How Sidney Powell's Plea Deal Could Hurt Trump in the Georgia Racketeering Case
The election conspiracy theorist struck a deal that allows her to avoid prison by testifying for the prosecution.
After the 2020 presidential election, Sidney Powell tirelessly promoted a baroque conspiracy theory claiming that Donald Trump had been deprived of his rightful victory by a combination of deliberately corrupted voting machines and phony ballot dumps. At first, Powell explicitly did that on behalf of the Trump campaign, joining the "elite strike force team" of lawyers who were determined to reverse Joe Biden's victory. She also pressed her outlandish and unsubstantiated fraud claims in numerous TV appearances and in lawsuits she filed on behalf of aggrieved Republicans. And even after the Trump campaign disassociated itself from Powell on November 22, 2020, the president and representatives such as Rudy Giuliani continued to tell the same basic story.
The fruitless attempts to validate that story included a bizarre incident in which employees of SullivanStrickler, a forensic data firm hired by Powell, copied election software and ballot records at the Board of Elections and Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, on January 7, 2021, the day after Trump supporters enraged by his stolen-election fantasy rioted at the U.S. Capitol. That freelance investigation was the basis for the state criminal charges to which Powell pleaded guilty on Thursday, the day before her election-related racketeering trial was scheduled to begin.
Under her plea agreement, Powell will avoid any time behind bars and, if she successfully completes six years of probation, a criminal record. What did Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis get in exchange? It's a question that should worry Trump, the lead defendant in the Georgia case.
Powell originally was charged with violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act by participating in an "enterprise" that illegally sought to keep Trump in power. That offense is punishable by five to 20 years in prison. Powell also faced six other felony charges based on the Coffee County incident: two counts of conspiracy to commit election fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit computer theft, one count of conspiracy to commit computer trespass, one count of conspiracy to commit computer invasion of privacy, and one count of conspiracy to defraud the state. She avoided the possibility of years in prison by instead pleading guilty to six misdemeanor counts of intentionally interfering with public officials' election duties.
As part of that deal, Powell agreed to testify in the racketeering case. "Assuming truthful testimony in the Fulton County case," Trump lawyer Steve Sadow said on Thursday, "it will be favorable to my overall defense strategy." That seems doubtful, since Willis would not have given Powell a get-out-of-jail card unless she thought her testimony would bolster the prosecution's evidence.
What does Powell know that could hurt Trump's defense? She was not directly involved in the actions that the Georgia indictment cites as the basis for 12 of the 13 charges against Trump. Those charges involve things like encouraging Republican candidates for the Electoral College to present themselves as the state's "duly elected and qualified" electors, asking Georgia legislators to recognize those "alternate" or "contingent" electors instead of Biden's, making knowingly false statements in a post-election lawsuit, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" the votes necessary to reverse Trump's loss in that state, and lying to Raffensperger toward that end.
Powell has no direct knowledge about any of that. But her testimony could be important in supporting the racketeering charge against Trump by verifying some of the "overt acts" in furtherance of the alleged conspiracy.
The indictment lists 161 of those. In addition to the specific offenses that Willis says Trump committed, they include a lot of conduct that was not inherently criminal but allegedly was aimed at the illegal goal of reversing the election outcome. Twelve of the "overt acts" involved Powell. They include two events that directly involved the Trump campaign or Trump himself.
On November 19, 2020, Powell appeared at a press conference alongside two of her co-defendants in the Georgia case, Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, another campaign lawyer, to claim that the election had been stolen through massive fraud. All three lawyers spoke as representatives of the Trump campaign. Since Willis has video evidence of that ridiculous presentation, she hardly needs Powell to establish that it happened. But Powell probably can shed light on the motivation behind it, which could reinforce the prosecution's argument that it was part of a criminal conspiracy to keep Trump in the White House.
On December 18, 2020, Powell participated in a White House meeting that also included Trump and Giuliani. According to the indictment, "the individuals present at the meeting discussed certain strategies and theories intended to influence the outcome of the November 3, 2020, presidential election, including seizing voting equipment and appointing [Powell] as special counsel with broad authority to investigate allegations of voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere."
Based on witness testimony, the House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot reported that "multiple lawyers in the White House, including Eric Herschmann, Derek Lyons, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, 'pushed back strongly' against the idea of seizing voting machines." Cipollone, who said he had "seen no evidence of massive fraud in the election," told the committee that seizing the machines was a "horrible idea" with "no legal basis."
That apparently did not faze Trump. At another meeting on December 31, he broached the subject again. "Why don't you guys seize machines?" Trump asked, according to Richard Donoghue, then the acting deputy attorney general. "You guys should seize machines because there will be evidence."
Trump also seriously considered Powell's suggestion that she should be appointed as a special counsel charged with investigating election fraud. His receptiveness to that idea is striking, since by this point the Trump campaign had officially separated itself from Powell. And the day after Powell et al.'s weird press conference, according to testimony collected by the House select committee, Trump had expressed skepticism of Powell's extravagant claims. When Powell called Trump to elaborate on those claims, the committee said in its report, "the president muted his speakerphone and laughed at Powell, telling the others in the room, 'This does sound crazy, doesn't it?'"
Powell nevertheless still had the president's ear. And even though Trump reportedly laughed at some of her claims, he and Giuliani continued to falsely accuse Dominion Voting Systems of facilitating decisive election fraud with software designed to switch votes from Trump to Biden. Powell's continued coziness with Trump puts her in a position to testify not only about the proposed seizure of voting machines but also about his general determination to continue pushing the stolen-election narrative, and perhaps about his motive for doing so.
The rest of the "overt acts" involving Powell are connected to the SullivanStrickler work she commissioned in Georgia and elsewhere. But even if Trump personally had nothing to do with that, the loose requirements for proving a racketeering conspiracy in Georgia allow Willis to cite it as further evidence of a criminal scheme with Trump at its center.
"This is somebody who was at ground zero of these allegations and a lawyer who is pleading guilty," John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney, told the Associated Press. "This is very significant."
More bad news for Trump: Kenneth Chesebro, a former Trump campaign lawyer who originally was supposed to be tried alongside Powell, today pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents. Like Powell, he will avoid jail time in exchange for testifying in the upcoming racketeering trials. Cheseboro was one of the strategists behind the "alternate" electors plan in Georgia and other states, so his testimony will be relevant to a major part of the case against Trump.
According to CNBC, Chesebro's defense attorney, Scott Grubman, "said it was inaccurate to describe Chesebro as the architect of a plan to subvert democracy." That can be interpreted in two ways: as denying that Chesebro (as opposed to, say, John Eastman, another lawyer charged in the Georgia case) was mainly responsible for the plan or as denying that there was anything improper about presenting "contingent" electors in case Trump's Georgia election lawsuit proved successful. The latter argument is bound to figure in Trump's trial.
