Almost two years ago, Ashleigh Merchant sat at a desk in the cluttered back room of her Marietta law office, her mind racing.

It was deadline day for pretrial motions in the Fulton County case accusing Donald Trump and 18 others of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Merchant’s paralegal was about to upload a document that was nothing short of a legal hand grenade.

“She was like, ‘Are you ready to send it? Are you ready to send it?’” Merchant recalled in a recent interview. But Merchant needed to take a beat.

The filing accused Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis — who was leading one of the most scrutinized prosecutions in the nation — of a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the outside lawyer she had hired to help steer the complicated litigation. It argued the relationship gave the DA an improper financial interest in continuing the case and called for the judge to dismiss the indictment against Merchant’s client and disqualify the entire Fulton DA’s office from the prosecution.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (center) confers with lead prosecutors Donald Wakeford (left) and Nathan Wade during a motion hearing at Fulton County Courthouse on July 1, 2022. (Hyosub Shin/AJC)

Credit: TNS

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Credit: TNS

Known as a dogged investigator, Merchant had made a name for herself in Cobb County’s tight-knit legal community by taking big swings. But this was in a whole different category.

Her decision to press send on the salacious claims earned her national headlines as well as a flood of criticism from the DA and her allies, who framed Merchant as a liar, Trump shill and a scandalmonger willing to wade into the sex lives of her opponents.

But it also made the fast-talking Marietta lawyer a giant killer.

Last month, Merchant succeeded in doing what many once thought was a long shot. Georgia’s top court ousted Willis and her office from the election interference case by letting a lower court ruling stand. The racketeering prosecution Willis and her team had spent years assembling is now on life support.

“If it wasn’t for her efforts, the disqualification wouldn’t have resulted,” said Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead Georgia attorney. He said Merchant was “the finest investigative attorney I’ve ever worked with.”

Merchant’s work would also help fuel retribution campaigns from Willis’ critics, from the Statehouse to Capitol Hill and, reportedly, Trump’s Justice Department.

For the longtime defense attorney, the blowback has prompted her to double down on efforts to advocate for peers when she feels they’re being mistreated by courtroom authorities.

“You stop giving a f--- after you get treated like crap a lot,” she said.

‘Dig and dig and dig’

Merchant, 48, grew up in Clearwater, Florida, and got two degrees from the University of Florida before settling in metro Atlanta with her husband and law partner, John.

Potty-mouthed and self-deprecating, Merchant is often running when she isn’t at work or with her two teenage daughters or six dogs.

Her admirers praise her scrappiness and willingness to take on courtroom authorities she believes are overstepping.

“You don’t want to mess with her because once she gets her mind made up, she’s going to dig and dig and dig,” said Manny Arora, a criminal defense attorney who once shared office space with Merchant.

“She’s fearless,” said Carlos Rodriguez, a Marietta criminal defense attorney who has worked with Merchant.

That gutsiness was honed early when, as an overworked Fulton public defender, she grew frustrated at how so many of her clients were being denied bond and spending years sitting in jail before being taken to trial.

So Merchant began systematically filing speedy trial demands, an attempt to force then-Fulton DA Paul Howard to prioritize the worst offenders for trials. Soon, prosecutors began offering better plea deals to her clients charged with lower-level crimes.

Merchant continued to question authority figures even after moving into private practice. In 2016, she used security footage of Cobb County Judge Reuben Green to accuse him of siding with the prosecution against her client.

Two years later, she and her husband began working pro bono for a defendant in the sensational murder case of former South Georgia beauty queen Tara Grinstead. After the public defender system denied the Merchants’ request for state funding to cover an expert witness and an investigator in defense of their client, Ryan Alexander Duke, the couple took the issue to the state Supreme Court — and won.

Confirming the relationship

Merchant had only casually followed the Fulton election interference case before she was hired in August 2023 to represent Mike Roman, a Pennsylvania political operative who worked for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Roman’s inclusion in the indictment was a surprise. He did not appear to have ties to Georgia and was not in the extensive list of recommended targets by the special purpose grand jury that advised Willis. The seven felonies he’s charged with stem from his role in helping organize slates of Trump electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden, including Georgia.

Michael Roman was a staffer for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. He later worked for the Trump 2020 campaign as director of Election Day operations. (Courtesy photo)

Credit: Image from Twitter

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Credit: Image from Twitter

Roman, who spent much of his career as an opposition researcher, turned down a relatively generous plea deal from prosecutors and supported Merchant’s efforts to investigate his investigators.

Merchant knew Wade, who had also cut his teeth in Cobb. She had campaigned for him when he made a bid to defeat Green, the judge she locked horns with there. But she immediately wondered why Willis had hired Wade to work on the election case given that most of his background was in misdemeanors — not complex racketeering cases.

Other attorneys working on the case were asking similar questions. Arora, who represented co-defendant Ken Chesebro, began hearing whispers about Wade and Willis.

When Arora brought up the romance rumors during a call that September with fellow defense attorneys, he was largely met with hesitation and shrugs. The judge overseeing the case had already shot down a pair of challenges related to Wade. Did they want to risk angering him again over something ripped from the tabloids? Others had their own strategies they wanted to pursue.

The lawyers took a pass. Except for Merchant.

“Everybody was kind of skittish because it’s so salacious,” Arora recounted, “But Ashleigh’s like, ‘Let’s keep digging.’”

Merchant started asking people in her own network about Willis and Wade and filed a slew of open records requests. Invoices showed the DA’s office had paid Wade upward of $650,000 in legal fees, but that didn’t prove a relationship.

She spoke with Terrence Bradley, a friend from Cobb legal circles and Wade’s former law partner. He confirmed that Willis-Wade were romantically involved. But Merchant didn’t know if he had an ax to grind and she didn’t have him on tape or making a sworn statement.

Merchant’s biggest breakthrough came when she began looking into the details of Wade’s ongoing divorce. His estranged wife helped confirm dates and details, and ultimately released credit card statements that showed Wade paid for some of Willis’ travel on trips to California and the Caribbean.

Merchant was also hitting some roadblocks. Certain witnesses and companies would cooperate only with a subpoena, and Merchant couldn’t get that without an evidentiary hearing on the calendar.

That led to the disqualification filing in January 2024.

Any hesitations Merchant had about making the move faded away as she recalled a conversation she’d had with her husband about what she would do if Roman were ultimately convicted. What would she say if she had to testify at a hearing about whether she had effectively represented him?

The allegations were “true. I had a legal basis for it. So at that point it was like, do I have the balls to file it or not?” Merchant said. “You can’t develop something like that and have it and then not do it. You just can’t. So I knew I had to.”

Merchant was the lone signatory on the filing.

A ‘ticket to the circus’

At that point in the case, Willis had racked up a series of procedural victories in local and federal court. She’d secured four plea deals from case defendants, including from three lawyers who’d worked for Trump, and she was angling to go to trial that summer.

The Georgia case was heralded as perhaps the strongest of the four criminal prosecutions against Trump and the one that would survive if he won re-election and did away with the federal charges lodged against him.

And Willis was being widely lauded as a hero on the left for defying death threats in an effort to hold Trump accountable for trying to steal an election.

Just weeks after Merchant’s allegations went public, that had changed.

Several co-defendants joined Merchant’s motion after Willis implied her critics were racist and sexist during a fiery speech at a historic Black church.

A few weeks later, in a dramatic evidentiary hearing streamed live on many cable news outlets, Merchant and her colleagues questioned Wade and Willis under oath.

Willis had already confirmed in a court filing that she had a “personal relationship” with Wade, even as she argued there was no financial conflict that justified removing her or her office from the case. She defended Wade’s credentials and accused Merchant of acting in bad faith.

“This is not an example of zealous advocacy, nor is it a good faith effort to develop a record on a disputed legal issue — it is a ticket to the circus,” her office wrote.

She and her team alleged Merchant got major facts wrong, among them: when the romantic relationship began, that Willis and Wade had cohabitated and details about Willis’ daughter’s college attendance.

Now Merchant was on the biggest stage of her career. She did everything she could to avoid politics or the suggestion there was any personal animus toward Willis.

“I just kept telling myself, the world is watching, and this is what little kids are seeing lawyers as,” she recounted. “Don’t embarrass the profession, make sure you have your stuff together.”

Merchant let Willis and Wade just talk.

“In law school, you’d lose points,” she said. “But I’m watching it, and I’m like, you’re just vomiting information, and you’re digging your own grave.”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testifies during a hearing in the case against Donald Trump on Feb. 15, 2024, in Atlanta. (Alyssa Pointer/Pool/Getty Images/TNS)

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Credit: TNS

Merchant would have a far more frustrating experience when Bradley, her star witness who she believed would prove Willis’ testimony was untruthful, was evasive on the stand.

Bradley, who in person and over texts was candid with Merchant about what he saw between Willis and Wade, said he could no longer recall many details and frequently cited attorney-client privilege. (Bradley had at one point represented Wade during his divorce proceedings.)

A month later, the judge overseeing the case said he couldn’t take any stock in Bradley’s testimony and rejected Merchant’s motion, allowing Willis to stay on the case if Wade resigned, which the latter did within hours.

But Merchant had better luck at the state Court of Appeals, which overturned the lower court’s decision and disqualified the Fulton DA’s office because of an appearance of a conflict of interest. Merchant was thrilled by the outcome, especially after the state Supreme Court declined to step in last month and hear Willis’ appeal.

“It is definitely vindicating,” Merchant said. “So many people thought I was making a mountain out of a molehill, or I was creating this and it wasn’t appropriate to bring and I’d done something wrong.”

She feels bullish that whichever new prosecutor is appointed next will dismiss the charges, at least against Roman.

Backlash and newfound skepticism

Neither Willis’ office nor Wade responded to a request to comment for this story.

Merchant hasn’t seen either since the hearing. But the events of the past two years have made her a persona non grata with the DA’s office.

This spring, a Fulton judge ordered the DA’s office to pay Merchant and her firm more than $54,000 in attorneys’ fees and turn over documents it withheld for months in violation of Georgia’s open records laws. The judge concluded the DA’s office was “openly hostile” toward Merchant and acted intentionally and in bad faith.

Merchant insists that hasn’t dissuaded her from taking cases in Fulton, but she does feel like it’s harder for her clients to get good plea deals from prosecutors there.

“That’s a conversation I have to have because there is backlash,” she said.

At the same time, her work on the case has also helped her secure new clients.

When a Kennesaw father and real estate investor was indicted for allegedly snatching a 2-year-old child from the arms of his mother at an Acworth Walmart, he requested that Merchant represent him after he remembered her work from the Trump case.

Merchant has also begun working as a contributor to Megyn Kelly’s “MK True Crime” network and was recently elected to the University of Florida law school’s board of trustees.

Looking back, she said she feels stung by the way she was treated after bringing up the disqualification motion. Not only by prosecutors she believes were unnecessarily personal and impugned her candor, but also by some defense attorneys who disagree with her decision to represent someone aligned with Trump.

“It was surreal, because I’m doing my job. This has nothing to do with politics,” she said.

She leans on a group of roughly 10 other female attorneys that calls themselves “BAWLS,” short for badass women lawyers.

Attorney Ashleigh Merchant said the backlash she's experienced “was surreal, because I’m doing my job. This has nothing to do with politics.” (Natrice Miller/AJC)
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Given her experience, Merchant says she’s more likely to step up and fight for defense attorneys she feels are being unfairly treated by judges and prosecutors. It’s part of her job as the current president of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

That ethos was on full display last summer when she raced to the Fulton courthouse after learning a judge was planning to hold Brian Steel, the defense attorney representing rapper Young Thug, in contempt of court and put him in jail.

Standing at the podium as her colleagues texted her case law citations, Merchant argued to obtain Steel’s release from custody and urged the judge to step aside since he was a witness to the events at issue.

“We’re not going to let this happen to our brother, who was simply doing his job,” Merchant told the judge.

Merchant said her experience with the Trump case has also made her more skeptical of what she views as political prosecutions. Before, she said she was much more willing to believe a prosecutor had their reasons for pursuing a case.

“I’m just skeptical of all of it at this point,” she said.

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