XPost: alt.sodomites.barack-obama, talk.politics.misc, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh XPost: talk.politics.guns

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis's office said there had been a "data entry error" in how payments had been recorded to her former
boyfriend, Nathan Wade, in the Donald Trump indictment.

Trump pleaded not guilty to all 13 charges against him in Georgia and has
said the case is politically motivated because he is the frontrunner for
the GOP presidential nomination.

Ashleigh Merchant, attorney for Trump's co-defendant Michael Roman, said
in court documents that Wade's first three months of work as a special prosecutor were paid from the district attorney's seized property fund.

A spokesperson for the Fulton County government subsequently told Newsweek
that this claim was "demonstrably false."

Newsweek later showed the spokesperson entries from the district
attorney's expense account, which recorded payments to Wade from the
seized property account in July, August, and September 2020, all for sums
over $30,000. The spokesperson said these entries were in error.

To maintain transparency, payments to lawyers should not be made from a confiscated property account but from a general or legal fund.

The spokesperson told Newsweek on Monday that the open expense account
"draws off of a database maintained by Fulton County government, not the District Attorney's office. We are not able to assess why a data entry
error was made in the database maintained by them."

In court documents and in testimony to the Georgia Senate Special Investigations Committee last week, Merchant said that Fulton County's own records showed payments to Wade from the confiscated property account.

Confiscated property held by the Fulton County DA's office includes, for example, $150,000 in cash and $1 million worth of jewelry seized from the rapper Young Thug when he was arrested in May 2022 on organized crime
charges. Paying lawyers from the forfeited property account would be inappropriate for any district attorney's office.

In admitting the clerical error, the spokesman included an email from
Willis's chief operation officer, who noted that the expenses document
prepared by the Fulton County government "incorrectly states that Invoices
9, 10 and 11 were paid out of a forfeiture account."

The chief operating officer attached three memos for the payments, which
he said showed that they were pulled from the general account rather than
the confiscated property fund.

In addition, the chief operating officer provided several reasons why the
money would not come from the forfeiture account, including that the DA's office has state and federal forfeiture accounts and only holds the money
in the account; the funds in the Georgia confiscated funds account are
always kept low and would never be able to make payments of over $30,000 a month to a lawyer.

Last month, Willis gave evidence in a two-day hearing following Merchant's accusations that she was in a relationship with Wade. Merchant also
alleged that the pair had benefited financially from taxpayers' money.

The timeline of their relationship has emerged as a key point of
contention, and Merchant has said it started earlier than they admitted. Trump's lawyers examined phone records alleging the pair were in a
relationship before the Georgia election fraud case began.

Newsweek reached out to Donald Trump's attorney via email for comment on Monday.

Invoices disclosed by Willis's office show that Wade earned $653,881 in
total for the case from November 1, 2021, to December 31st, 2023.

For his monthly invoices to Willis, Wade's title is listed as "the Anti- Corruption Special Prosecutor."

Wade's monthly invoices increased to over $30,000 a month in 2022 and have mostly stayed at that level since.

Recent invoices obtained by Roman's defense team through an open records request show that, for July 2023, Willis paid Wade $35,250 at $250 an
hour.

That includes a "team meeting, drafting" that accounted for 33 hours of
work and totaled $8,250, and "team argument and prep" for 32 hours, which totaled $8,000.

"Travel out of state and interview witness" lasted 18 hours for a total of $4,500.

Wade earned $35,000 in August 2023, $34,250 in September, and $37,000 in October. That dropped to $16,000 in November for a July-November average
of $31,500, a Newsweek analysis shows.

https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-nathan-wade-payments-fulton-county- 1878062

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)