In a potential setback to former President Donald J. Trump and his co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case, a key witness testified on Tuesday that he had no knowledge of when a romantic relationship began between the two prosecutors leading the case.
Defense attorneys are seeking to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, claiming that her romantic relationship with the lawyer she hired to run the case, Nathan Wade, has created an untenable conflict of interest.
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have said that the relationship began only after she hired him in November 2021. Mr. Trump’s lawyer has accused them of lying.
For weeks, the defense had suggested that the key witness, Terrence Bradley, the former divorce lawyer and law partner of Mr. Wade, could provide crucial testimony contradicting Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade. But Mr. Bradley testified in court on Tuesday that “I don’t know when the relationship started,” and that he “never witnessed anything.”
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and other defendants hammered at Mr. Bradley’s credibility on Tuesday, reading aloud text messages he wrote in January that appeared to suggest that he knew more about the prosecutors’ relationship than he was letting on. In text exchanges, Mr. Bradley told a defense lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, that the romance between the prosecutors had begun before Nov. 1, 2021, when Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade.
“Do you think it happened before she hired him?” Ms. Merchant asked Mr. Bradley in one text exchange, which was entered into evidence. “Absolutely,” Mr. Bradley replied.
But on the stand on Tuesday, Mr. Bradley insisted that he had been only “speculating” about the relationship in those texts, and was not speaking from personal knowledge.
It was Mr. Bradley’s third time on the witness stand this month, in a series of hearings that have threatened to upend the prosecution of Mr. Trump and his allies for seeking to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. The defense team contends that the two prosecutors engaged in “self-dealing,” because Mr. Wade spent money on vacations that he took with Ms. Willis while he was being paid by her office.
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have denied that there was any improper financial benefit, and have testified that they roughly split the costs of their vacations to places like the Caribbean and Napa Valley.
The extraordinary detour that the election interference case has taken, forcing the lead prosecutors to fight accusations of impropriety, may have changed it fundamentally. Even if the presiding judge allows Ms. Willis to keep the case, she is likely to face tough scrutiny moving forward, including from a new state commission that will be able to remove prosecutors and from the Georgia Senate, which has opened an investigation.
And if the case is taken from Ms. Willis and her team, more serious problems may follow.
The accusations first surfaced in a filing last month from Ms. Merchant, a lawyer for Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is among the defendants. Her effort to disqualify Ms. Willis, Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis’s entire office has appeared to rely heavily on her recent communications with Mr. Bradley.
Mr. Bradley had a falling out with Mr. Wade in recent years as their business relationship soured. In a previous hearing, it emerged that Mr. Bradley had been accused of sexual assaulting an employee of the business, an allegation that he emphatically denied.
Mr. Bradley clearly had no desire to testify about his former law partner and was a reluctant witness each time he took the stand.
In a court appearance this month, he declined to answer questions related to what he knew about the romance, citing attorney-client privilege and other rules that shield lawyers from having to disclose communications with clients.
But Scott McAfee, the Fulton County Superior Court judge overseeing the case, said on Tuesday said that neither Mr. Wade nor Mr. Bradley “had met their burden of establishing that the attorney-client privilege applied” to the extent that it would shield him from answering all questions.
Mr. Bradley arrived in court on Tuesday afternoon in a plaid suit and with a gloomy air to face hostile questions from a series of defense attorneys.
“I do not have knowledge of it starting, or when it started,” he told Ms. Merchant about the relationship between Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis, an assertion he made multiple times. He also testified that he had not spoken to either of the prosecutors since the allegations emerged, or any time recently.
Steven H. Sadow, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, pressed Mr. Bradley on his text exchanges with Ms. Merchant indicating that the relationship had started before Mr. Wade was hired. “Why would you speculate and say that in a text?” Mr. Sadow asked, repeating the question several times.
“I don’t recall why I thought that it started at that time,” Mr. Bradley replied, and later reiterated he had just been speculating.
Judge McAfee also appears to be scrutinizing the details of how the two prosecutors divided the costs of the vacations they took together. Delta Air Lines has provided records to the court that have been sealed, the judge said in an order filed on Monday. Delta was among the airlines that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade used for their private travel, previously released records have shown.
Another hearing has been scheduled for Friday. Judge McAfee has said that he will not rule from the bench, meaning that a decision is not likely to come until next week at the earliest.
Among the issues that could come up on Friday are phone records obtained through a subpoena, which Mr. Sadow has said show “just under 12,000” calls and text messages between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade in the first 11 months of 2021, before she hired him.
A filing from Mr. Sadow last week also said that cellphone location data suggested that Mr. Wade was in the vicinity of Ms. Willis’s residence from late at night until dawn on two occasions during that period.
However, such data is often limited in the extent to which it can pinpoint someone’s location. And Ms. Willis’s office said the data did “not prove that Special Prosecutor Wade was ever at any particular location or address.”
At a previous hearing, a witness named Robin Yeartie, a former friend of Ms. Willis and former employee of the D.A.’s office, said that the romance started before Mr. Wade was hired. As with Mr. Bradley, the judge will have to weigh the credibility of Ms. Yeartie, who left the D.A.’s office on bad terms, ending her friendship with Ms. Willis.
Ms. Willis, in her own dramatic testimony this month, said that the romance ended before Mr. Trump was indicted in August and vigorously defended her conduct, as well as her case.
“These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020,” she told Ms. Merchant. “I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”
