Terrence Bradley, a former law partner, divorce attorney and friend of special prosecutor Nathan Wade, did not want to be there yesterday, and he made that abundantly clear as he obfuscated and did a whole lot of not recalling things.
00:06:00.980As you just heard, Nathan Wade was in that courtroom yesterday as his one-time friend and law partner was on the stand.
00:06:09.300Wade had tried to stop it from happening at all, but the judge ruled this testimony must go forward
00:06:14.220and that Terrence Bradley had to testify about the Wade-Willis romance and what Terrence Bradley knew about it.
00:06:21.260The judge listened to him in camera in his chambers on Monday and decided the claims that this was all protected by attorney-client privilege were nonsense.
00:06:30.100These guys were friends and law partners for years before he actually started to help Nathan Wade with the divorce.
00:06:37.340None of those conversations would be privileged.
00:06:59.620I want you to keep all of what you just heard in mind as our show brings you this next bit of information courtesy of our first guest, Phil Holloway.
00:07:08.160He's an attorney down in Cobb County in this area.
00:07:12.540He knows a lot of these players and he got his hands on some of the actual texts.
00:07:17.860So far, we've only heard the lawyers raise the substance in questions, show them to the witnesses, and then hear some answers.
00:07:26.200No one has shown us the actual text messages between Ashley Merchant and Terrence Bradley.
00:07:32.720But Phil Holloway got his hands on some of them and is sharing them with us exclusively.
00:07:40.640In one exchange about Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade's relationship, look at this.
00:07:45.360Ashley Merchant says, like, just date.
00:24:58.440And so I think we did get some of that from him.
00:25:00.560He didn't want to plow old ground all over again.
00:25:03.200So he was able to observe how the witness was testifying and compare it to what was said in these exhibits that were used in court yesterday.
00:25:12.580And I think that this issue was driven home.
00:25:17.660So despite the fact that the witness did not give the bombshell testimony from the witness stand, we still got it.
00:25:25.400We still got that bombshell information because there was a paper trail or, in this case, an electronic text trail that showed that he had made different statements in the past.
00:25:37.080Here is a cross-examination of, this is Ashley Merchant trying to get to the one text where he said, looks good, right?
00:25:48.500That she had sent him the draft motion to disqualify Wade and Willis.
00:25:52.060And he said, yeah, there's that one change you should make about the judge, like the court that they were on.
00:25:59.720And then he said, you should add me to this footnote.
00:26:02.020Because there's a footnote in her brief that speaks about Wade's business partners, his law partners, and any money they made from Fannie Willis.
00:26:09.960And when Terrence Bradley was Nathan Wade's business partner, his law partner, he made that money.
00:26:14.740That's some $74,000, I guess, as a taint lawyer, as I mentioned.
00:26:18.860Anyway, it appears that Terrence Bradley was saying to Ashley Merchant when she was drafting her motion, better put me back in there.
00:26:25.200So other than that, she said, okay, good point.
00:26:28.300And she said, anything else, anything that isn't accurate.
00:26:46.200And she tried to nail him down, raising, here's Ashley Merchant and then defense attorney Gillum, who points out the name of the motion that had been sent to a friend of Nathan Wade, former law partner of Nathan Wade's, former lawyer for Nathan Wade, who still considers himself a friend of Nathan Wade.
00:27:06.120You've got the defense lawyers contacting you about a motion to disqualify Nathan Wade and Fannie Willis from this case.
00:27:15.420And this is what you, like, this is the text exchange?
00:27:44.340Well, let's look at the title of the motion that she sent you, the defendant Michael Roman's motion to dismiss grand jury indictment as fatally defective and motion to disqualify the district attorney, her office, and the special prosecutor from further prosecuting this matter.
00:28:03.080Do you remember seeing that in the draft that you read and reviewed?
00:28:50.360They've issued a subpoena to Attorney Ashley Merchant for all of her text communications related to this case.
00:28:58.700I don't know more at this time, but I do know that that subpoena is out and that it's seeking these very things that we're talking about right now on this show.
00:30:07.760We're going to see the text messages, the legal headaches for Fannie Willis continue to mount this.
00:30:12.660The entire text message exchange between Ashley Merchant and Terrence Bradley, subpoenaed now by the Georgia State Senate, which is investigating Fannie Willis's behavior in this case.
00:30:23.980What power does the Georgia State Senate have over Fannie Willis or any of this?
00:30:29.740So there are obviously half of the state legislature which has the capacity to make laws.
00:30:34.540They can do laws that have to do with ethics.
00:30:39.160They can do things that have to do with evidence.
00:30:41.860They can do things that have to do with funding, quite frankly, of prosecutors' offices.
00:30:45.980And there's a big move in the Georgia legislature to have an entity, an agency, if you will, that conducts oversight of prosecutors throughout the state of Georgia.
00:30:57.840They have one that's an oversight for the judiciary.
00:31:01.500So there's a push to be able to do an oversight on prosecutors.
00:31:05.000They have something that already exists, but they're making changes and tweaks to it, I think, in the current legislature.
00:31:13.880So they can make laws, basically, that can impact how not only Fannie Willis but other prosecutors are able to conduct themselves and run their offices in the future.
00:31:23.500Here's why, for the immediate purposes, this subpoena is significant.
00:31:29.940This document, with all the text exchanges, is not yet public.
00:31:33.900I'm sure the judge has seen it, which is, I'm sure, helpful to Ashley Merchant.
00:31:38.280But it's not yet public, and yet it's going to be.
00:31:41.460Because while there may be a confidentiality order in this case, the Georgia State Senate answers to the people and is going to have to make—
00:31:48.800There's nothing inherently confidential about this.
00:31:50.600This is not a lawyer-client communication.
00:31:52.960This is Ashley Merchant, lawyer for one of the defendants, communicating with Terrence Bradley, potential witness in the case.
00:31:57.940There's nothing that would protect this other than a protective order by this judge.
00:32:01.680And once the Georgia State Senate gets its hands on it, we're all going to see all of the texts in full between the two of them.
00:32:11.040But I'm sure if you see the whole document front to back, it's going to put everything in context.
00:32:15.720And I guarantee you it's not going to make Terrence Bradley look like a guy who's sitting, speculating, reluctant to share.
00:32:22.740It's probably going to show somebody who's very much in on the discussion and wants Ashley Merchant to have the accurate info, for whatever reason, about Nathan Wade.
00:33:14.500You had a guest on yesterday from Breitbart, and what they're looking at is whether or not there was a political piece of how this thing started.
00:33:25.600And is this really a get Trump kind of a case?
00:33:29.200We've got to have prosecutors who are fair.
00:33:31.200You can't have prosecutors who single out individuals and target them because they don't like them or because they don't like their politics or they don't agree with how they tweet.
00:33:41.540You've got to have prosecutors who are fair-minded and objective.
00:33:45.480And this goes back to the motion to dismiss and disqualify that has been litigated right now, that we're talking about right now.
00:33:53.340Because if Willis is – part of that motion, let's not forget, is that she is out on TV, on the radio.
00:34:01.520She's making herself a star in the public eye, and she's doing it to benefit herself personally and professionally.
00:34:11.880That's the claim and part of this motion.
00:34:14.040She hired a media company to monitor her mentions.
00:34:16.300Yeah, she hired the media company, and so this is all part of the claim that this is so unfair for all these reasons that the indictment itself is structurally unsound, and it's structurally unsound because it's not based on fundamental fairness as required by the due process clause of the Constitution.
00:34:37.000You need look no further than, I will say, Jack Smith, who is definitely partisan and out to get Trump, however, is behaving himself with respect to the public like a normal prosecutor behaves when they're outward facing.
00:35:13.220That's been clear from the beginning, and it's come back to bite her in the you-know-what.
00:35:18.460I want to get back before we take a quick break because I have other texts that I'm going to show the audience.
00:35:23.000But to that soundbite we played before your breaking news, where she, Ashley Merchant, and Gillum, he represents one of the other defendants, are pointing out the absurdity of him.
00:35:34.620She's asking him, was there anything else inaccurate, anything else?
00:35:38.280And he's like, no, looks good, looks good.
00:35:41.640And now he wants to say, oh, I was only referring to that one footnote when I said, looks good.
00:35:49.060And Gillum gets up there and says, you looked at this motion that you knew a lawyer for a defendant was about to file.
00:35:57.640This motion was called defendant Michael Roman's motion to dismiss grand jury indictment as fatally defective and motion to disqualify the district attorney, her office, and the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, and from further prosecuting this matter.
00:36:27.600And so now you tell me what credibility this guy has to look at the judge and say, oh, I was, I thought I was only being asked if my one little footnote that I raised was accurate or not.
00:36:39.560The way I read it, when I read that text message that you were just referring to, I interpret it to mean that he's telling Mr. Merchant that everything, you know, with maybe that one exception about what he was referring to is accurate.
00:36:57.440And that would include the information about when the affair began.
00:37:05.080That's why it's offered as substantive evidence, because the judge is not obligated to accept testimony from the witness stand.
00:37:11.860He can go by the text messages, because if the text message confirms that, you know, the relevant parts of her motion, particularly about when the affair began and that kind of thing,
00:37:23.300if he's confirming to her in the text messages that all that is accurate, the judge can use that as substantive evidence in the case, Megan, to base his ruling.
00:37:33.500And, you know, so that's that's what this is going to be about.
00:37:36.940And on Friday, you're going to see the lawyers arguing that point to the judge and hammering that point so that hopefully he relies on the prior statements versus the in court statements.
00:37:47.780I don't know how he couldn't. I mean, Terrence Bradley was obviously not telling the truth yesterday.
00:37:52.320You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know it. It was like any civilian could look at it.
00:37:55.720I guess CNN wasn't able to see it. But any nonpartisan hack can see what he was doing there.
00:38:01.160There's a lot more. There is a question about and I'm going to take a break first.
00:38:06.340But there is a question about where's the prosecutor? Where's the lead prosecutor?
00:38:10.900Her name is Anna Cross, who had Terrence Bradley when he was on the stand on Feb 16.
00:38:18.740She did the cross-examination. Suddenly she's off the briefs and might be off the case.
00:38:25.020Why? Why? Stand by. Quick break. Back with Phil next.
00:38:32.500There are a couple of other text exchanges, and I do want to get to this lead prosecutor on what happened to Anna Cross.
00:38:38.660Where is she? But let's start with another text exchange.
00:38:43.300Some we have, like the three that we just went through, that we showed to the audience.
00:38:47.320Some we just heard about during the cross-examination.
00:38:50.900And this is one of those, or at least this is some information that Terrence Bradley appears to have shared with Ashley Merchant in some way, shape or form,
00:39:03.100about allegedly someone witnessing Wade and Willis having sex in the office place before she was DA.
00:39:12.300Again, before they claimed their affair began.
01:13:31.880Literally no AC privilege for conduct before the divorce.
01:13:36.900Besides, now that he filed a fraudulent affidavit.
01:13:40.140Keep in mind, in this case, Nathan Wade had responded and told the lies, what we think are lies, about when the relationship began.
01:13:46.560Besides now that he's filed a fraudulent affidavit, you may actually have a duty.
01:13:52.720She's speaking to his former lawyer and friend.
01:13:55.380You may actually have a duty to alert the court to the fraud in the affidavit under the crime fraud because he lied under oath to facts you know to be false.
01:14:14.580The man we have to thank for being able to bring this to you, among other things, in this case, wonderful reporting, Phil Holloway, who's, I mean, I don't know what kind of lawyer you are, Phil Holloway, but you're a damn good reporter and journalist.
01:14:25.020I think you've got two hats to wear, and thank you so much for giving this to us and letting us read this on the air.
01:14:32.740Well, it's quite something, and I'm glad you printed it all out because I didn't want to use that much paper.
01:14:39.760You know, there's a lot in there to digest, and one of the things that I wanted to point out, and you got into some of this, you know, this appears to be, you know, a collaborative effort.
01:14:49.980You know, when Ashley Merchant is preparing to drop this motion to disqualify and is going to allege the affair, she says something in there to the effect of, you know, I'm frightened or I'm scared or I'm nervous or something along those lines.
01:15:03.780And Bradley goes on to say, you know, like, you're one of the best lawyers I know, go be great.
01:15:10.720And so he's encouraging her, and that was just earlier this year, if I remember the dates on those.
01:15:16.100So this puts all of this into, I think, much clearer context.
01:15:22.320The court's not going to have to be able to consider all of these text messages.
01:15:27.980He can only consider the messages that were, I think, confronted by the witness in court and were confirmed that those were his texts and that things that had to do with a prior inconsistent statement.
01:15:42.100But if you remember, the prosecutor had objected saying, you know, judge, under the rule of completeness, you know, you don't have all of the context.
01:15:53.600If you want to satisfy about the rule of completeness, here it is.
01:15:56.820It's all going into the court and into the court record.
01:15:59.220So it's unclear if the judge is going to be able to consider everything that you just went over.
01:16:03.880But certainly this does put it all into context.
01:16:06.580And remember when Anna Cross and others were saying she has no good faith basis for raising these issues?
01:16:16.020Obviously, we have a good faith basis when this witness is apparently helping her put together her pleadings and helping her investigate the circumstances surrounding this affair.
01:16:36.480And, you know, in Georgia, we don't have the ability to do pretrial depositions with witnesses.
01:16:42.320If we did, we would have a hearing like yesterday, except there wouldn't be a judge and there wouldn't be a prosecutor objecting to every question.
01:16:49.620And you can get into a lot of this stuff under oath.
01:18:26.820Maybe the judge can't technically consider all this, although I don't know why.
01:18:30.980I mean, this whole thing would be, wouldn't this have been submitted to the judge in connection with the privilege objections that we had to go through?
01:18:37.080Wouldn't he have seen his whole thing?
01:18:40.740I think that the plan was to ask the witness questions.
01:18:45.260And if the witness testified differently than would have been expected based on the, the text communications that you, and that's, by the way, not the only, clearly they were talking that this was just the, the written text version.
01:18:56.500There's, you can read, when you read this, you can tell that they're having phone conversations and other things.
01:19:01.700So, um, the expectation was, is that he would testify, uh, to the things that you just went over in this text, um, lengthy text thread.
01:19:11.040And, um, and so when that didn't happen, he was confronted with the, some of the texts that would have, um, been meant to directly refute his testimony or to say, look, this is a prior statement.
01:19:21.920Okay. So let's say, so, so perhaps I was wrong that the judge knows all the stuff I was reading.
01:19:27.360He knows a portion of this stuff, but the problem for him is given the news you just gave us that the Georgia state Senate has subpoenaed these text messages, which I just read to you.
01:19:37.420The judge is going to hear that. Like there's, they're about to become a public record and there's no, he doesn't want to embarrass himself.
01:19:45.800He's still a human being. He's going to see the news articles about all of this and has got to make sure he doesn't look like a fool in going with, well, the CNN version.
01:19:59.400Terrence Bradley said he didn't remember anything. So I can't really put any weight on this allegation. Like that's not going to happen now.
01:20:08.140Well, this is, this goes back to something I've said from almost day one.
01:20:13.740What's this whole thing about the affair and the money and all that broke. I, if I'm the judge, I'm probably going to halt the proceedings and I'm going to figure out some way to order an independent thorough investigation.
01:20:26.320Because I need to know if I'm the judge is a fraud being perpetrated on my court. It's not going to happen on my watch. And if it's this serious, you know, I'm not going to leave it to the defense lawyers who are limited in their investigative resources.
01:20:42.000As, as, as good as these lawyers are, you know, we don't have the resources that cops have, that prosecutors offices have, that the attorney general has. I'm going to, if I'm the judge, I'm going to figure out somebody who has these resources that can bring these people in, question them, find out the truth of the matter.
01:21:00.780How did this whole thing come up? When was the affair? Did people lie? If a, if a fraud has been perpetrated on my court, I'm going to want to get to the bottom of it.
01:21:11.260This is a unique situation. I've never in my life seen or heard anything like this. I was talking with a judge friend of mine yesterday at lunch. He and I agree.
01:21:20.780This would be a fantastic ethics kind of exam for bar, for a law school, because it's so complicated and there's so many different ways to look at this. So many angles to go down.
01:21:32.080We've got to get to the bottom of it. And I think it's going to require an independent investigation at this point.
01:21:37.640Yes, because if there isn't one with all due respect to Judge McAfee, who I believe has been doing a good job, he's going to look very foolish if he doesn't have this thoroughly investigated.
01:21:49.200We may have as many as three officers of the court perpetrating a fraud on the court. And if he just resolves it by saying, oh, not enough evidence to disqualify them, he's going to look like a fool.
01:22:02.840He can't allow that. That's just for his own dignity, for the dignity of the court, which must be respected lawyers, witnesses in general cannot get away with this.
01:22:12.220This is well beyond whether these two need to be disqualified, really.
01:22:17.600They really need an investigation on whether they should be disbarred, disciplined at a minimum, and potentially could be facing criminal charges if an independent investigator finds these were material representations made under oath, knowingly false.
01:22:31.660That's what perjury is in the state of Georgia.
01:22:33.440This is just not Terrence Bradley. I don't recall. I don't recall. I don't recall does not get you a perjury charge, which is why he answered that way.
01:22:43.720But listen, he did not do the ethical thing yesterday. He didn't. He should have done what he did in these texts.
01:22:50.640And if he's embarrassed about it, he should have admitted that.
01:22:52.540It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card to say, I don't recall.
01:22:56.780All right, I've got to do two things. I've got to take a quick break, but we've got to get to what's happening with Anna Cross.
01:23:02.040She is—there are three special prosecutors Fannie brought in. Nathan Wade's one of them.
01:23:06.640Floyd is another one. And Anna Cross is the third.
01:23:09.740Anna Cross is the one who took Terrence Bradley's testimony.
01:23:14.340She did his cross-examination on Feb 16, nowhere to be found when he resumed the stand.
01:23:22.280And her name is not on their most recent filing. Why?
01:23:27.420How many lawyers in this case are worried about perpetrating a fraud on the court?
01:23:33.060And who, if anyone, said, I'm not going to be part of it?
01:23:36.560Coming back with Phil right after this quick break.
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01:25:13.920So Anna Cross was the next signatory right after Fannie Willis onto that brief.
01:25:20.380But then, as I point out, even though this woman here was the one we'd been hearing most from during the 1516 hearing, she wasn't there when Terrence Bradley took the stand yesterday.
01:25:34.700And it was her witness, normally the same lawyer, right?
01:26:46.820But it's so weird because you've got these people that are private lawyers, but on the other hand, they're also prosecuting, you know, one of the biggest cases in Georgia history for the Fulton DA's office.
01:27:05.320She's got things in other courts and other jurisdictions.
01:27:08.640And so there was an email that I'm privy to that was recently sent to all the lawyers in the case just in the last few days where Cross had said she was not going to be there yesterday.
01:27:20.560And she has essentially said that she's unavailable that day because she said it was short notice.
01:27:27.260And she's unavailable for the next few weeks, I think it is, because of other things that she's working on.
01:27:36.040Whether and when she comes back, we'll just have to wait and see.
01:27:41.140But for the time being, you're right, she's not been on any of this.
01:27:45.680And the timing is interesting because it's right about the time when the defense starts presenting direct evidence that contradicts Bonnie Willis' testimony under oath.
01:27:57.020When I was an assistant district attorney, if my boss, the DA, had asked me to participate in a proceeding and I thought that he had committed a fraud on the court, I couldn't be a part of it.
01:29:48.320When you were communicating different details of the relationship between Miss Willis and Mr. Wade to Mrs. Merchant, did you lie to her about any of those details?
01:29:58.400I don't recall ever whether any of it was a lie or not.
01:30:05.360Now, having seen the full text, Phil, I mean, that just is so impossible to believe.
01:30:11.980You don't recall whether it was a lie when you said, make sure you get the early security detail, the one she had in 2020.
01:30:32.160So, you know, if he's not lying, if he says he's not lying to Ashley Merchant, then he's not lying when he says he's absolutely certain that the affair began, you know, prior to her taking office.
01:30:44.640That's the I think it's how it's a perfectly fair reading of this and what's going on.
01:30:49.760And it would seem to confirm the the validity and the truthfulness of the text exchange, where he essentially tells that actually that these people are lying under oath.
01:31:01.740So, yeah, this is all, you know, you got to have context.
01:31:06.720And sometimes in courtrooms, because you have people standing up and making what we call speaking objections and they object, they don't cite, you know, the rule of evidence.
01:31:16.260They don't cite what the legal basis is for the objection.
01:31:18.620It's just an objection to slow it down, to throw up a roadblock, to to try to derail somebody's train of thought when they're cross-examining it.
01:31:27.980You don't get sometimes in court, you don't get the whole truth.
01:31:32.840And so now when you when you have this information that we've obtained through other sources and other means, we now get to see the whole thing.
01:31:52.420And honestly, a reminder to the audience that him saying her kids knew or this person was in an affair or whatever, that doesn't make it so.
01:32:00.840It's it's showing what was in Terrence Bradley's head and that it was communicated to Ashley Merchant and gave her a good faith belief for following filing this motion and also shows, I believe, how dishonest he was being in not recalling any detail.
01:32:17.920Literally a few weeks after he provided this level of specification on her questions and just volunteering.