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U.S. Rep. Scott Perry is on an exhaustive list of potential witnesses that prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., have prepared for a potential 2024 criminal trial against former president Donald J. Trump and 14 co-conspirators for alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential vote in that state.
The list, first reported by The Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper, is a detailed list of prospective witnesses District Attorney Fani Willis could call; it does not guarantee Perry would be called to the stand, but preserves Willis’s right to do so.
Even so, it’s another indication that as long as Trump is engaged in legal battles over his efforts to stay in power after the November 2020 vote — in which Trump was relatively narrowly, but quite clearly, defeated by Democrat Joe Biden — Perry will be catching some of the flak.
Perry’s inclusion on the list is not a surprise, given his heightened involvement in questioning election results and — as some recently-revealed communications have shown — his interest in helping Trump find people who could help execute some of his strategies.
Perry’s involvement has been previously cited in multiple Congressional reports, and he’s fighting a pitched battle with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigators to protect some 2,000 records on his personal cellphone, citing legislative privileges accorded members of Congress.
Attempts to reach Perry through his Congressional office were not immediately successful Thursday, but Perry attorney John Irving downplayed the import of the prosecutors’ witness list when contacted about it Thursday morning.
“I would make nothing of the fact that Representative Perry is included in a long list of potential witnesses in a court case at this early stage,” Irving said.
As outlined by the newspaper, the nearly 200-person list reads like a who’s who of Trump world, including: former Vice President Mike Pence; ex-Attorney General Bill Barr; onetime Justice Department officials Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue; and Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur and former aide to the former president.
Its scope, the paper reported, showcases the breadth of topics that Fulton prosecutors may broach in a case where Trump and 14 other defendants are accused of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 election.
The Georgia prosecutors had already previously confirmed they plan to seek testimony from four onetime defendants in the case who have struck plea deals, including three attorneys previously affiliated with the Trump campaign: Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis.
The remaining defendants have all pleaded not guilty.
Perry is not charged with any crimes stemming from his post-2020 election actions. But the evolving public record has shown he appears to have been enthusiastically engaged in helping Trump as the president signalled that he wasn’t willing to accept the results of the 2020 vote.
In one of the more sensational headlines from last year’s public hearings produced by the House Select Committee formed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Jan. 06, 2021 attacks on the Capitol by Trump supporters, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson listed Perry as among three Congressmen who inquired about a pre-emptive presidential pardon in the wake of the attacks.
Hutchinson said she believed the request — which Perry has vehemently denied — sprung out of a Dec. 21, 2020 meeting with Trump at the White House to strategize about what Congress could do to block final certification of Biden’s election.
Perry has strenuously defended his actions in that time as an appropriate response of a Congressman who was fielding a lot of calls and concerns about issues with the vote.
In a statement issued to PennLive last week after the inadvertent posting of a December 2022 ruling by a federal judge in his cellphone case, Perry attorney John P. Rowley put it this way:
“The communications reflect his efforts to understand real-time information about the 2020 election. They were confidential and intended to address critical business before Congress in the service of his constituents.”
Willis’ office has proposed an August trial date for the Trump case, but nothing has been formally scheduled by the court to date.
Perry, 62, is widely expected to seek re-election next year to a seventh term in the U.S. House of Representatives next year from Pennsylvania’s 10th District, a capital region seat that consists of Dauphin County, most of Cumberland County and roughly the northern half of York County.
In one by-product of the attention he’s received from his involvement in the Trump case, as many as eight Democrats have said they are interested in seeking that party’s nomination to oppose him.
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