At 34, Judge Scott McAfee is not old enough under the U.S. Constitution to be president himself. But since last summer, the Fulton County Superior Court judge has presided over one of the nation’s most important cases: The prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies on charges of election interference in Georgia.
Deciding whether to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney, FaniT. Willis — his former boss — is just one of the many difficult calls that Judge McAfee, who was sworn in as a judge early last year, has had to make in his Atlanta courtroom while overseeing the Trump case.
Judge McAfee grew up in Kennesaw, a suburb of Atlanta. At Emory, the elite private university in Atlanta, he studied political science and music — he is an accomplished cellist — and led the Emory College Republicans, a student group. As a law student at the University of Georgia in the early 2010s, he was an office holder in the campus Federalist Society, a conservative legal network.
After graduation, Judge McAfee interned for two State Supreme Court justices, Keith Blackwell and David Nahmias, both Republican appointees who influenced his approach. Later, he went to work for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, where, as a deputy prosecutor, he handled cases including armed robbery and murder. Ms. Willis was his supervisor in the trial division.
Judge McAfee later worked for officials who ran afoul of Mr. Trump. In 2019, he became an assistant United States attorney in Atlanta. The office was headed by Byung J. Pak, a Republican who quit in January 2021 after learning that Mr. Trump wanted to fire him for not backing his election fraud claims.
Weeks later, Judge McAfee was named state inspector general by Governor Kemp, who would also face Mr. Trump’s ire for declining to help overturn his narrow loss in the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden in Georgia. Mr. Kemp later appointed Judge McAfee to an opening on the Fulton County Superior Court, where he was randomly assigned the Trump case six months later.
Judge McAfee has already earned the respect of a variety of legal experts. Among them is Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “He is one of the most capable new judges that I have ever seen, and he has navigated an extremely challenging situation with grace and intelligence,” Mr. Eisen said.
Judge McAfee made clear last week that he was thinking about how his decisions on the Trump case will be viewed down the line.
“I’ve got two kids, 5 and 3,” he said in a radio interview. “They’re too young to have any idea of what’s going on or what I do. But what I’m looking forward to one day is maybe they will grow up a little bit and they ask me about it. And I’m looking forward to looking them in the eye and telling them I played it straight, and I did the best I could.”
