Fani Willis is the Georgia DA who brought a case against Trump and 18 co-conspirators for (allegedly) engaging in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the presidential election in the state. Today, one of Trump’s co-defendants, Michael Roman, filed a document with the court claiming that DA Willis hired a romantic partner to help prosecute the case and then benefitted financially from the relationship.

The bombshell public filing alleged that special prosecutor Nathan Wade, a private attorney, paid for lavish vacations he took with Willis using the Fulton County funds his law firm received. County records show that Wade, who has played a prominent role in the election interference case, has been paid nearly $654,000 in legal fees since January 2022. The DA authorizes his compensation…

The filing alleges that Willis and Wade have been involved in a romantic relationship that began before Wade was appointed special prosecutor. It says they traveled together to Napa Valley and Florida, and they cruised the Caribbean using tickets Wade purchased from Norwegian and Royal Caribbean cruise lines — although the filing did not include documentation of those purchases.

The document offers no concrete proof of the romantic ties between Willis and Wade, but says “sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney have confirmed they had an ongoing, personal relationship.”

CNN has more about the filing’s allegations:

In the filing, the attorneys allege Willis “violated her own county’s ethical standards and created an impermissible conflict of interest” when she hired Wade as a special prosecutor in the Georgia case “without obtaining approval prior to appointing him.”

The attorneys also say Wade is being paid far more than other prosecutors in her office and that they used the money to take vacations together to Napa Valley, Florida and the Caribbean. They allege Willis “never had legal authority to appoint” Wade in the first place and that she bypassed normal procedures for such hires.

“Wade is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute this case on her behalf,” the attorneys write in the filing. “In turn, Wade is taking Willis on, and paying for vacations across the world with money he is being paid by the Fulton County taxpayers and authorized solely by Willis.”

That does sound like corruption if it’s true. The Atlanta Journal Constitution spoke to a legal ethics expert who told them that if the allegations suggest, “Willis was conflicted in the investigation and prosecution of this case.” CNN spoke to a different expert who says the problem here is primarily the optics.

Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University College of Law and legal analyst, told CNN the filing “probably means relatively little in terms of derailing the prosecution against Trump and his allies except to undermine its legitimacy.”

“It’s an internal conflict of interest and certainly an optics problem, if true. The biggest issue here is it will undermine the legitimacy of the prosecution just as an optical matter,” he said.

But the if true part of this is still a very big caveat. The filing itself doesn’t provide any proof for any of these allegations. Roman’s lawyer says there’s a reason for that. She reviewed files connected to Nathan Wade’s ongoing divorce and made copies of documents which ostensibly back up some of these claims. However, at some point after she did so, the divorce case was sealed. Roman’s lawyer claims the sealing of the case was improper but is waiting until that issue is settled before putting any information she copied from the file forward in public.

So we’ll have to wait and see if Roman’s lawyer can back this up. Wade didn’t respond to a request for comment and Willis’ office said she would respond to the allegations in court filings. I sort of doubt she’ll be able to stick to that unless the response is coming tomorrow morning. At some point soon she’ll need to issue a denial of some kind.