According to the Washington Examiner, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has come under scrutiny for allocating substantial sums to private sector attorneys, a portion of which is earmarked for the investigation and prosecution of former President Donald Trump. County records reveal that Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor in the Trump case, has received over $500,000 from the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office between January 2022 and August 2023, as indicated in payment history.
Christopher Campbell, Wade’s colleague at the Wade & Campbell Firm, has also received payments totaling $116,670 from April 2021 to August 2023, according to the same records. Terrence Bradley, another former colleague of Wade, received $74,480 in payments from May 2021 to June 2022.
Wade, an attorney who bills by the hour, was personally selected by Willis about two years ago to serve as a special prosecutor in the Trump case, bypassing career prosecutors who work on fixed salaries. While the legality of this decision has not been questioned at this point, some, like Phil Holloway, a veteran Atlanta-based attorney, view the use of Wade as “unorthodox” and potentially lucrative for lawyers compensated hourly.
Holloway commented, “It’s certainly unorthodox and appears to be a cash cow for any lawyer paid by the hour. I’ve been practicing criminal law in Georgia for 24 years, and I’ve never seen such an arrangement.”
Willis initiated the investigation into Trump in February 2021 and subsequently indicted the former president and 18 co-defendants last month on racketeering charges, alleging they conspired to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
One of the co-defendants, former Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, drew attention to the substantial payments made to private prosecutors in a court filing, requesting a hearing on “improper contact by the special prosecutor’s law firm.” Shafer included in the filing an advertisement from Wade’s firm, which sought clients for criminal defense services, including the charge of “impersonating a public officer” levied against Shafer. The advertisement raised concerns about the ethical implications of a private attorney offering defense services to a person they were prosecuting.
Holloway also noted that using Wade as outsourced counsel could allow him to circumvent the typical responsibilities of public servants, such as statutory requirements for assistant district attorney appointments and the administration of an oath of office, which is meant to safeguard against misconduct by public officials.
Furthermore, Holloway cautioned that this arrangement could negatively impact morale among Willis’s in-house staff, as they might perceive it as a lack of trust in their capabilities.
Requests for comment from Willis’s office regarding this matter went unanswered.
Georgia-based defense attorney Andrew Fleischman has criticized the substantial payments to Wade and his firm, particularly in light of what he described as a “massive backlog of cases” at the district attorney’s office. He expressed concerns about Wade’s qualifications, noting that he has never tried a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case.
A source familiar with the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office suggested that the media had not given sufficient attention to these payments and questioned why someone already on the government payroll was not handling the Trump case, raising concerns about taxpayer funding for outsourced legal services. Despite these concerns, the source praised Willis’s intelligence but found the use of Wade to be peculiar and unsettling.
