I bet most Americans have no idea who QAnon conspiracy theory lawyer Sidney Powell is, despite all that media coverage she got for her Kraken and Hugo Chávez remarks. So when she pled guilty to 6 misdemeanor charges in Trump’s Fulton County case yesterday, as much as the media may have had a field day, the country reacted with a collective shrug. She had been charged with conspiracy and racketeering felonies and allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors, accept probation and a tiny fine. So… the government must have gotten her to flip big time— presumably on Giuliani and Trump. That’s my guess.
A former Enron lawyer, Michael Flynn lawyer and Trump lawyer, she always seems to be on the wrong side the law and lost cases in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Michigan trying to overturn the election for Trump. Aside from the case she just settled, she’s being sued by Dominion and Smartmatic for defaming their voting machines.
A trio of Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters wrote that “As part of the deal, Powell agreed to testify truthfully in the case and on Wednesday recorded a video statement with prosecutors. She will receive six years probation and pay a $6,000 fine. She also agreed to pay $2,700 in restitution to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office to replace election equipment in Coffee County. And Powell wrote a letter of apology to the citizens of Georgia… Powell’s plea deal is a significant win for Fulton prosecutors. Powell can speak to closed-door Oval Office meetings she had with Trump, Rudy Giuliani and several other co-defendants.” Big time slap on the wrist, but probably a disaster for Jeffrey Clark and Rudy Giuliani.
Powell’s plea deal ups the pressure on co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro, who was set to go to trial alongside her on Friday. Chesebro was charged for his role in Trump’s plan to use Republican presidential electors to help overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.
…If Chesebro also takes a plea, prosecutors would have the major benefit of not needing to publicly share the evidence they’ve collected at this relatively early point in the legal process. That helps them as they zero in on some of their biggest targets in the case, including Trump and Giuliani, who each face 13 charges.
Otherwise, jury selection will begin Friday in Fulton County court with Chesebro as the lone defendant.
…Under the terms of the deal, if she completes probation without incident, she will have a clean criminal record.
It’s also possible she can keep her law license. During Thursday’s proceedings, prosecutors specifically said Powell’s crimes were not of moral turpitude.
According to the rules of the State Bar of Texas, where Powell practices, a licensed attorney cannot “commit a serious crime or commit any other criminal act that reflects adversely on the lawyers honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects.”
Former U.S.Attorney from Alabama, Joyce Vance, now an NBC legal analyst wrote that the plea deal is bad for Trump. Now it’snopt just Scott Hall who made a deal to testify, but also Powell. After Powell, it is expected that other Georgia defendants will flip as well. “Prosecutors,” she wrote “usually start their dealmaking with the least culpable participants in a conspiracy. They flip these smaller fish in exchange for help making a case against the person above them, until they reach the person or people at the top. The highest value co-defendants can provide prosecutors with unique access to the people in charge of a criminal conspiracy. Powell and Chesebro were literally in the proverbial room(s) where it happened. Powell, for instance, attended the contentious Dec. 18, 2020 Oval Office meeting when it was suggested she be appointed a special prosecutor to investigate election fraud. Chesebro authored the original plan for the fake elector scheme. Their testimony, if they were willing to be truthful and proved credible, could be a real asset for prosecutors. Presumably in this case, Willis and her team are not counting on any such deals; with stakes this high, these prosecutors would have believed their case against Trump was already airtight when they indicted it. But jurors like to hear from witnesses with firsthand knowledge who can explain what happened and how it happened.”
Defense lawyers can attempt to undermine the credibility of cooperating co-defendants’ testimony, especially where it has been traded for favorable treatment. But prosecutors have a ready response. The fact that these witnesses aren’t altar boys is more a reflection on the defendant than the witnesses and the government. The defendant chose the witnesses. These are the people that he surrounded himself with.
And of course, prosecutors have to carefully corroborate testimony from defendants-turned-cooperators with documents, cellphone records, texts, emails, additional witnesses and other evidence. The deal that a cooperating co-defendant gets is contingent on their truthfulness, and prosecutors usually walk through that deal with the witness during their direct examination so that everything is clear to the jury before cross-examination. The witness knows that if they lie, the deal is off.
Deceitful cooperators get exposed. The one person in the courtroom who is sure to know if they are lying is the defendant who is on trial and who can tip off their attorney ahead of cross examination. The risk to the cooperator of losing their deal and ending up worse off is not an empty threat. And prosecutors use this fact when they talk with juries about evaluating the testimony they’ve heard from the now-cooperating witness. Consider the congressional testimony of Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen or Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson. They are textbook examples of witnesses who have been able to change their stories without losing their credibility.
Last night, Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng reported that Team Trump was astounded, incredulous when news came out that Powell flipped. They thought of her as “the wildest of MAGA diehards— someone who swore long past the bitter end that Trump won by a landslide in 2020, and insinuated that a long-dead Venezuelan dictator helped hatch a plot that flipped votes away from her guy. That’s why the former president and much of his inner circle didn’t think the conspiracy-addled lawyer would ever cooperate with prosecutors seeking to convict the ex-president. ‘Crazy as she was, she really believed what she was pushing,’ a lawyer close to the former president says. Her extreme convictions apparently weren’t enough to stop her from working with prosecutors seeking to imprison the former president… ‘[Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her team] managed to break the woman who was never supposed to be breakable,’ says one of the sources with knowledge of the matter, who has known both Trump and Powell for years.”
UPDATE: Another One Falls
Chesebro copped a plea this morning too. He pleaded guilty to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia--and he agreed to testify against Trump. Now there are three.
