privilege, after Merchant filed a motion in early January about Willis and Wade's relationship. Wade says he asserted privacy privilege after the motion was filed because he thought that Merchant was talking to his wife’s attorneys.Merchant tried to ask about a judge holding Wade in willful contempt in his divorce proceeding.The New York hush money hearing has concluded — with Judge Merchan telling the courtroom he will see them in March.Blanche then said the defense “vehemently objects to what is happening in this courtroom,” adding that Trump will spend the next two months preparing for the hush money trial during his presidential campaign.Merchant started her questioning of Wade by establishing their past relationship, saying she and her family supported Wade when he ran for an elected judgeship.Judge McAfee quickly squashed that line of questioning, saying Merchant’s opinions aren’t relevant here. “In the best way,” he saysJudge McAfee shot down a request by Merchant to keep Durante Partridge, Yeartie's attorney, on Zoom, because she said Partridge was the one who told her that Yeartie and Willis had lived together. Yeartie and Partridge said more than a handful of times during the hearing that the two never lived together. Willis had sublet Yeartie's condo.Prosecution lawyer Joshua Steinglass says the defense team for Trump has not turned over a single exhibit in contrast to the 336 exhibits produced by the prosecution.Yeartie said she observed Willis and Wade together prior to November 2021 doing things that were common for those in romantic relationships. “Hugging, kissing, just affection.”The district attorney's office asked Judge McAfee to reconsider their motion to quash Nathan Wade's subpoena, which McAfee subsequently denied.After Merchan mentioned that a couple of issues such as courtroom logistics remain, Steinglass asked if anything can be done about the small tables in the courtroom.Steinglass then asked about the technical aspects and a room where boxes of documents could be stored. Merchan told Steinglass to send him the list of witnesses before the trial and that he asked both sides to put together a one-paragraph narrative to give to the jurors.Blanche asked that potential jurors be asked about their political affiliations in jury selection, saying it was"an instructive way to see if they could be fair and impartial."Yeartie appears to have left the district attorney's office on bad terms, and she said she is no longer friends with Willis. She said they haven't spoken since 2022. “A situation happened that wasn’t really my fault,” Yeartie said, referring to her work in the district attorney's office. She said she was given a choice to resign or be fired, and the situation ended their friendship.Richard Rice, an attorney for another defendant, Robert Cheeley, asked Yeartie about any social trips Willis and Wade took together. Yeartie said she did not know of any.In response to questions from Anna Cross, a lawyer for the district attorney's office, Yeartie says that she never had knowledge of Willis and Wade living together. She also says that Willis paid her own rent.Yeartie said she knew a romantic relationship between Willis and Wade started in 2019 and continued until she last spoke with Willis in 2022. She said she was good friends with Willis at the time.Merchant and Abbate argued over possible testimony from Robin Yeartie, who used to work for the Fulton County district attorney's office. She now runs a travel agency. Durante Partridge, Yeartie's lawyer, said it was represented to him that Bradley’s testimony would provide the bridge to Yeartie. Rejecting a claim from Merchant, Partridge said Willis and Wade never lived together. Yeartie had sublet a place to Willis, he said. Abbate said Merchant represented that the good faith basis is that she learned about the relationship between Willis and Wade from Bradley.Steinglass, prosecutor from the district attorney’s office, and Blanche are going over questions that might be in dispute in the jury questionnaire. Steinglass read aloud a question that asks jurors about what news platforms they consume, saying that the question is which websites to include on the list. Some examples include The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Post, The Washington Post, Fox News, News Max, Truth Social and TikTok. He added conservative hosts such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Blanche argued that “extraordinarily conservative shows” were added to “target Trump” and that they can come up “with a bunch of liberal shows” such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to “give all of us an assessment of the juror.” Merchan said he will see how he can resolve this issue. Blanch replied that there is “a lot more liberal news out there.”Trump lawyer Steve Sadow says there’s no such law that would prevent Bradley from saying anything about Wade after 2018. Chopra says it’s not just anything. They’re talking about something associated with representation during Wade’s divorce. "We’re not saying that you can’t ask about, did Mr. Wade enjoy a beer at the ballgame. That wasn’t the question," he said.McAfee seems skeptical about the District Attorney's argument that any conversations between Wade and Bradley about Wade and Willis' relationship are privileged. “I think he’s taking the position that he’s not willing to share anything Mr. Wade ever told him, period, which that’s a broader representation of attorney-client privilege than I’ve ever heard," McAfee said.Merchant asked if Bradley had knowledge about Willis' and Wade's relationship starting in 2019. Bradley said he was advised by the bar that he can’t reveal anything he saw or learned, “and that if the court is asking me to do that, then an immediate certificate of review should be asked." Bradley added that he did not want to lose his law license.Judge Merchan maintained that he does not want to violate Trump’s constitutional rights as he said the start date of March 25 for the trial will proceed.Motion to quash is still pending.Bradley's attorney again objects to questions about what Bradley observed in his personal relationship with Wade. Specifically, Merchant asked about when Wade and Willis' relationship began. "We can’t talk about Mr. Wade on any level. It would be inappropriate," Bradley's lawyer tells Judge McAfee.Abbate, the lawyer for the district attorney's team, objected to Merchant's question about when Wade approached Bradley about filing for divorce.Blanche cited the media coverage of the E. Jean Carroll case as being potentially prejudicial in this case, saying that Carroll went on"a media blitz."Asked by Merchant when he first met Wade, Bradley says he’s known Wade since 1998 and started a law firm together around 2010.Merchant says privilege applies only to communications in furtherance of legal advice. Bradley's attorney continues asking for a sidebar with the judge, rather than continuing to object to Bradley's testimony. McAfee tells the lawyers that, “I haven’t heard anything about a relationship about an attorney-client relationship, about a privilege ever attaching. And I think that’s going to need to be established before we can actually determine the scope of it, and whether this falls inside or out of it.”Bradley made clear that he's participating in the hearing not by choice and he wasn't happy to be there. Merchant asked Bradley about exchanging text messages with him. Bradley said they mostly discussed his health and whether he would be subpoenaed. He said he hasn't talked directly with Merchant about Willis and Wade's relationship. Merchant again asked Bradley if they've texted about Willis and Wade's trips together. The state's prosecutor, Adam Abbate, objected, citing attorney-client privilege.Terrence Bradley, Wade's former law partner who also represented him for a time in his divorce proceedings, will testify first.Colangelo called the Trump team's attempts to delay the trial"a continued pattern to evade accountability," pointing to their multiple previous attempts to push back the case.There’s at least one prominent clergy member here in support of Willis in the packed courtroom, a bishop of Georgia's AME churches.Judge McAfee asks Merchant to call her first witness. First witness is Robin Yeartie, but Yeartie hadn't arrived yet when she was called. The judge tried to get Yeartie's attorney, Mr. Partridge, on the Zoom call, but he did not appear to be in the Zoom room.Adam Abbate for the DA’s office is taking issue with Merchant's wanting to call Terrence Bradley, former law partner to Nathan Wade. Abbate says the claims Merchant has made are “not only legally meritless, they are factually unsupported by the statements that Miss Merchant made to the court, what I would say are patently false. They are egregious misrepresentations of what is believed that Mr. Bradley would say or even knows.” Merchant said Bradley, isn’t the only witness she wants to call. She says she wants to call Robin Yeartie first. Merchant says she has a good faith basis to call Yeartie. She says she talked to her last night and that she has first-hand information about the relationship. Then she wants to call Wade, then Bradley.Amid a heated exchange between Merchan and Blanche on the scheduling of a trial date in the hush money case, Trump is sitting motionless and stone-faced while staring at the judge.Trump lawyer Todd Blanche argued that starting the trial on March 25 is a “great injustice” given that the former president faces other legal battles in addition to the hush money case. Blanche noted that there is a “completely different landscape now” compared to the last time Trump’s team appeared before Judge Merchan, citing Trump’s indictments in three separate cases that require “different faces and different series of proof” as well as “millions of pages to discovery to go through.” Blanche argued that Trump has a “right to prepare for a criminal trial” but that he has a “extremely compressed schedule” for each of the trials he faces. He stressed that Trump and his legal team are “put in an impossible situation” and that they didn’t want to have this conference today.Merchan indicated that he’s not interested in hearing that the trial date is unfair when Blanche has known it was set for months. “You know about this case ... ," Merchan said."I had made clear this was a date certain, you proceeded at your own peril.” Blanche then said he would be asking to move the existing May trial date in Trump’s classified documents case in Florida.Before heading into the courtroom, Trump pointed to other crimes while repeating his allegations that the legal cases against him are an attempt at “election interference” amid his presidential campaign. Trump griped that “violent crime is at an all-time high” while maintaining that he did not commit a crime in the hush money case. “I look outside, I look at the streets. It’s so different from when I left New York. It’s so different. It’s dirty and it’s crime-ridden,” he said. “And today you walk down the street and get mugged or you get shot.”“And they’re doing this where literally legal experts, legal scholars said they don’t understand it — there was no crime and there was no crime here at all,” he added, referring to the hush money case. “This is just a way of hurting me in the election because I’m leading by a lot.”“Migrants are trying to beat up our police officers, they’re trying to do things that we’ve never seen before actually, we are going to have a problem with,” he said. “I call it ‘Biden migrant crime’ because you have millions of people that came into this, this place, this country that has been so badly hurt, and they’re doing things that nobody’s ever seen before,” he said. “So you have violent migrant crime, and they arrested me for doing nothing wrong.”Diana Paulsen Talking to cameras outside of the courtroom, Trump criticized the prosecution, saying"this is not a crime" and the case"could have been brought three years ago." He repeated his claims that the prosecution is politically motivated and criticized the timing of the trial during primary season, saying"how can you run for election and be sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?" and"I should be in South Carolina right now."Former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin is also here sitting near the DA’s team. She posted an Instagram post last week in support of Willis. Harrison Floyd, a former Trump campaign staffer who is a co-defendant in the case, walked into the courtroom and took a seat near Franklin. “I didn’t know they let supermodels in here," he said.David Shafer, one of Trump's co-defendants in the case, is here with his attorney, Craig Gillen. They’re sitting at the defense table alongside Ashleigh Merchant and her husband, John. Nathan Wade and the DA’s team just showed up. Bill Cromwell, who represents another one of the defendants, is sitting in front of me and tells me the first witness is up to the judge. But the lawyers would like to call Wade first.Steinglass is a well-respected trial lawyer who was brought onto the team that tried the Trump Organization criminal tax fraud case in the fall of 2022 and has remained a part of the Trump investigations team.Prosecutor Steven Wu is sitting in the front row. He argued yesterday at the Court of Appeals in Albany, N.Y., against Harvey Weinstein who is seeking to overturn his sexual assault verdict. Weinstein remains in jail in upstate New York.Trump has arrived at the courthouse in lower Manhattan and entered the building a few minutes ago, an official outside of the court said.Reporters lined up overnight in frigid temperatures to get a seat in the courtroom for this historic event, the first criminal prosecution of a former president. Trump will enter the courthouse at the same entrance, the district attorney’s office on Hogan Place, that he arrived at last April for his arraignment. Security is extremely tight both outside and inside the courthouse, with everyone going through two sets of magnetometers before they enter the courtroom on the 15th floor of Manhattan criminal court. Trump did not have to be here today after Judge Juan Merchan had waived his appearance, but the former president chose to show up. The case involves Trump’s payoff to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election, allegedly to cover up an extramarital affair, which prosecutors say amounted to an illegal campaign contribution. Trump’s attorneys say there was nothing illegal about the payment.Trump just left Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan and is expected to head to the courthouse in lower Manhattan, witnesses told NBC News.case against former President Donald Trump gave the green light Monday for a hearing this week involving misconduct allegations against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and said her disqualification from the case is “possible.”“Disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” he said. One of Trump’s co-defendants in the election case, Michael Roman, alleged that Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade had “a personal relationship” that was “improper.”, and so what remains to be proven is the existence and extent of any financial benefit, if there even was one. “Because I think it’s possible that the facts alleged by the defendant could result in disqualification, I think an evidentiary hearing must occur to establish the record on those core allegations,” he added. With a little more than a week until South Carolina’s Republican primary, Donald Trump is expected back in Manhattan as a judge is set to decide if the former president must go to trial next month. Prosecutors are accusing him of doctoring his company’s books to bury evidence of an alleged affair ahead of the 2016 election. NBC’s Laura Jarrett reports for"TODAY."during the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claimed she slept with the married Trump in 2006, a claim he has denied. Trump had classified his reimbursement of the payout as a legal expense.will attend a hearing Thursday that is expected to determine a timetable for the trial in the New York hush money case against him, his lawyer said Tuesday.New York Judge Juan Merchan’s hearing on Thursday, where he will also address Trump’s motions to dismiss the case, will likely shape the first felony trial against the former president. Last year, the judge decided that the trial would begin on March 25, thoughIn New York, Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential bid. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Brooklyn DA Aide Accused of Trashing Jewish Staffers on Leave Receives Secret $15K BonusA Brooklyn District Attorney (DA) aide, who has been on leave for the past six months after being accused of trashing Jewish staffers, has received a secret $15,000 bonus. The aide has outearned their boss, Fani Willis, who is also accused of having an affair with a Trump prosecutor. Willis had previously vowed not to date staff in 2020, calling it 'certainly inappropriate'. The attorney, Fani Willis, will now be investigated. Residents at a meeting expressed their concerns about Willis and her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, alleging that she benefited from him taking her on expensive trips paid for with county money.
Read more »
Listen Live: Supreme Court hears arguments over Trump's eligibility for 2024 ballotThe Supreme Court is considering a historic case over whether former President Donald Trump is eligible for a second term in the White House.
Read more »
Supreme Court Hears Arguments In Trump 2024 Ballot Case: Live UpdatesPaige Lavender is a senior editor of breaking news.
Read more »
Report: Whistleblowers Lining up to Testify in Fulton County DA Fani Willis CaseSource of breaking news and analysis, insightful commentary and original reporting, curated and written specifically for the new generation of independent and conservative thinkers.
Read more »
Relationship between DA Fani Willis and Nathan Wade started years earlier than claimed, witness saysA witness has testified that a personal relationship between DA Fani Willis and Nathan Wade started in 2019, earlier than previously known.
Read more »