Unlike Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has chiefly targeted former President Donald Trump, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has aimed her prosecutorial muscle at Trump and 18 co-defendants in their alleged plot to undermine democracy and alter the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The strategy in prosecuting such sweeping RICO conspiracies is to go “up the chain” — that is, allowing lower level operatives in the conspiracy to plead out in exchange for testimony damaging to the higher level actors. (In mafia cases, this can mean getting the person who executed a murder to plead and flip and testify against the figure higher up the chain who ordered the hit.)
Willis’s strategy has been effective so far, at least as far as compelling pleas. Though it remains unknown exactly how damaging the testimony of her pleaders will be to higher-ups, Willis’s relatively light punishment in exchange for that future testimony indicates that her office believes the defendants who have pled possess important information that implicates those up the chain.
With the plea deal of Jenna Ellis — a former Trump campaign lawyer — announced this morning, that makes four deals Willis has struck in the case so far. Ellis pleaded guilty to one count of “aiding and abetting false statements and writings.”
Ellis said she relied on more senior attorneys "to provide me with true and reliable" info as she took on a more public role repping Trump. "In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the elections in several states, including GA, I failed to do my due diligence" pic.twitter.com/2NK54XZ4xM
— Tamar Hallerman (@TamarHallerman) October 24, 2023
“In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the elections in several states, including GA, I failed to do my due diligence,” Ellis said, the failure to perform due diligence representing a cardinal sin among attorneys.
Ellis gets five years probation, 100 hours of community service and must pay $5,000 to the Office of the Georgia Secretary of State.
And then there were 15–and notably, three of the four to have pled worked as lawyers in the effort to overturn the results of the election. https://t.co/hOjqFdy2jn
— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) October 24, 2023
Notably, three of the four defendants (75%) who have pleaded out so far are attorneys — a fact that can be interpreted as evidence of the soundness of Willis’s Fulton County cases against them. It also means the witnesses were familiar with the legal machinations of the alleged effort to overturn the election, meaning they possess specific actionable details about how the scheme worked.
Attorney Sidney Powell — whom Trump emphasized afterward was never his attorney — and attorney (and former Harvard Law School star) Kenneth Chesebro also pleaded in Fulton County, receiving similar probationary periods in exchange for truthful testimony against other co-defendants (read: up the chain) in the future. The first defendant to take a Willis deal was bail bondsman Scott Hall.
