'Wow': Fani Willis brands lawyer a liar in middle of combative testimony
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ testimony began Thursday with a wink and a bang when she signaled hello to someone in the courtroom — then accused the lawyer questioning her of lying.
“It is ridiculous to me that you lied ... and yet here we still are,” Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer hoping to remove the district attorney from Donald Trump’s Georgia election racketeering case.
“It seems today like a lawyer writes a lie then it's printed for all the world to see.”
Merchant hopes to prove at Thursday’s hearing that Willis’ personal relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade disqualifies her from prosecuting Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election in the state.
Willis came out on the offensive and appeared to stagger Merchant, whose questions were peppered with ums, with the strength of her anger.
“I told you what happened,” snapped Willis, when Merchant repeated a question. “Is there something you didn’t understand?”
At another point, when confronted about the dates that the relationship started, she responded, "That's a lie, that's one of your lies."
Willis said she probably uttered some “choice words” when she received Merchant’s motion because she was not a “southern gentleman” like Wade.
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Wade testified earlier that he did not date Willis before she hired him in 2020 because he was battling cancer and was afraid to socialize during the pandemic.
Willis snapped when Merchant demanded information about a 2019 conference that she and Wade both attended.
“You tried to implicate I slept with him at that conference, which I find to be extremely offensive,” Willis said.
“When someone lies on you and it's highly offensive when they implicate that you slept with somebody the first day you met with them.”
People who watched the live stream were stunned by Willis’ courtroom battle with Merchant.
“Wow,” wrote Victor Shi, a 2020 delegate for Joe Biden, on X. “Willis is on absolute fire right now.”