It's been awhile since I've checked in on donald trump's status as an alleged criminal racketeer. While there's been slow going in South Florida over the stolen documents case, and furious legal battles waged in Washington DC over his role in the January 6th Insurrection, in Georgia the Fulton County case is racing ahead on six cylinders as a number of the 19 indicted alleged co-conspirators are close to facing their courtroom dates with destiny.
In one such matter, a major player in trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results decided to play ball with DA Fani Willis' team and took a plea. Via Kate Brumback at AP News:
Lawyer Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to reduced charges Thursday over efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election in Georgia, becoming the second defendant in the sprawling case to reach a deal with prosecutors.
Powell, who was charged alongside Trump and 17 others with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law, entered the plea just a day before jury selection was set to start in her trial. She pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.
As part of the deal, she will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and will have to write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents. She also recorded a statement for prosecutors and agreed to testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials...
That last part is important, because Sidney Powell is one of the major actors in trump's planning and staging to disrupt the Electoral Count in Congress that January 6th 2021. As Jeremy Stahl notes over at Slate (paywalled):
...This is awful news for Donald Trump, as Powell also immediately becomes the highest-level known cooperating witness against him. Given what we know about Powell’s role in the days surrounding Jan. 6 and the very lenient terms of her plea deal, she appears poised to offer damning testimony against the former president...
Powell is only the second domino to fall among Trump’s alleged co-conspirators agreeing publicly to cooperate against Trump. So far, she is the most damaging for Trump, but she is likely to be joined by others who were targeted in the 19-person RICO conspiracy case filed in August by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and her cooperation places further pressure on others to agree to testify against Trump...
Under the terms of Powell’s agreement, she will receive a small monetary fine and a six-year sentence of probation, and she will have to write an apology letter to the people of Georgia. This may seem like a slap on the wrist for one of the top figures implicated in the Jan. 6 cases, but it could mean she gave up a significant amount of evidence against even higher-level figures as part of her deal. Indeed, the agreement included a pledge to turn over all documents, testify against all of her co-defendants, and offer a recorded statement to prosecutors. She’s already done the last part.
That testimony against her co-defendants could start as soon as next month, when the trial of Chesebro is projected to begin. While Powell is not obligated by the agreement to testify against Trump as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution, scheduled for March, any testimony she gives in the Chesebro trial could potentially be used by Smith’s team. If Powell refuses to testify in the federal case, Judge Tanya Chutkan could decide to admit any Georgia testimony. “Her testimony will be on the record and potentially admissible,” in the federal case, said Eisen...
What’s more important, for the purposes of the prosecutions against Trump, though, is that the House Jan. 6 committee revealed that she was an active participant during a critical White House meeting in the weeks before Jan. 6, during which Trump allegedly sought to have her appointed as special counsel in order to seize voting machines. Eisen called that the “the Oval Office meeting that has been described as one of the craziest of the Trump administration,” and said testimony on it is likely to be critical to the overall conspiracy charge...
Powell was literally in the room when it happened. She was going to play whatever role trump wanted her to do in order to disrupt the vote counts and overturn the results to favor himself.
This was a trumpian supporter who jumped from state to state, filing legal motion after legal motion to delay, overrule, and eliminate any election results that went to Biden. Rallying to a battlecry of "Release the Kraken!" Powell blundered through every case with poor and ill-informed legal challenges lacking credible witnesses or documentation, and that pretty much got herself laughed out of each and every courtroom.
With Powell flipped, she becomes an eyewitness to most of everything trump's inner circle of election deniers - Bannon, Stone, Giuliani, and many others - planned and committed before, during, and even after January 6th blew up.
I doubt any of the marquee names are going to flip - not yet - because their own grifting and personal fortunes are on the line to where fighting it out in court is the only path they can take (and still make money from MAGA believers).
But the lower-tier people in the plots and schemes don't have such options. They're facing serious jail time, and in Georgia there's no chance for parole until AFTER they've served in prison.
We're all just waiting for the rest of the Fulton County 19 to flip to save their own hides.
Get kraken, you fools. The ones who make the quickest deals get the best deals.
1 comment:
The Cheese has pleaded guilty. Three down, sixteen to go. Powell's misdemeanor charges don't automatically nuke her law license, although I don't know who would hire her at this point.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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