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Tag: sidney powell
"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.

Sidney Powell

'Bad News' For Sidney Powell As Georgia Co-Defendant Takes Plea Deal

The first of 19 co-defendants in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ RICO and election interference case against Donald Trump has pleaded guilty in what is being described as a “plea deal.”

“Under the terms of an agreement with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office, Hall pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to commit computer theft, conspiracy to commit computer trespass, conspiracy to commit computer invasion of privacy, and conspiracy to defraud the state,” NBC News reports. “Under the terms of the deal, he’s being sentenced to five years probation.”

CNN previously reported “Hall, a bail bondsman and pro-Trump poll-watcher in Atlanta, spent hours inside a restricted area of the Coffee County elections office when voting systems were breached in January 2021. The breach was connected to efforts by pro-Trump conspiracy theorists to find voter fraud. Hall was captured on surveillance video at the office, on the day of the breach. He testified before the grand jury in Fulton County case and acknowledged that he gained access to a voting machine.”

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a professor of law and frequent MSNBC contributor, says Hall “was in the thick of things with Sidney Powell on January 7 for the Coffee County scheme involving voting machines. If he’s cooperating, it’s a bad sign for her.”

Hall’s plea deal “spells bad news for, among others, Sidney Powell,” says former Department of Defense Special Counsel Ryan Goodman, an NYU Law professor of law. Goodman posted a graphic showing the overlap in charges against Hall and Powell, which he called “alleged joint actions.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Sidney Powell

Special Counsel's Expanding Probe Imperils 'Kraken' Lawyer Sidney Powell

In contrast to Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' broad, far-reaching case, special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results is often described by legal experts as lean and mean.

But according to CNN reporters Zachary Cohen and Paula Reid, Smith is, in some ways, "widening" his investigation. And this increases the possibility that some of Trump's allies "could still face legal peril" because of their efforts to help Trump stay in office in 2020 despite losing the election to now-President Joe Biden.

One of those allies is far-right attorney and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who is among Trump's co-defendants in Willis' case.

"Questions asked of two recent witnesses indicate Smith is focusing on how money raised off baseless claims of voter fraud was used to fund attempts to breach voting equipment in several states won by Joe Biden, according to multiple sources familiar with the ongoing investigation," Cohen and Reid report in an article published by CNN on September 5. "In both interviews, prosecutors have focused their questions on the role of former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell."

The CNN reporters add, "According to invoices obtained by CNN, Powell's nonprofit, Defending the Republic, hired forensics firms that ultimately accessed voting equipment in four swing states won by Biden: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona."

Powell, according to Cohen and Reid, "has also been identified by CNN as one of Trump's un-indicted co-conspirators listed in Smith's federal election indictment."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Donald Trump

As Scope Of Trump's Lies Emerges, Georgia Indictment Appears More Likely

Donald Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger included a whole series of false claims, threats, and obvious efforts to drag him into a conspiracy. A second call to Raffensperger’s office, heard by members of a Fulton County grand jury, added still more lies. Among the claims that Trump made was one in which he insisted “dead people voted.” Trump told Raffensperger that his team had done the research and produced the evidence to support this claim.

“They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number,” said Trump, “and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”

As The Washington Post reports, Trump really did have a study in hand from researchers he had hired to look at the results in Georgia and deliver an analysis. However, what that report found was not what Trump claimed. The number his researchers had uncovered suggested that the maximum number of votes that might have been cast using the identity of dead Georgians was “23 such votes across the Peach State.” That’s roughly 5,000 short of the 5,000 Trump claimed.

This is only one of the bald-faced lies Trump told in that conversation, and it’s just one of several equally egregious falsehoods Trump and his team have tried to pass off in state after state. It’s also one of the reasons Trump’s legal team is now sweating the obvious: that grand jury in Georgia is likely to deliver an indictment.

As a number of grand jury cases connected with Donald Trump push toward possible time in court, more and more evidence is leaking to the public that shows just how much effort Trump put into finding some evidence of voter fraud, and just how much lying he was willing to do when that evidence failed to appear.

Last September, it became clear that an internal report prepared at Donald Trump’s order had failed to support claims of any issue with voting machines even as Trump’s attorneys were in court claiming that Dominion and Smartmatic were secretly using the same software, that Dominion had been founded to serve former Venezuela dictator Hugo Chávez, that the machines were funded by George Soros, and that Dominion’s leadership had connections to antifa activists.

However, all of these claims had already been debunked by that internal report prepared expressly for Trump. As The New York Times reported then, it’s not as if the people making statements in court were unaware of the findings. They just hid them.

The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

In recent weeks, it’s become increasingly clear that Trump is terrified. He’s been using his social media accounts to attack investigations into his lies about the election, investigations into his connection to Jan. 6, investigations into tax fraud, and investigations into crimes associated with his payoff to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. The increasing frequency and vehemence of these posts shows just how certainly Trump seems to believe papers are coming to his door. And soon.

The report viewed by the Post shows that Trump knew his actions in almost every state where his “elite legal team” was clogging the courts were based on outright lies. In Nevada, Trump’s lawyers went to court claiming that 1,506 ballots were “cast in the names of dead people.” Trump’s own investigators actually indicated a number of around 20. And this number is likely too high.

Even the small number of potentially ineligible ballots that the Trump report claims were cast by dead people may be an overestimation. It is not uncommon for a small number of voters to cast ballots early or by mail and then die before Election Day. Those ballots are typically counted, and considered legally cast, because of the difficulty of tracking and retrieving the votes in such a short time frame.

The fact that Trump didn’t just lie to state officials, but did so intentionally and in absolute contradiction to the evidence that had been given to him, is another reason why the case in Fulton County, Georgia, is expected to end with charges. In every state, the researchers that Trump hired found no evidence of widespread fraud, and no reason not to support the numbers that the state reported.

Trump knew he was lying from the outset. So did his legal team. But they lied anyway—to the public, to Congress, to state officials, and in court.

On Friday, Trump pumped out a 90-second rant warning his supporters that Democrats are aiming to “steal” the 2024. In addition to repeating all the elements of the Big Lie, Trump warns that “the DOJ should stop” and that “Republicans in Congress are watching closely.”

If watching this is hard to tolerate, just imagine he’s wearing an orange jumpsuit. Trump is certainly thinking about it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.