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Tag: jenna ellis
Jenna Ellis

Fox News Showcased Jenna's Election Lies -- And Ignored Her Guilty Plea

Jenna Ellis, a Republican lawyer who participated in Donald Trump’s scheme to subvert the results of the 2020 election, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference case against the former president and his alleged accomplices. Ellis used the airwaves of Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business, to push false election claims, even as the network’s stars privately disparaged her — but now Fox has all but ignored her guilty plea in Trump’s case.

Ellis, who had faced charges which included participating in what prosecutors called a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Trump’s defeat in Georgia, pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, which could include giving testimony at trial, and said in a statement to the court that she had “failed to do my due diligence” and feels “deep remorse” for her actions.

Fox has kept its viewers in the dark about Ellis’ plea, which received extensive coverage on CNN and MSNBC. Fox News provided only about 3 minutes of coverage across 2 segments while Fox Business had not mentioned it at all, according to a Media Matters review through 3 p.m. ET.

Fox’s lack of coverage around Ellis’ guilty plea is particularly relevant given that she had used the networks’ platforms to promote election falsehoods. Ellis appeared on Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business, more than 20 times in the weeks following the 2020 election, according to the Nexis database and Media Matters’ internal database. The bulk of Ellis’ interviews came with hardcore Trumpist election deniers like Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, and Lou Dobbs, though she was also hosted by “news”-side anchors like Harris Faulkner and Shannon Bream.

Ellis used her Fox interviews to promote election lies — including about Dominion Voting Systems, the technology company that subsequently sued Fox for defamation, eventually reaping a record $787.5 million settlement.

And filings in that lawsuit reveal that inside Fox, the network’s stars knew that Ellis was not a credible voice.

When Ellis appeared on then-Fox prime-time host Tucker Carlson’s show on November 4, 2020, she pushed a viral fake news story that in Michigan, “You have 138,000 votes that magically appear that are all 100% Biden votes.”

“The specific case you are referring to, where 100% of the votes, many votes, were cast for Joe Biden. That doesn’t seem plausible. Will those votes count?” Carlson asked. He later added that “100% of anything ought to make you nervous because it’s probably a crock. And that does not seem believable to me.”

But texts revealed in the Dominion suit show that the next day, Carlson was informed that claim was false.

“Just for heads up jenna ellis she was wrong last night when she said there were a 100k ballots and all for Biden,” he was told.

“Many have said that,” Carlson replied.

Carlson would later criticize Ellis’ claims about Dominion to her directly. On November 21, 2020, he texted her, “Circumstantial won’t work with this story. If there’s no one inside the company willing to talk, or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it, this seems shockingly reckless to me. And as you know there isn’t.”

Carlson and Fox host Laura Ingraham also criticized Ellis in text messages two days later during a discussion about the ineptitude of the Trump legal team.

“Let’s just put it this way, when your WH [White House] counsel has a strong view about the quality of the legal team.… Jenna Ellis…Oy vey. No serious lawyer could believe what they were saying,” Ingraham wrote.

“But they said nothing in public. Pretty disgusting,” Carlson replied.

“That she is even connected in any way to the effort is a fucking joke,” Ingraham added.

But Fox producers happily continued booking that “fucking joke” to push the same election lies to their audience, because Fox is a pro-Trump propaganda network that yoked its own success to that of the former president.

Three years after Trump’s defeat, that means declaring the former president’s myriad prosecutions to be the politically motivated salvos of a Stalinist administration — and paying no mind when the one-time regulars it hosted to defend him now plead guilty to associated crimes.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

"Before The Next Teardrop Falls": Jenna Ellis Makes Courtroom Confession

"Before The Next Teardrop Falls": Jenna Ellis Makes Courtroom Confession

Jenna Ellis, the lawyer who in 2020 described herself as part of Donald Trump’s “elite strike force team,” has reached a plea deal with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and will plead guilty to a felony she committed when she worked to help Trump overturn the election results in Georgia. She was charged with soliciting a public officer to violate his oath to the people of Georgia. She pleaded guilty to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false writings and statements.

Ellis is the third Trump lawyer to plead guilty to committing crimes in the racketeering case against Trump and 18 other co-defendants. The other lawyers are Sidney Powell, who pleaded guilty last Thursday, and Kenneth Chesebro, who entered a plea of guilty the following day, on the morning his trial was set to begin. Another co-defendant, Scott Hall, pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy to interfere in the performance of official election duties in the Coffee County theft of election data.

In her guilty plea, Ellis agreed to complete three to five years of probation, to pay a $5,000 fine, to do100 hours of community service, and to write a letter of apology to the people of the state of Georgia. Ellis tearfully read her letter of apology aloud to the judge this morning, beginning by introducing herself “as an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings.”

Except when it came to helping her hero Donald Trump steal the election of 2020 , apparently.

Previously, like Powell and Chesebro before her, Ellis recorded on video a lengthy “proffer,” giving prosecutors details of the facts she will be able to testify to when she is called to give evidence against her co-defendants, including Trump.

Prosecutors read aloud the indictment against Ellis, including portions that detailed how she wrote memos for Trump about how Vice President Pence could go about overturning the election results on January 6, 2021, when he presided over the certification of electoral ballots in the Congress. The indictment also outlined how she had traveled with fellow Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, where she gave false information about the election to state lawmakers, urging them to use their powers to overturn the election results in their states in favor of Trump. Ellis has already been sanctioned by a Colorado judge for the false statements she made about the election, and in court today, she admitted to making more false statements on behalf of Trump.

She claimed she made the statements “in a reckless state of mind,” and in her apology stated that she had “relied on lawyers with many more years of experience than I to provide me with true and reliable information.” She went on to say that she had failed to do “due diligence” and check her facts. In other words, as a “Christian” lawyer, Jenna Ellis blamed her failures on other lawyers, said she had been “misled” by them, and said she no longer believed the lies she told about Trump being the winner of the 2020 election. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said in her apology letter.

One lawyer who would seem to have “misled” Ellis is Rudy Giuliani. Another would seem to be John Eastman, and yet another may be Jeffrey Clark. None of these men will probably be sleeping very comfortably tonight, thinking of the testimony she is set to give against them, not to mention Donald Trump, the client on whose behalf she, Powell, and Chesebro told all their lies.

Donald Trump’s friends, lawyers, campaign workers, and go-fers are discovering, one after another, that their loyalty to the former president ends at the jailhouse door.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Tearful Jenna Ellis Pleads Guilty, Apologizes, And Dumps Trump (VIDEO)

Tearful Jenna Ellis Pleads Guilty, Apologizes, And Dumps Trump (VIDEO)

On Tuesday, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis became the latest Trump associate to cut a plea deal with prosecutors in Georgia regarding her role in the racketeering case to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The bluster Ellis has been known for was gone on Tuesday as she semi-sobbed through a brief statement to the court during which she sort of took responsibility for trying to help reverse the decision of millions of Georgians while squarely blaming others for misleading her.

I endeavored to represent my client to the best of my ability. I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information, especially since my role involved speaking to the media and to legislators in various states. What I did not do, but should have done, your Honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true.[...] If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post election challenges.”

Ellis finished by claiming some responsibility: “I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado Bar who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Trump Lawyer Ellis: Club Q Victims Deserve To Suffer 'Eternal Damnation'

Trump Lawyer Ellis: Club Q Victims Deserve To Suffer 'Eternal Damnation'

Jenna Ellis, one of the right-wing lawyers who represented former President Donald Trump in his failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election, proclaimed on Wednesday's edition of The Jenna Ellis Show that the five victims who were murdered in the massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado early Sunday morning are burning in Hell.

"The five people who were killed in the nightclub that night, there is no evidence at all that they were Christians. So assuming that they were not, that they had not accepted the truth of the gospel of Christ and affirmed Jesus Christ as the lord of their life, they are now reaping the consequences of having eternal damnation," Ellis said. "And that is far, far greater – we should be having that conversation. Instead of just the tragedy of what happened to the body, we need to be talking about what happened to the soul and the fact that they are now in eternal separation from our lord and savior Jesus Christ."

Watch below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.