Charles Bethea writes:

This past August, Manny Arora, a lawyer in Atlanta, considered an unusual challenge to the charges brought against his client Kenneth Chesebro. Arora, who is in his fifties, is an unflappable retired Air Force prosecutor. He has argued cases on behalf of the former N.F.L. star Adam (Pacman) Jones and Gucci Mane, the Atlanta rapper. Chesebro was a big client, too: a Harvard-trained lawyer and one of the alleged architects of Donald Trump’s scheme to have several states, including Georgia, submit fake electors to overturn the 2020 election. The Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, had just charged Trump and eighteen others, including Chesebro, with taking part in a criminal enterprise. Her indictment listed more than a hundred and sixty acts in furtherance of their conspiracy, including a taped phone call Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to “find 11,780” votes. Chesebro was charged with seven felony counts related to the fake-elector plan—a stratagem that he’d admitted, from the start, would “likely” be rejected by the Supreme Court.

Willis had hired a special prosecutor named Nathan Wade, in November of 2021, to lead the case, which she’d launched in February of that year. But when Arora dug into his background, last fall, he thought that Wade had an oddly thin résumé for someone working on such a high-profile case. Wade had spent his career as a private defense lawyer, often fighting misdemeanor charges, and later as a municipal-court judge. He’d never worked on a racketeering case. “He really didn’t appear qualified to lead a rico prosecution,” Arora, who had also worked in the Fulton County D.A.’s office, two decades ago, told me. Georgia has an unusually broad racketeering statute, which Willis is fond of using. “Most lawyers in this state aren’t qualified to do it, and here you’re talking about using it in the most unique way in American history—going after a President,” Arora said. “And the D.A. hires someone that hasn’t had any serious felony experience, much less something at this level?”

Others in Georgia’s legal community felt similarly. “It was weird,” a longtime criminal-defense attorney who asked to remain anonymous, given his regular interactions with Willis, told me. “I’ve been practicing for decades here. So has my partner. We’d never heard of this guy, and suddenly he’s lead counsel in a monumentally important case.” In 2014, Wade had run unsuccessfully for superior-court judge, in Cobb County. Arora reached out to people in the area who knew Wade, including, he said, one of his former law partners, Terrence Bradley. Arora learned from them that Wade had been seeing Willis romantically. “Nobody wanted to be the one going on record about it,” he told me. “They’d just say, ‘Some things were going on at this apartment.’ ‘Get the cell-phone records and you’ll see this.’ ‘Talk to her security detail.’ Things like that.” Wade, it turned out, had initiated divorce proceedings with his wife a day after Willis hired him, in 2021. His divorce case is ongoing, and it’s not clear what precipitated it, or when exactly the marriage unravelled and when the relationship with Willis began. Arora has seen a lot in his career, but all this startled him and begged further scrutiny. “We just didn’t have enough time to flesh it all out,” Arora told me. “We were busy with other motions.” [Continue reading…]