Nineteen were indicted in the Georgia election case. Four have now pled guilty. All four have agreed to cooperate with the prosecutors in the case against the remaining co-conspirators.
A plea agreement is a contract. Cooperation is offered in exchange for leniency in sentencing. The terms of those agreements have been described in the media as generous, in that the defendants will all avoid jail time, assuming good behavior. In some cases, they get to keep their law licenses, although state bars might determine otherwise down the road. Of interest beyond that are the specifics about what cooperation entails and the penalty for breach. If criminal plea agreements are reduced to writing somewhere, I have been unable to find online versions of the plea agreements in Georgia v. Trump, which is a shame. I will have to cobble together the terms from news reports on the court proceedings on the matter.
The first to enter a plea was bail bondsman Scott Hall (right)
, perhaps the least notorious of the alleged criminal conspirators. According to Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, writing in The New York Times, he pled guilty to five misdemeanor counts of intentional interference with performance of election duties. He had been charged with racketeering and felony conspiracy in connection with tampering with voting equipment in Coffee County, Georgia in January 2021 in an attempt to discover evidence of voting fraud at the behest of the Trump campaign.
According to the plea deal, he will serve five years of probation. He will pay a $5000 fine and apologize to the people of Georgia. He will have to perform 200 hours of community service and surrender his license to carry a firearm. He may not participate in activities relating to the administration of an election. He agreed to testify against his co-conspirators, which is bad news for two other defendants, Misty Hampton and Cathy Latham, who allegedly participated in the Coffee County scheme. Defendant David Shafer the former head of the Republican Party in Georgia, also seems to have ties to Mr. Hall through Mr. Hall's brother-in law, David Bossie.
The next to fall was Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell (left). Charles Bethea and Sue Halpern provide in-depth coverage in The New Yorker on what led Ms. Powell to plead guilty. She pled guilty to six misdemeanor counts of election interference and will have to pay nearly $9000 in fines and serve six years of probation. She has apologized the the people of Georgia and agreed to testify in the proceedings against her co-conspirators.
Ms. Powell was engaged in a lot of election fraud shenanigans, but she, like Mr. Hall, was convicted for allegedly tampering with voting machines in Coffee County. Misty Hampton, the county's election supervisor, apparently bought into Ms. Powell's nutter idea that Dominion voting machines had been tampered with. She refused to certify her county's election results. The story in The New Yorker provides a lot of details I had not read elsewhere. It took a long time to discover what happened in Coffee County, because Georgia's secretary of state blocked efforts to learn whether the voting records has been illegally accessed. An election watchdog group investigated and was able to issue subpoenas. Their forensic expert was able to confirm a breach, and the rest was expected to come out in Fani Willis's case.
The New Yorker obtained a copy of a 400-page report by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). It details what might have been the basis for Ms. Powell's rather surprising decision to plead guilty. Among other things, it seems clear that Powell and her co-conspirators, including Ms. Hampton and Ms. Latham, represented to their hired forensics experts that they had permission to access election equipment when they did not. Ms. Powell had pursued a litigation strategy of trying to persuade the court that her involvement in the alleged conspiracy could be limited to conduct in Coffee County on January 7th. The fact that she paid the outside experts who were given illegal access to voting data suggests a larger role. The New Yorker seems to suggest that she pled guilty when she did once it became clear that she was going to be implicated in wider illegality.
Next came Kenneth Chesebro. According to Richard Fausset and Alan Feuer, writing in The New York Times, Mr. Chesebro "was accused of conspiring to create slates of fake electors to support Mr. Trump in Georgia and several other states won by President Biden." While the earlier pleas had been to misdemeanors, Mr. Chesebro pled guilty to a single count of conspiracy. He was sentenced to five years' probation. He apologized to the people of Georgia, and he agreed to pay $5000 in restitution, turn over documents, and to testify against the remaining co-conspirators. The Times obtained e-mail communications which it regards as indicating that Mr. Chesebro provided political as well as legal advice and included communications with co-defendant John Eastman. The Times quotes Mr. Chesebro's lawyer, who wants to emphasize that the RICO charge and all other charges against Mr. Chesebro were dismissed. Got it. Mr. Chesebro is JUST an attorney who conspired to file false documents. Mr. Chesebro pleaded guilty to a charge that would not require that he surrender his law license. C'mon bar association. Seems like felons who are also un-indicted co-conspirators in another case might not be fit to be officers of the court.
And finally, yesterday, Jenna Ellis joined the ranks of those who have entered guilty pleas. According to Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, writing in The New York Times, Ms. Ellis will be sentenced to five years of probation, pay $5,000 in restitution and perform 100 hours of community service. Like the others who have entered into plea agreements, she has apologized to the people of Georgia, and she agreed to cooperate fully with prosecutors. Unlike the others, she made a statement to the court in which she tearfully expressed remorse, because she takes her responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously "an attorney who is also a Christian." Add this to the list of ways in which some people think their religion differentiates them from non-believers. News flash: the ethical rules apply to non-Christians as well. We just look within to find our moral compass.
Not surprisingly, it was a bit of a non-apology apology. She was just trying to do the right thing, but she got bad information from people she trusted. She didn't do her due diligence and that's on her. If she had known then what she now knows and what anybody with any sense knew at the time, she never would have represented Donald Trump in his post-election challenges. Unfortunately, what she says here is not consistent with her sworn statement in a Colorado disciplinary proceeding. In that statement, she acknowledged that she had knowingly misrepresented facts in claiming that widespread voting fraud had led to Mr. Trump’s defeat. So her misconduct goes beyond a failure to undertake due diligence.
Last month, Ms. Ellis described Mr. Trump as "a friend," but she said she would not support him politically because of his "malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong." I often say things like that about my friends. I wonder if, after her plea deal and agreement to testify, Mr. Trump will consider her a friend. He's known for his loyalty to close friends. I mean, look at how he has gone out of his way to help Michael Cohen. Allen Weisselberg no doubt spent his four months spent in jail for lying on behalf of the Trump Organization contemplating the value of his close friendship with Mr. Trump.
Richard Fausset and Alan Feuer's story in The Times makes a strong case for why prosecutors may have been willing to grant generous terms, at least to Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell. Their trial was set to begin very soon. If prosecutors had to make their case against those two defendants, they would have revealed a great deal about their litigation strategy, and that information could have been useful to counsel for the remaining plaintiffs.
What's next, you might ask? This is not my area of expertise, but from the perspective of my position as an armchair prosecutor, it seems that these Misty Hampton and Cathy Latham are left looking very exposed, and the noose also seems to be tightening around John Eastman's neck. Rudy Giuliani has already confessed to lies in another Georgia case and is reportedly running out of funds to pay his attorneys. I would be surprised if there weren't more plea agreements on the way to trial, unless the prosecutors, thinking they already have enough witnesses, are no longer interested in offering such generous terms. They may not need to.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/contractsprof_blog/2023/10/the-plea-deals-in-state-of-georgia-v-trump.html
