Powell’s Gulty Plea is Bad News for Trump

Photo by Tom Williams, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump’s legal prospects took a turn for the worse on Thursday morning when Sidney Powell agreed to a plea deal in Fulton County. Powell, along with Kenneth Chesebro, had petitioned for a speedy trial and jury selection was scheduled to start tomorrow.

Per the Associated Press, Powell agreed to six years of probation and a $6,000 fine. Powell will also write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia and testify against other defendants in the case.

Powell’s co-defendant, Kenneth Chesebro, reportedly rejected a similar plea deal, but Powell is not the first of the Georgia defendants to plead guilty. Back in September, Scott Hall, a bail bondsman and Republican activist, entered a guilty plea for racketeering charges in connection with the illegal breach of voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia.

The incident in Coffee County also directly involved Powell and several others. Lawfare explains this aspect of the alleged conspiracy in detail, but essentially the Trump lawyers acted on claims by Misty Hampton, an elections supervisor in the heavily red, south Georgia county that alleged that votes could be changed on the Dominion voting machines. Powell’s team was looking for a reason to implement an Executive Order seizing voting machines and made contact with the Coffee County officials. Scott Hall organized a trip to south Georgia and Powell engaged forensic computer analysts to examine the voting machines (in violation of the law) and the team ultimately made forensic copies of “virtually every piece of Coffee County’s elections equipment.”

While the conspiracy indictment encompasses much more than the Coffee County shenanigans, the incident is a good example of how the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the election went far beyond espousing crackpot theories. In this case, it crossed the line into blatantly criminal activity.

There are a couple of things to note about the case against Powell. First, she was directly implicated in the Coffee County breach, a factor that is not true of Donald Trump. This probably plays directly into the second consideration, which is that, as a lawyer, Powell realized that she was in deep enough kimchi that she didn’t want to go to trial.

When it comes to Donald Trump’s legal cases, Powell’s guilty plea opens up a new avenue of evidence against The Former Guy. As with prosecutions of mob bosses, the state started with enough evidence for a broad indictment. As low-ranking members of the plot agree to plea deals and become state’s evidence, the evidence against the bigger fish grows. Trump should be very concerned about Powell’s session of show-and-tell not only with Fani Willis but with Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Trump’s federal cases.

It will also be interesting to watch Chesebro go to trial. Chesebro, also an attorney, will be the first of the election conspiracy defendants to stand trial, and his experience will show a lot (but probably not everything) about how Willis will try to prosecute Trump.

Sidney Powell deserves much more justice than she got today, but it’s encouraging that she is being punished for what amounts to an attack on American democracy itself. I have to wonder what possessed her to do what she did, knowing that her claims about election fraud were pure bunk. The only answer that I can find is that she thought she would get away with it.