Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee cautioned prosecutors working for District Attorney Fani Willis against calling witnesses not specifically outlined in their witness list. McAfee made his warning during a procedural hearing on Friday for the trial of attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, who face charges for their alleged part in what Willis claims was a racketeering scheme meant to illegally influence the 2020 election in Georgia.
Responding to a discovery notice filed by prosecutors, which sought to notify the court of their intention to call additional witnesses who provided testimony to the special grand jury but are not identified as witnesses, McAfee (pictured above) told special prosecutor Nathan Wade he expects “the state to be adhering to witness list rules, and if there are witnesses that are buried in discovery somewhere that don’t make it on that list, we’re going to have an issue and we’re going to have to talk through it.”
McAfee further cautioned the prosecutors against adding hundreds of additional witnesses in response to his warning, explaining, “that’s going to go against what we expect for a witness list.” Assistant District Attorney Adam Ney insisted his goal was to anticipate possible additional witnesses, and his office had “no intent to skirt any of the requirements at all.”
Willis’s team initially said she planned to call 150 witnesses over a four-month trial. The team claimed the same number of witnesses will be required for the case against Chesebro and Powell, even after it was severed from the greater indictment against Trump and the other defendants.
Attorney Brian Rafferty, who represents Powell, argued the prosecutors’ intention to call additional witnesses from the discovery process “opens the door” to “production of all the special purpose grand jury transcripts,” meaning Willis’s office could be required to produce thousands of additional pages of transcripts from its months-long special grand jury as part of discovery.
McAfee told one of the prosecutors he “opened [himself] up to this” by filing such a “broad, sweeping” discovery notice. McAfee ultimately elected to “wait and see” the prosecutors’ final witness list before moving further.
Jurors are now scheduled to begin meeting for selection on October 20, though the trial was originally scheduled to begin on October 23. Additionally, McAfee said he expects the trial to take between three and five months and the court to take breaks on Fridays, around Thanksgiving, and for two weeks around Christmas, for the benefit of the jurors.
The subject of plea agreements was also raised during the hearing when Wade told McAfee such an offer is possible.
“We’ll sit down and kind of put some things together,” said Wade, “and we’ll reach out to defense counsel individually to extend an offer.”
Attorneys for Powell and Chesebro did not respond to the mention of a plea deal, and CNN reported that Scott Grubman, an attorney who represents Chesebro, said in a recent interview that his client intends to go to trial “unless the state does the right thing and drops the case” against him first.
Fulton County has paid Wade and his law firm nearly $550,000 for his work prosecuting Trump.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Georgia Star News and a reporter for the Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
