Former Fulton County, Georgia special prosecutor Nathan Wade suggested to House lawmakers that he met with White House officials on several occasions during the county’s lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, but did not remember the details.
Earlier this year, Wade resigned from his position after a judge ordered that either he or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis would have to leave the sweeping election-related case against Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants. The judge handed down the order after both Wade and Willis had confirmed the pair were in a relationship.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee interviewed Wade earlier this month in its investigation into Willis’s and Wade’s relationship, and whether the two financially benefitted from the arrangement. In a court hearing earlier this year, both Wade and Willis denied they profited and disputed allegations saying they were in a relationship before Wade was hired on as special prosecutor.
At one point, according to a transcript released by the committee, Wade was asked about an invoice that read, “Travel to Athens; conf with White House counsel, May 23rd, 2022.”
Wade said that the semicolon that was placed after “travel to Athens” was a separate thought. The investigator asked, “So if you billed for a conf with White House counsel, would that have occurred?”
He then responded, “If I billed for a conf with White House counsel, this document doesn’t say that that conf with White House counsel happened in Athens. That’s not what that says.”
When asked again if the reference to White House counsel meant that he billed for a conference with that official, Wade responded: “Yes.”
“I believe that it would have—it would have been completed on or before that time,” he also said, responding to the date, May 23, 2022.
Investigators then asked him: “So if there was a conf with White House counsel, it would have occurred on or before May 23rd, 2022?” He responded with, “Yes.”
Later in the interview, Wade said he did not recall the details of a separate meeting, marked, “Interview with D.C./White House, November 18th, 2022. Eight hours at $250. Cost $2,000.”
According to the transcript, Wade said he did not remember anyone who was involved in the meeting, possible travel, or people who scheduled it.
When he was asked, “And if you billed for it, if you billed 8 hours for interview with D.C./White House, it’s safe to assume that you would have taken part in the interview?” He replied, “Yes ma’am.”
Dozens of times throughout the interview, Wade, who worked as a divorce lawyer before he was named as Willis’s special prosecutor, said that he could not recall details or know information when he was asked about different topics in connection to the Judiciary Committee’s probe.
At one point, Wade said he was not familiar with the racketeering charges that Willis had planned to file against Trump and his co-defendants. In order to get up to speed on the topic, Wade said he took hours of lessons from another lawyer who wrote a book on the subject and who partook in the investigation.
“It’s a very complicated legal concept, but the dubbed godfather of RICO, the gentleman who wrote the book … spent hours and hours teaching me RICO, if you will,” Wade said, referring to an acronym often used to describe the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act used to charge the former president and others.
Willis also wrote to Wade, telling him that it is “incumbent” that he guards “against the unauthorized disclosure of confidential information by invoking all applicable legal protections and privileges” during the deposition.
Last week, Wade’s prepared statement said that he did “nothing to compromise” the investigation or case against Trump and that it was not politically motivated, which Trump has said to be the case.
“My team and I investigated the issues in the election interference case for more than two years,” he said. “This case was not politically motivated. Rather, it was an independent investigation based upon facts, interviews, evidence, and the rule of law. I had no mandate other than to honestly seek the truth.”
