UPDATE (Oct. 24, 2023, 9:43 a.m. ET): Lawyer Jenna Ellis on Tuesday pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case. She’s the fourth co-defendant in the case to do so.
The last-minute guilty pleas from Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro have raised questions about what their convictions could mean for others on the Georgia indictment, including for alleged election subversion kingpin Donald Trump himself. Not knowing what they’ve shared with prosecutors privately, it’s unclear how much more danger Trump is in now than he was before those pleas.
But whatever their cooperation value, Powell and Chesebro’s no-jail deals show something simpler, but perhaps more telling, about how the rest of the case may unfold. And that’s the prosecution’s willingness to cut such deals.
As a general matter, it’s unremarkable for a defendant to plead guilty in a criminal case, even up to the eve of trial. Most cases don’t go to trial, for a variety of reasons. At least some of those factors were likely at play here — including, for a defendant, the threat of greater punishment upon conviction and, for a prosecutor, the certainty of conviction itself. Underlying both related variables is the jury, an unpredictable player in the equation.
On that note, it’s no accident that these deals came together when they did. Powell and Chesebro are the second and third to drop from the 19-defendant indictment, following bail bondsman Scott Hall last month. If Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had a plan for which defendants she wanted pleas from first, it would be quite a coincidence if Powell and Chesebro happened to be on that list. Rather, their deals were more likely propelled by their invocation of speedy trial rights, which put the parties at the precipice of trial just two months after indictment.
Again, we don’t know what Powell or Chesebro told Willis’ team in their proffer sessions. It’s possible they provided helpful information against perceived higher-ups in the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Either way, it’s notable that two lawyers in a racketeering indictment, charged with effectively trying to thwart democracy, won’t have to spend a day behind bars — and with the state’s apparent blessing to keep their law licenses, to boot. To be sure, their deals could wind up being outliers relative to their alleged culpability — a function of their having wisely (in retrospect, at least) invoked speedy trial rights. That is, perhaps there isn’t much more to the deal than meets the eye: the defendants stay free and prosecutors conserve their resources while securing convictions (however minor, compared to the indictment’s more dramatic allegations). But even if the remaining 16 defendants aren’t worried about Powell or Chesebro giving incriminating information against them, they may still be more motivated to enter a plea bargain after seeing what their co-defendants got — and knowing that whatever deals might be available might not last forever. For that reason alone, the list of remaining defendants may shorten sooner rather than later. Just as I predicted there wouldn’t be a 19-defendant trial before these pleas happened, I doubt that all 16 people left will take their cases to trial. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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