The Fani Willis hearing was must-watch TV that no one needed to see

Follow this authorRuth Marcus's opinions

Robin Bryant-Yeartie, Willis’s one-time friend and former employee in the district attorney’s office (does anyone get hired on merit around here?) asserted that she had seen Willis and Wade canoodling in the years leading up to his hiring; she had “no doubt” that their romantic relationship began shortly after they met at a judicial conference in 2019. That testimony, if credited, would mean that the pair lied under oath when they denied any such entanglement before Willis brought Wade on as special prosecutor.

Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former law partner, may have some knowledge on that score. But Bradley, who also served as Wade’s divorce lawyer, said he was prevented from answering because his knowledge was shielded by attorney-client privilege, and that has so far been upheld by the presiding judge. So with Wade and Willis forcefully denying that their romantic entanglement predated his hiring, and an absence of real corroboration on the other side, the assertion that they lied to the court fizzled.

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Likewise, the suggestion that Willis benefited from the Wade’s hiring because he underwrote their vacations from Aruba to Napa to the Bahamas to Belize. (You might wonder whether these prosecutors had more pressing work to do.) Wade and Willis insisted that she repaid him — conveniently, in cash — and, again, there was a dearth of evidence to the contrary.

Still, the performance tarnished Willis, and while she portrayed herself as the victim of “lies,” she is primarily the victim of her own bad judgment. Even assuming that nothing was going on between Willis and Wade before she brought him into the DA’s office — and the questioning on this point was so ineffective that I remain agnostic on the subject — the notion that you shouldn’t be sleeping with your subordinate seems never to have entered Willis’s mind. If, as she insists, their relationship changed, then maybe choose one or the other, boyfriend or employee? Don’t expose your office — much less a high-profile case — to snickering, and worse.

That she only started sleeping with Wade after she hired him isn’t a defense. It’s an indictment. “I certainly will not be choosing people to date that work under me,” she said in a 2020 campaign appearance. That was a promise worth keeping.

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Some Democrats and other Trump critics, tired of the former president’s bombastic antics, will no doubt welcome Willis’s fearless pushback. “You think I’m on trial,” Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, the........

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