Georgia prosecutors are picking up co-operators in the Trump 2020 election case. Will it matter?
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Rather than continue to stand behind Trump, three lawyers have cut deals in the last week with prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, agreeing to plead guilty and co-operate in the indictment that charged them, the ex-president and 15 others with illegally plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Sidney Powell was present for a now-infamous December 2020 meeting at the White House where participants hatched far-fetched schemes to keep Donald Trump in power and was so tied to the then-president that he once considered naming her a special counsel to probe claims of election fraud.
Kenneth Chesebro was part of a small coterie of advisers who prosecutors say prodded Republicans in battleground states to submit slates of fake electors who would falsely assert that Trump, not Democrat Joe Biden, was victorious.
Jenna Ellis authored legal memos that prosecutors say laid out strategies for disrupting the counting of electoral votes and advanced baseless voting fraud statements before state legislatures.
Yet rather than continue to stand behind Trump, the three lawyers have cut deals in the last week with prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, agreeing to plead guilty and co-operate in the indictment that charged them, the ex-president and 15 others with illegally plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
The deals ensure the co-operation of witnesses who could presumably offer insider accounts of the desperate scheming to help Trump remain U.S. president -- a boon for prosecutors striving to develop incriminating evidence against higher-profile targets. Even so, it's hard to forecast how much their assistance heightens Trump's legal peril, especially since Powell's own history of outlandish, ill-supported claims of fraud could open her to attacks on her credibility and a bruising cross-examination.
"It's not a slam dunk that she is the knife to the heart of the former U.S. president, but it's not a good day for him when she pleads guilty," John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said of Powell. "She's going to do something that hurts him. The level of the hurt, we don't know yet."
None of the agreements -- Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanour charges, Chesebro and Ellis to a felony -- required prison time. That's a generous resolution for defendants alleged to have played significant roles in what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has called a "criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia's presidential election result." But such an outcome could nonetheless signal to other defendants the benefits that await them if they, too, plead guilty while also helping prosecutors winnow down an unwieldy racketeering case so they can focus on even bigger names.
