The judge who apparently was "randomly assigned" to oversee perhaps the biggest case in Georgia history has been on the job for just six months and has ties to Fulton County DA Fani Willis and other key people involved in the 2020 election in the Peach State.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee was assigned to the the criminal indictment case of former President Donald Trump and 18 others who prosecutors charge organized efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
McAfee, 34, was formerly a prosecutor in the Fulton County district attorney's office and later for the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta.
McAfee has worked for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who Trump repeatedly slammed for doing "nothing" about irregularities in the 2020 vote; former U.S. Attorney Byung J. Pak, whom Trump forced out of office for not joining the election contesting effort; and Willis, the Democrat district attorney in Fulton County who has investigated Trump for two and a half years and, critics say, conveniently waited to file charges against the top GOP contender ahead of an historically important presidential campaign.
The Wall Street Journal cited Lawrence Zimmerman, an Atlanta criminal defense lawyer who has been in court with McAfee when he was a prosecutor, as saying the sheer size of the case now before McAfee might be overwhelming to someone so new to the bench.
Zimmerman expected McAfee to eventually create separate trials for individuals or smaller groups of those tried to handle the large number of people indicted.
“It’s so vast and voluminous … this is not manageable,” he said.
McAfee didn’t respond to calls to his office seeking comment.
McAfee is young for a judge, having graduated from Emory in 2010, with a focus on political science and music. He graduated from the University of Georgia law school in 2013, where he became a member of the Order of the Barristers, an honor society.
After a brief stint in private practice, he became a Fulton County prosecutor in 2015, working in the Major Case Division and handling “hundreds of felony cases ranging from armed robbery to murder,” according to a state biography. Willis was a supervisor in the office at the time.
In September 2018, McAfee went to work as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, also in Atlanta. He “investigated and prosecuted major drug trafficking organizations, fraud, and illegal firearms possession,” according to the state biography.
There ought to be a law in Georgia about rogue prosecutors: Wait, there is
In May, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill into law creating a new commission empowered to discipline and remove wayward prosecutors, saying it will curb “far-left prosecutors” who are “making our communities less safe.”
The measure establishing the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission was launched on July 1 and will start accepting complaints Oct. 1. (Expect it to be inundated, observers say.)
“I am not going to stand idly by as rogue or incompetent prosecutors refuse to uphold the law,” Kemp said.
Georgia Democrats strenuously opposed the measure, saying the Republican legislative majority was seeking another way to impose its will on Democrat voters at the local level.
One of the Democrats publicly denouncing the measure was Fulton County's Willis.
“This bill was never deemed necessary until an historic thing happened in 2020, and let’s just talk about it and tell the truth...,” Willis said. “In 2020, we went from having five district attorneys that are minorities to 14 that are minorities.”
The commission could also target prosecutors who declared before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 that they wouldn’t prosecute abortion-related offenses. Seven current Georgia DAs reportedly fit that description.
MTG has personal receipts on 2020 election irregularities in Georgia
Records back up Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's claim that her husband husband never requested an absentee ballot in the November 2020 election, despite election records showing otherwise.
During a court hearing earlier this year, Greene reiterated that voter fraud took place in Georgia during the 2020 election. She testified under oath — during an April hearing challenging her candidacy for alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 protest — that her husband did not request a mailed absentee ballot, despite receiving one, and when he showed up to vote in person he was told he had already voted absentee.
New information from Floyd County, where Perry Greene voted, supports the claim that he never requested a ballot.
“I was not working for the Floyd County Board of Elections and Registration during the 2020 election and so I reviewed the Georgia Secretary of State’s E-Net System to see what information I could provide,” county elections supervisor Pete McDonald said in a statement. “The E-Net system indicated that a ‘by mail’ absentee ballot was turned in by Mr. Greene prior to him completing an ‘in person’ absentee ballot on 10-23-2020. This is the same record that would have been referred to by any poll worker who was on duty at the time Mr. Greene appeared to vote in person by early ballot.”
McDonald said he reviewed additional records and that review leads him to believe the information obtained from the E-Net system was either inaccurate or incomplete.
Rep. Greene wrote on social media:
"Was there election fraud in Georgia in 2020? YES there was. My then husband, Perry Greene showed up to vote and was told he already voted by absentee ballot but did NOT and NEVER requested an absentee ballot.
"Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, what happened?
"The information showed that in fact, Perry never requested an absentee ballot, never turned one in, and was forced to surrender an absentee ballot he never requested and never filled out and never turned in so that he could vote in person in the general election of 2020.
"The fraud was in the Secretary of State website. It showed an absentee ballot had been turned in (in his name) but he had never turned one in. Who turned in an absentee ballot in Perry’s name? Who typed it in the SOS system?
"What happened to that absentee ballot after he then voted in person on another ballot? I heard from people all over Georgia that said the same thing happened to them, what happened to all those fake absentee ballots?
"We have never received an explanation from Brad Raffensperger. And Perry and Brad Raffensperger used to be friends and were even in a men’s Bible study group together years ago. You’d think Brad would pick up the phone. So actually Governor Kemp, there were many problems in our Georgia election in 2020.
"I have all the FOIA documents and I’m happy to share them."
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