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      Jenna Ellis Could Become a Star Witness Against Trump

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      When Jenna Ellis last week became the most recent lawyer to join in an accelerating series of guilty pleas in the Fulton County, Ga., prosecution of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators, she offered a powerful repudiation of the “Big Lie” that could potentially cut the legs out from under Donald Trump’s defense, make her a star witness for prosecutors and a potent weapon against the former president’s political ambitions.Ms. Ellis admitted that the allegations of election fraud she peddled as an advocate for the effort to overturn the 2020 election were false. Two other plea deals, from Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have been important, but Ms. Ellis is in a unique position to aid prosecutors in the Georgia case and possibly even the parallel federal one — as well as Mr. Trump’s opponents in the court of public opinion.Ms. Ellis pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting the false statements made by co-defendants (including Rudy Giuliani) to the Georgia Senate about supposed voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. These included that “10,315 or more dead people voted” in Georgia, “at least 96,000 mail-in ballots were counted” erroneously and “2,506 felons voted illegally.”These lies were at the cutting edge of Mr. Trump’s assault on the election. Both the state and federal criminal prosecutions allege that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators knowingly deployed falsehoods like these in their schemes to overturn the election.Ms. Ellis emerged from her plea hearing as a likely star witness for prosecutors, starting with the one who secured her cooperation, the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis. Unlike Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell, in pleading guilty Ms. Ellis spoke in detail about her “responsibilities as a lawyer.” Tearing up, she talked about the due diligence that “I did not do but should have done” and her “deep remorse for those failures of mine.” The judge, a tough former prosecutor, thanked her for sharing that and noted how unusual it was for a defendant to do so.Trials are about the evidence and the law. But they are also theater, and the jury is the audience. In this case, the jury is not the only audience — the Georgia trials will be televised, so many Americans will also be tuned in. Ms. Ellis is poised to be a potent weapon against Mr. Trump in the courtroom and on TVs.That is bad news for her former co-defendants — above all, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump. Ms. Ellis was most closely associated with Mr. Giuliani, appearing by his side in Georgia and across the country. If her court appearance last week is any indication, she will be a compelling guide to his alleged misconduct. She will also add to what is known about it; she and Mr. Giuliani undoubtedly had many conversations that are not yet public and that will inform the jury. And because Mr. Giuliani was the senior lawyer on the case, her pointed statement that she was misled by attorneys “with many more years of experience” hits him directly.Ms. Ellis’s likely trial testimony will also hit Mr. Trump hard. She has now effectively repudiated his claims that he won the election — an argument that is expected to be a centerpiece of his trial defense. Coming from a formerly outspoken MAGA champion, her disagreement has the potential to resonate with jurors.It also builds on substantial other evidence against the former president, which includes voluminous witness testimony collected by the House Jan. 6 committee indicating that many advisers told him the election was not stolen — and that in private he repeatedly admitted as much.Ms. Ellis’s testimony may also compromise one of Mr. Trump’s main defenses. He has made clear he intends to claim he relied on advice of counsel. But that defense is available only if the lawyers are not part of the alleged crimes. Ms. Ellis’s plea puts her squarely within the conspiracy, as do those of Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell. That will hamper Mr. Trump’s effort to present a reliance-on-counsel defense.In comparing Ms. Ellis to the two other lawyers who pleaded guilty, it is also critical to note that she is promising full cooperation with Ms. Willis. Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell have important contributions to make to the prosecution, but they merely agreed to provide documents, preview their testimony and testify truthfully if called.Ms. Ellis took the additional step of also agreeing “to fully cooperate with prosecutors,” which could include doing interviews with prosecutors, “appearing for evidentiary hearings, and assisting in pretrial matters.”To our knowledge, Ms. Ellis is not yet cooperating with prosecutors in the federal case led by the special counsel Jack Smith, but if she does, she would have a comparative advantage for the prosecution over Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell: They are identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case and would be more problematic for Mr. Smith to deal with. He may not, for example, be willing to immunize them should they assert their privilege against self-incrimination, since that would hamper prosecuting them. But because he has not named Ms. Ellis among Mr. Trump’s alleged federal co-conspirators, he may feel more free to extend immunity to secure her valuable testimony. (He has reportedly done just that with Mark Meadows, a former Trump White House chief of staff.)Ms. Ellis’s guilty plea may also have political reverberations. It is riveting to see a MAGA champion who helped lead the election assault tearfully admitting she and that effort misled the American people. Her court appearance was live-streamed and repeated in a loop on television and social media.Looking ahead in the Georgia case, the judge just got back the five months that he had set aside for the Chesebro and Powell trial. Even if Mr. Trump manages to postpone appearing before a Georgia jury during that window, the trial of other defendants could begin within it — and certainly during 2024. That means Ms. Ellis and other existing and potential witnesses against Mr. Trump will likely be critical not only in the legal arena, but the political one.With Mr. Trump showing no signs of backing down from his claims of 2020 election fraud and a new election upon us, Ms. Ellis’s plea — like the televised Jan. 6 committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, another Trump insider who turned on him with powerful effect — could be a potential turning point in the court of public opinion. When Mr. Trump’s lies are repeated in the future, in whatever venue, expect to see Ms. Ellis often.Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Amy Lee Copeland, a former federal prosecutor, is a criminal defense and appellate lawyer in Savannah, Ga.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Billion-dollar prisons: why the US is pouring money into new construction

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      At a time when the US has narrowly skirted a recession, and people around the country are still struggling with the cost of living, a curious number of states have found billions of dollars for one thing: building prisons and jails.In September, Alabama announced that a new prison, currently under construction, would have a final cost of $1.082bn. The same month Indiana broke ground on a $1.2bn prison. Nebraska is spending $350m on a new prison, while some in Georgia are lobbying for $1.69bn for construction of a jail in Fulton county.The willingness to spend vast amounts of money on locking people up, particularly in states like Alabama, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, is staggering. It’s also wrong-headed, experts say.“Any money spent on caging human beings is not money well spent, period,” said Carmen Gutierrez, an assistant professor in the department of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research specializes in the connection between punishment and health.“We have decades of research showing that incarceration does not improve public safety, and that it in fact harms individuals who themselves are incarcerated. It also harms their families and it harms the communities that they come from. So the damage outweighs any potential benefit.”The US has an incarceration rate of 664 people in every 100,000, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, far higher than other founding Nato countries. (The next highest is the UK, where 129 out of every 100,000 people are behind bars.)That amounts to 1.8 million people incarcerated across the country, but the numbers are not spread evenly. In Alabama, Georgia and other southern states about one in every 100 people is incarcerated in prisons, jails, immigration detention and juvenile justice facilities.The number of people being locked up has declined, somewhat, since the middle of the last decade, but some facts about incarceration remain the same: not all races are incarcerated equally.Black people make up 13% of the US population, but 38% of the prison, jail and other detention facility population, according to Prison Policy Initiative data. White people are far less likely to be caged: despite 60% of the US identifying as white, they also account for 38% of incarcerated people.“Incarceration is a highly gendered and racialized phenomenon,” Gutierrez said. “People who are males make up around 90% of people who go to jail and prison, and people who are black and brown – typically people who are Latino or Indigenous – are making up those who are disproportionately incarcerated.”The mammoth US prison population can be traced to the 1970s, with Richard Nixon’s “tough on crime” and “law and order” rhetoric, but it really exploded in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president.The Fair Fight Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration and systemic racism, says there are a multitude of reasons why the US cages so many people – including the disastrous “war on drugs”, mandatory minimum sentences, exorbitant bail and a lack of mental health services.The tough on crime rhetoric has endured to this day. Violent crime was a huge focus for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterm elections, while Donald Trump has taken to describing big cities as “cesspools of bloodshed and crime”.Trump, who lives in a spa resort in Florida and generally travels only for political rallies or court appearances, has offered no evidence for his claim.Despite the raft of research showing incarceration does more harm than good, few states are seriously attempting to reduce the number of people in jail.In January, Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, introduced new laws concerning how inmates could earn early release for good behavior, in a move critics said would lead to more overcrowding in the state’s prisons. Ivey has also been a key driver behind the state’s costly new prison.“The new prison facilities being built in Alabama are critically important to public safety, to our criminal justice system and to Alabama as a whole,” Ivey said in September.Alabama, which was ranked as the seventh poorest state by US News, has the fifth lowest household income in the country and is a place where a child born in 2020 could expect to live to be only 73 years old.It is also one of 10 largely Republican-led states that has declined to use federal government resources to expand Medicaid – a healthcare program for low-income residents – to more residents, which Gutierrez said can lead to people ending up in incarceration, or being re-incarcerated.“To deny Medicaid expansion in a state is to exacerbate the health and wellbeing issues of poor people who are the ones cycling through jails and prisons due to their poverty and poor health,” she said.“Folks who are formerly incarcerated, their health status may be determining their likelihood of going to jail and prison in the first place. Because if I’m sick, and I’m not working because I’m sick, and if I have mental illness or a substance use disorder, I’m more visible to the police, I’m more visible to punishment, and that thus increases my chances of being sent to jail or prison.”In Georgia, which has also opted out of expanded Medicaid, officials are attempting to source $1.7bn for a new prison near Atlanta, with little sign that politicians are considering spending the money elsewhere. Indiana’s $1.2bn facility is scheduled to open in 2027.One thing most can agree is that conditions in many of America’s jails are dire.Earlier this year, Atteeyah Hollie, deputy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the Guardian there “are daily horrors that are happening” in Georgia’s Fulton county jail – which the new facility would replace.The Department of Justice opened an investigation into the jail in July, citing reports that “an incarcerated person died covered in insects and filth, that the Fulton county jail is structurally unsafe, that prevalent violence has resulted in serious injuries and homicides”.In Alabama, a majority of prisons don’t have air-conditioning, which the Montgomery Advertiser reported made conditions “hell” during a summer where the heat index reached 115F (46C).Both states have committed to improving conditions, but it is hard to shake the sense that the billions being spent on new prisons and jails would be better used elsewhere.Jacob Kang-Brown, senior research fellow at Vera Institute, which works to end over-criminalization and mass incarceration, said the funds should be put towards education and affordable housing, and supporting robust access to healthcare.“The social welfare safety net in the US has been underinvested in for decades. That is part of the reason why we have such a huge investment in incarceration. It’s really a negative cycle,” Kang-Brown said.As president, Trump signed the bipartisan First Step Act, a prison and sentencing reform bill which expanded rehabilitative opportunities for incarcerated people, increased the possibility of early parole for good behavior and reduced mandatory minimum sentences for a number of drug-related crimes.At the time, the act was championed by Republicans, Democrats and advocates.But in the 2022 midterm elections, amid a rise in some forms of violent crime, Republicans began to distance themselves from the First Step Act, while Trump, despite his role in the legislation, would not say whether he still supports it when asked by the New York Times. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival for the GOP presidential nomination, has said he would repeal it.“There are a lot of concerns about public safety, and politicians want to throw money at that problem often, as opposed to thinking hard about what that might mean and how to best address those problems,” Kang-Brown said.“Many people are seemingly more comfortable with investing in law enforcement and prisons to address those things, other than the real kind of investments, like affordable housing, for instance, that can actually improve public safety in a real substantive way.” More

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      After Antifraud Crusade, a Trial Asks: Were Illegal Voters or Legal Ones the Target?

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      True the Vote challenged the legality of 250,000 Georgia voters, offered cash for fraud evidence and recruited poll watchers. A federal trial will determine why.As Republican candidates and their supporters increasingly focus on specious claims of rampant voter fraud, a federal trial starting in Georgia on Thursday will examine whether a key campaign to unmask illegal voters in 2020 actually aimed to intimidate legal ones.The outcome could have implications for conservative election integrity organizations that are widely expected to ramp up antifraud efforts during next year’s general election. The trial also could clarify the reach of an important section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the historic civil-rights law that the Supreme Court has steadily pared back over the last decade.That question is serious enough that the Department of Justice has filed a brief in the case and will defend the government’s view of the act’s scope at the trial. The campaign, mounted in December 2020 by a right-wing group called True the Vote, filed challenges with local election officials to the eligibility of some 250,000 registered Georgia voters. The group also offered bounties from a $1 million reward fund for evidence of “election malfeasance” and sought to recruit citizen monitors to patrol polls and ballot drop-off locations.The lawsuit, filed by the liberal political action committee Fair Fight Inc., alleges that finding fraud was a secondary concern. The actual purpose, the group argues, was to dissuade Democratic voters from turning out in tight runoffs that month for Georgia’s two seats in the U.S. Senate.That would violate a clause of the Voting Rights Act that broadly prohibits any “attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote.”Lawyers for True the Vote argue that the group’s efforts have nothing to do with intimidation and are an essential form of constitutionally protected free speech. Two Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, won the Senate runoffs in early January 2021. The case has since plodded through the legal system for nearly three years before coming to trial.In a briefing last week, Cianti Stewart-Reid, the executive director of Fair Fight, cast the lawsuit as a move to head off what she called “a troubling plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election based on disinformation and bad faith attacks on voter eligibility.”“Georgia has become the testing ground for modern-day voter challenges and other antidemocratic tactics we believe are being deployed as part of a national effort led by followers of the Big Lie,” she said, referring to former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen.Catherine Engelbrecht, a founder and president of True the Vote, did not respond to requests for comment. But in court filings, lawyers for her and the organization said that efforts to search for illegal voters like those in Georgia are protected by the First Amendment.Threatening to punish people for casting ballots clearly violates the Voting Rights Act and has no free-speech protection, one of the lawyers for True the Vote, Cameron Powell, said in an interview. But he said that there was reason to worry that people might cast ballots in places where they did not live. He said the state had mailed seven million absentee ballots to Georgia residents, a measure to make voting easier during the Covid pandemic, although some people on voter rolls no longer lived where they had registered.(In fact, the state sent absentee ballot applications — not actual ballots — to 6.9 million registered voters in 2020. About 1.3 million absentee ballots were cast in the November election, and the state said that “all of them were verified for the voter’s identity and eligibility.”)Lawyers for Catherine Engelbrecht, a founder and president of True the Vote, said that efforts to root out fraud are protected by the First Amendment.Bridget Bennett/Reuters“Engaging in speech about elections and voter integrity, engaging in facilitating petitions by Georgia voters who are concerned about the residency status of other Georgia voters, is subject to the highest First Amendment protections,” he said. “And it’s a very high bar to show that this was done in bad faith.”The intimidation clause of the Voting Rights Act has been invoked before to punish both large-scale challenges to voters’ eligibility and the dispatch of monitors to watch polling places for “suspicious” activity. The national Republican Party was barred from participating in so-called ballot security efforts from 1982 to 2018 because of its involvement in both.The Georgia lawsuit presents a less clear-cut picture than those instances, said Justin Levitt, an election law scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.“It’s not in the center of the strike zone, but it’s not a wild pitch, either,” he said. “The context in this is everything.”True the Vote, a Texas-based organization that arose from Ms. Engelbrecht’s Tea Party activities more than a decade ago, has a checkered financial and legal history. Ms. Engelbrecht’s forays into conspiracy theories and far-right politics have led even some former allies to distance themselves from her activities.The organization’s former lawyer, the conservative legal powerhouse James Bopp Jr., quit the Georgia case in March and sued her and True the Vote over what he claimed was nearly $1 million in unpaid bills.The group has regularly aired charges of fraudulent voting and helped produce the recent film “2,000 Mules” that made widely debunked charges of ballot-stuffing at voting drop boxes in Georgia and elsewhere. In Georgia, the group, saying that it had planned to challenge 364,000 voter registrations statewide, unveiled its election integrity initiative in mid-December 2020, as early voting in the Senate runoffs was getting underway. The voters who faced a legal challenge were among Georgians who had filed change-of-address notices with the Postal Service but had not registered to vote at a new address. Experts say that comparing address lists and registration rolls is not a reliable method of identifying potentially illegal voters. True the Vote and a handful of allies, including local Republican Party officials, eventually forwarded to county election boards some 250,000 potential challenges to registrations. A majority of boards refused to consider them, and those that did appeared to have found no evidence of illegality.But in some cases, the plaintiffs said, local officials summoned voters to bring proof of their eligibility to hearings, and others were told to cast provisional ballots that would be counted only if their eligibility were proven. Political operatives have long used a similar tactic, sometimes sending warning letters about eligibility directly to voters, in efforts to depress turnout.Fair Fight claims that the Georgia effort, combined with the public recruitment of poll watchers and the promise of a financial payoff for allegations of fraud, were largely designed to frighten voters, not to uncover wrongdoing. In court filings, True the Vote has called the allegations overblown and stressed that very few voters were ever notified that their legitimacy had been challenged.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      Trump’s Allies Pledged Loyalty to Him. Until They Didn’t.

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      The former president is facing down Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer, in a Manhattan courtroom, while other ex-loyalists are cooperating in a case against him in Georgia.Donald J. Trump could not hide his anger. Sitting at the front of a crowded New York courtroom this week, he folded his arms tightly across his chest. He tossed his head and scowled. He stared into the middle distance and scrolled through his phone.His ire was directed at Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had taken the witness stand 15 feet away and had promptly called Mr. Trump a liar. Mr. Cohen has told his share of lies as well. But in court, he swore he had done so “at the direction of, in concert with and for the benefit of Mr. Trump.”Mr. Cohen’s two days of dramatic testimony this week provided the first glimpse of what could become a familiar scene: Mr. Trump, sitting at a defense table, watching as a lawyer who once did his bidding now cooperated with the authorities seeking to hold him to account.On the same day Mr. Cohen began his testimony, Jenna Ellis, who had sought to help Mr. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, pleaded guilty to state charges in Georgia. She was preceded by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both lawyers who worked with Mr. Trump’s campaign, both now expected to cooperate in the criminal case that the Georgia prosecutors brought against him.The circumstances surrounding the Georgia criminal case and the Manhattan civil fraud trial are vastly different. But near the center of each case are lawyers who pledged public fealty to Mr. Trump — until they very publicly did not.Mr. Trump has long relied on a phalanx of legal attack dogs to speak on his behalf, or to do or say things he would rather not do or say himself. And because Mr. Trump has such a tenuous relationship with the truth, those lieutenants often spread a message that prosecutors and investigators consider to be outright lies. Lies about an election he lost, a relationship with a porn star he may have had and a net worth he may not quite have achieved.Now those statements are ricocheting back at Mr. Trump as he contends with the civil trial in New York, brought by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, and with four criminal indictments up and down the East Coast. And while Mr. Trump is quick to blame his betrayers — Mr. Cohen is “proven to be a liar,” he said outside the courtroom this week — his predicament was born from his own lopsided approach to relationships.Mr. Trump has a history of disavowing people who were once close to him and find themselves in trouble. He had long since cut ties with Mr. Cohen — until Tuesday, they had not seen each other in five years — and more recently he distanced himself from the lawyers in the Georgia case. He had also refused to pay their mounting legal bills.Their relationships, a one-way street flowing in Mr. Trump’s direction, appeared to work for a time. But when those loyal soldiers faced their own legal jeopardy, their allegiance to the former president became strained or even shattered.There have been exceptions since Mr. Trump’s split with Mr. Cohen. Mr. Trump’s political action committee has picked up the legal bills for his co-defendants in the federal criminal case involving his handling of classified government documents, as well as those of several witnesses connected to the case.Mr. Trump’s company also agreed to dole out a $2 million severance payment to his longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, and continues to pay for Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers. Mr. Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud and testified at the company’s criminal trial last year, but has stopped short of turning on Mr. Trump.Mr. Cohen was among several in a series of people who Mr. Trump turned to over decades in the hopes they would emulate his first fixer and defender, the lawyer Roy Cohn. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Mr. Trump told one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, in an interview. “He brutalized for you.”That brutality — along with Mr. Cohn’s method of conflating public relations defenses with legal ones, making showy displays in court and accusing the federal government of “Gestapo-like tactics” against Mr. Trump in a 1970s suit alleging housing discrimination — became Mr. Trump’s preferred model for a lawyer.Mr. Cohen has often said that those sort of tactics influenced what Mr. Trump looks for in those who defend him.While it is unclear how useful Ms. Ellis and the other two lawyers will be to the case against Mr. Trump in Georgia, Mr. Cohen has already been tormenting Mr. Trump for the last five years. Ms. Ellis became critical of him publicly in the last several months.Mr. Trump made a point of attending the trial in Manhattan this week to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony in person.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesFor Mr. Trump, the feud with Mr. Cohen is personal. Although he is running for president and fighting the four indictments, none of those obligations could pry him away from the Manhattan courtroom to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony. Mr. Trump did not have to attend the testimony, but people close to him say he believes events go better for him when he is present.Mr. Trump’s falling out with Mr. Cohen stemmed from their dealings with the porn star Stormy Daniels.In the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to silence her story of an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier — an affair that Mr. Trump denied had ever taken place.The deal came to light in 2018, and soon, the F.B.I. had searched Mr. Cohen’s home and office. As Mr. Cohen’s life imploded, Mr. Trump began to distance himself from his fixer, and eventually, his company stopped paying Mr. Cohen’s legal bills altogether.Mr. Cohen soon lashed out and began to speak with prosecutors. When he pleaded guilty that year for his role in the hush-money deal, he stood up in court and pointed the finger at the then-president. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen declared, had directed the payment of the hush money.Although the federal prosecutors declined to indict Mr. Trump, this year the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against him related to the deal, using Mr. Cohen as a potential star witness for a trial scheduled to start in the spring. Mr. Cohen has also testified before Congress that the former president’s company had manipulated financial statements to reach Mr. Trump’s desired net worth. That testimony was the catalyst for Ms. James to open her investigation.When Ms. James’s team questioned Mr. Cohen on Tuesday, he repeated many of the same accusations, testifying that Mr. Trump had directed him to “reverse engineer” annual financial statements to reach the former president’s desired net worth.Mr. Cohen spoke calmly and confidently as he recounted Mr. Trump’s obsession with his net worth.But the Trump team’s cross-examination exposed the perils of relying on a disgruntled former aide, especially one as temperamental as Mr. Cohen.Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on Mr. Cohen’s inconsistent statements about the former president and his own crimes, leading him to admit to having lied a number of times. Toward the end of the second day of cross-examination, Mr. Cohen appeared visibly flustered as he tripped over rapid-fire questions about whether Mr. Trump had personally directed him to inflate numbers on his annual financial statements. Mr. Cohen said he had not, prompting Mr. Trump and one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, to throw their hands up in victory.Ms. Habba also resurfaced a series of glowing remarks Mr. Cohen once made about his boss, further underscoring his about-face.“I think he’s going to be an amazing president”; “I’m the guy who would take the bullet for the president”; “I think the world of him, I respect him as a business man and I respect him as a boss,” Ms. Habba emphatically read, as she circled the courtroom with a hand-held microphone like a preacher delivering a sermon.This appeared to delight Mr. Trump, who turned to watch Ms. Habba while draping his arm over her empty chair.Before Mr. Cohen completed his testimony on Wednesday, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Justice Arthur J. Engoron to dismiss the case, citing Mr. Cohen’s contradictions.Justice Engoron denied the request, and Mr. Trump stormed out of the courtroom.Kate Christobek More

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      Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis takes plea deal in Georgia election subversion case

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      Jenna Ellis, the lawyer for Donald Trump who was also facing criminal charges for attempted election subversion, is taking a plea deal, pleading guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.In Fulton county on Tuesday, Ellis became the fourth of 19 defendants to plead guilty as part of the wide-ranging racketeering charges into Trump and allies in the 2020 election in Georgia. Last week, both Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty before their trials were to start. Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman, has also pleaded guilty.Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writing. She was sentenced to five years’ probation, ordered to pay $5,000 restitution to the Georgia secretary of state, 100 hours of community service, and to write a letter of apology. She also agreed to cooperate with prosecutors testify truthfully against the remaining defendants in the case.During a plea hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors detailed how Ellis appeared at a December 2020 hearing in the Georgia senate with Rudy Giuliani and Ray Smith in which they made numerous false allegations about voter fraud in Georgia.“The false statements were made with reckless disregard to the truth,” prosecutors said, and were part of a plan to get the Georgia legislature to set aside the valid results of the presidential elections.Ellis came to tears as she addressed the court, saying she was relying on information that more experienced lawyers provided her and should have investigated further. Had she known what she knows now, she said, she would have declined to represent Trump.She added that she looked back on “the whole experience with deep remorse”.“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information,” she said. “What I should have done, but did not do, your honor, was make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence.”She ended by apologizing to the court and the people of Georgia.All of the defendants who have pleaded guilty have received similar plea deals.Ellis had been charged with violating state anti-racketeering laws and solicitation of violation of an oath by a public officer. She was granted $100,000 bail and previously pleaded not guilty.Ellis has been an outspoken critic of her former friend in recent months, calling Trump a “malignant narcissist” in an interview back in September.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”The 38-year-old was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977.Ellis was a relatively obscure lawyer until she joined the Trump campaign in 2019 after Trump liked her defenses of him on television. Soon, the campaign described her as a “senior legal adviser” despite her lack of experience in election law and minimal legal experience overall.Her cooperation with prosecutors could be particularly bad news for Giuliani, with whom she traveled across the country, appearing at hearings in battleground states convened by state lawmakers to lay out false allegations of fraud. She and Giuliani also tried to convince state lawmakers to appoint alternate sets of electors. Ellis also wrote a memo on 5 January 2021, laying out a strategy for Mike Pence not to count electoral votes from states that had swung the election for Biden, according to the indictment in the Georgia case.Since being indicted, Ellis has complained that Trump was not helping pay legal fees for those charged in Georgia. Earlier this year, she was censured by the state bar in Colorado, where she holds her law license, for her election falsehoods. More

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      in Elections

      The Lawyers Now Turning on Trump

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      Clare Toeniskoetter and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicOver the past few days, two of the lawyers who tried to help former President Donald J. Trump stay in power after losing the 2020 election pleaded guilty in a Georgia racketeering case and have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against him.Richard Faussett, who writes about politics in the American South for The Times, explains why two of Mr. Trump’s former allies have now turned against him.On today’s episodeRichard Fausset, a correspondent for The New York Times covering the American South.The two lawyers pleading guilty in the Georgia case are Sidney Powell, left, and Kenneth Chesebro.Photos: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters; Pool photo by Alyssa PointerBackground readingSidney Powell, a member of the Trump legal team in 2020, pleaded guilty and will cooperate with prosecutors seeking to convict the former president in an election interference case in Georgia.Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump-aligned lawyer, also pleaded guilty in Georgia.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Richard Fausset More

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      in US Politics

      Trump faces new peril in federal 2020 election case after lawyer pleads guilty

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      Donald Trump’s chances of being convicted in the federal 2020 election subversion case may have increased after his top election lawyer took a plea deal in the 2020 election case in Fulton county and admitted that the effort to create fake slates of electors was fraudulent.The immediate consequence of Kenneth Chesebro’s plea deal is that he could incriminate the former president in Georgia, given one of his plea conditions involved testifying truthfully against other defendants.But Chesebro could also separately incriminate Trump in the federal criminal case in Washington, should the special counsel Jack Smith use his new admission to bolster the case that Trump conspired to defraud the United States in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell also took a plea deal last week, underscoring the remarkable run of victories for the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who has separately defeated repeated efforts from multiple Trump allies to transfer their criminal cases to federal court.But while Powell’s plea agreement was particularly notable, in large part due to her personal notoriety and her infamous pitch to Trump at an explosive White House meeting to have the military seize voting machines, the development with Chesebro could be more legally significant.The Chesebro-devised fake electors scheme ultimately became the central part of the strategy pursued by Trump and his allies to stop or delay the January 6 congressional certification of the election results.Trump’s eventual plan involved trying to use the existence of the fake electors to pressure his vice-president, Mike Pence, to declare at the certification that the election results in battleground states that Trump actually lost remained in doubt, and could therefore not be counted.At issue for Trump is that Chesebro’s plea deal in Fulton county required him to admit guilt to count 15 in the indictment – that Trump and Chesebro and others violated the law in filing the fake electors certificate – and thereby affirm that the fake electors were indeed fraudulent.The plea deal also required Chesebro to tape a statement for Fulton county prosecutors, evidence that appears to have been sufficiently helpful in proving their cases against the other co-defendants that he was granted an arrangement under which he faced no jail term.It remains unclear how Chesebro’s plea is being viewed by the special counsel, and even if he were subpoenaed to testify in Washington, Chesebro could assert his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.But if Chesebro does testify in Georgia, it could be a boon for the special counsel who would have the ability to use that testimony in their case, and have Chesebro testify about the facts contained within the statements. The contents of the statement are not public, but are almost certain to touch on the fake electors scheme.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the 45-page federal 2020 election indictment, the conspiracy to defraud the United States was described as the use of dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair the counting and certification of the election results.The admission from Chesebro that the slates, which are being alleged as the vehicle used to commit the conspiracy, were fraudulent could bolster the charge that Trump and his allies fundamentally did use deceit to stop Congress from certifying the election results.After Chesebro took the plea deal, Trump’s lead lawyer told reporters that his “truthful testimony” would help the former president. “It appears to me that the guilty plea to count 15 of the Fulton county indictment was the result of pressure by Fani Willis and her team and the prosecution’s looming threat of prison time,” Steve Sadow said.The lawyer for Chesebro also downplayed his admission. “While Mr Chesebro did take responsibility for conspiracy to commit filing false documents, I want to make something clear: he did not implicate anyone else. He implicated himself in that particular charge,” Scott Grubman said in an interview on MSNBC.But the reality for Chesebro is that he might have little option but to become a cooperating witness against Trump in the federal case. Chesebro was identified as unindicted co-conspirator five in the federal indictment, and prosecutors could pressure him with charges because of his guilty plea. More

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      Trump fake elector scheme: where do seven states’ investigations stand?

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      As Donald Trump faces criminal charges in multiple cases across the country, several states are still investigating a scheme created by Trump allies and boosted by Trump himself to cast fake electoral votes for the Republican candidate for the 2020 election.As part of the US electoral college system, states cast a set number of votes for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state, the winner of which then takes the presidency. Seven states that the former president lost saw slates of fake GOP electors falsely claim Trump had won their electoral votes. These fake electors included high-profile Republicans, such as sitting officeholders and state party leaders.Two prosecutors, in Michigan and Georgia, have already filed charges against fake electors. Others have confirmed investigations but provided few details. One state prosecutor said local laws did not address this kind of crime, which is unprecedented.Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump campaign legal adviser and the supposed mastermind of the fake electors scheme, pleaded guilty in Georgia over his role in subverting the election. Chesebro allegedly created the plan in a secret memo based on Wisconsin’s electoral vote.At the federal level, the special counsel Jack Smith and his team brought charges against Trump and his allies over their attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, which include the fake elector scheme. Several states have confirmed they are cooperating with Smith’s investigation, and news reports have indicated Smith offered limited immunity to some fake electors for their testimony.Since the scheme had no precedent, some states and experts have struggled to figure out which laws may have been broken, and whether the charges should be state or federal. In some states, the fake electors also face civil lawsuits. Here’s where they stand.ArizonaThe former Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, a Republican, never publicly confirmed any investigation into the state’s fake electors, which included high-profile far-right figures such as the state senator Jake Hoffman and the former Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward. The state actually saw two separate sets of fake electors.His successor, the Democrat Kris Mayes, told the Guardian earlier this year that her office is investigating the fake electors, but has not provided any details of the investigation so far. On a recent Arizona Republic podcast episode, Mayes said she could not say much about the contours of the investigation, but that her office was taking it “very seriously” and that it was a “very important investigation”.While the cases in Michigan and Georgia are much further along, she noted that their prosecutors have been in place much longer than she has. Mayes took office in January 2023.GeorgiaThree fake electors in Georgia were charged as part of a broader case against Trump and his allies over election subversion attempts.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, brought charges against the former Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer, the state senator Shawn Still and the activist Cathy Latham, three of the 16 fake electors from that state. They face various charges, including forgery, impersonating a public officer and attempting to file false documents.Several of the others who signed on as false electors for Trump struck immunity deals or plea agreements with prosecutors.The three fake electors charged have pleaded not guilty. Their attorneys argued in September that they were not fake electors, but instead “contingent” electors who could be used should the courts overturn Biden’s win, the Associated Press reported. The three are trying to get their case moved from state court in Georgia to a federal court, arguing they were acting as federal officers who were keeping an avenue open for Trump depending on what happened in the courts.Sidney Powell, who was charged in the broader case, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. The unexpected move netted Powell six years of probation and some fines and marks a major shift in the Georgia case for Trump and his allies. Chesebro, on the day jury selection for his trial was set to begin, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents and probably will serve five years’ probation.MichiganThe Democratic attorney general Dana Nessel charged 16 Michiganders who participated as fake electors with eight felonies each, including multiple forgery charges, for their roles in the scheme. Those charged include party activists, candidates for office and state and local party officials.Attempts by two defendants to get the charges dismissed because of Nessel’s comments about how the electors were “brainwashed” were unsuccessful. The 16 people charged pleaded not guilty, and probable cause hearings are set for this month.This week, one of Michigan’s fake electors saw his charges dropped as part of a deal with the state’s attorney general. James Renner, a Republican who falsely signed that Trump had won, agreed to “full cooperation, truthful testimony and production of any and all relevant documents” in exchange for the dropped charges, filings from the attorney general’s office, obtained by NBC News, show. This includes information about how he was asked to become part of the fake slate and the circumstances of meetings among those involved in the scheme.NevadaNevada’s top prosecutor has said his office would not bring charges against the six people who signed on as fake electors there in 2020. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Aaron Ford, said current state laws did not address this kind of situation, “to the dismay of some, and I’m sure, to the delight of others”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Democratic state senator Skip Daly attempted to solve that problem, and the state legislature passed a bill that would have made it a felony for people to serve as false electors, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Ford had endorsed the bill.But the Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, vetoed the bill, saying the penalties were too harsh, though he said he believed those who undermine elections should face “strict punishments”.New MexicoThe former New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas started an investigation into the five Republicans who signed as false electors there, then referred the matter to federal prosecutors, according to Source New Mexico.The office of the current attorney general, Raúl Torrez, confirmed there was an active state investigation into the fake electors to see if they violated state law, but details about the case have been scant. Torrez’s office said it would work with Jack Smith to get any evidence related to a state inquiry, according to KOAT Action News.Like Pennsylvania, the fake electors in New Mexico included a caveat in their documents that could help them, should charges be filed. They wrote that they signed the documents “on the understanding that it might be later determined that we are the duly elected and qualified electors”.PennsylvaniaThe 20 fake electors in Pennsylvania are unlikely to face any criminal charges because of how they worded the documents they signed. The documents say the false electoral votes would only be considered valid if the courts deemed the slate to be the “duly elected and qualified electors” for Pennsylvania.Governor Josh Shapiro, then the state’s Democratic attorney general, said the hedged language would spare the false electors from a criminal investigation by his office. His successor as attorney general, Michelle Henry, told Votebeat that the office’s position remained that charges were not warranted.“Though their rhetoric and policy were intentionally misleading and purposefully damaging to our democracy, based on our initial review, our office does not believe this meets the legal standards for forgery,” Shapiro said in 2022.WisconsinThe Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, has not said whether his office is investigating the state’s 10 fake electors for potential state law violations, though a civil lawsuit against the alternate slate is moving forward. Kaul has said he supports the federal investigation and that he expects to see “further developments” in that case.Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, said in August he wanted to see the Wisconsin fake electors “held accountable” via prosecution.“What those ten fake electors did was wrong,” Evers wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “People have to be held accountable for that, and I hope to hell somebody does.”Federal prosecutors, in the Trump indictment, said the fake electors scheme started in Wisconsin with the attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who suggested electors meet there to sign on to a slate in case Trump’s team won in the courts. More