Leaked texts could 'undermine' Fani Willis' defense in ethics hearing: former prosecutor

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis doesn't come off as very credible as Judge Scott McAfee tries to reconcile her text messages with her claims that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade didn't begin until after he was hired, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN's Jake Tapper on Wednesday.

And yet, he added, there's still nothing conclusive that shows cause to remove her from the case — for now.

"Yeah. So the issue here is there's kind of like a silly suggestion that the only reason Fani Willis is even engaged in this prosecution is so that she and her lover, Mr. Wade, you know, could live high on the hog and they take take this government salary and go on vacations and this and that, which, on its face, doesn't seem all that credible," said Tapper. "But, obviously, the relationship was incredibly reckless. And now there are questions about whether or not she has been honest under oath about that relationship."

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"What are the judge's options here, what can he do with all this information?" Tapper asked.

"Yeah, so this is a really important question," said Honig. "This will be up to the judge, Judge Scott McAfee, who we've seen in action. He is going to have to decide, first of all, who's telling the truth here. That was the defendant's burden. It's the people who are challenging the D.A. to establish the truth of what they're saying. But I can see the judge going either way with this. On the one hand, I could see the judge saying, I find the D.A.'s story that this relationship only started after Mr. Wade was hired to be non-believable, non-credible, the text messages certainly undermine that. There have been cell phone records that undermine that."

All of that said, Honig stressed, "We don't have a clear smoking gun piece of evidence that their relationship started beforehand."

Watch the video below or at the link right here.

Elie Honig says Fani Willis texts don't look goodwww.youtube.com