A day before jury selection was set to begin in her Fulton County, Georgia, trial, former Donald Trump attorney Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to six counts of misdemeanor “conspiracy to commit interference with performance of election duties.” The result of this will be six years of probation, a $6,000 fine, and an apology letter to the voters of Georgia for Powell’s role in attempting to steal the 2020 election.
That level of punishment seems outrageously lenient considering Powell’s actions in Georgia. In particular, the deal Powell has made with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis doesn’t include pleading guilty to the first charge in the indictment—a state-level racketeering charge that would have made a prison sentence mandatory. However, this is a RICO case involving 18 defendants. One purpose in charging large numbers of co-defendants under RICO is to gain the cooperation of lower-level members of the scheme who are willing to fold early and avoid the RICO charge in exchange for providing insider testimony against other participants in the conspiracy. That appears to be exactly what has happened with Powell.
The Coast Guard hasn’t yet issued a warning, but the many codefendants navigating the choppy seas of the Fulton County case should navigate with care, because the kraken isn’t just floating passively on the surface: It’s turned on them all.
As with many other states, Powell’s involvement in Georgia includes astonishing levels of dishonesty and jaw-dropping flights of fantasy. That included a “bassackwards” court filing claiming that votes had been handed to Trump, which had somehow helped Biden; promising to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit; and a whole stumbling series of legal filings that were dismissed almost as quickly as they were filed. They include, most famously, her allusion to a mythical Norwegian sea monster made famous as a stop-motion baddie in a 1981 fantasy film.
Dead Venezuelan dictator? Chinese money funding U.S. voting fraud? Claims that Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state took payoffs? Hundreds of thousands of replicated votes? Silicon Valley manipulating votes? It’s all squeezed into just two minutes’ worth of outrageous claims.
In her guilty plea, it’s not Powell’s outlandish statements or multiple failed suits that were the source of the charges, but her involvement with efforts to tamper with voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia. This was part of an extended effort to find some evidence of Powell’s claims about votes being “flipped” in machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. Its first result was Powell being sued by Dominion even before the company sued Fox News, but the ultimate result may be the very subdued version of Powell who appeared on Thursday morning in a Georgia courtroom.
Powell’s knowledge of the actions in Coffee County is likely to be immediately put to use in prosecuting others who took part in this misadventure. Codefendants who were involved in efforts to obtain access to machines and voting records in Coffee County are now unlikely to find any generous deals in their future.
But it seems unlikely that Willis made a deal with Powell for what she knew about the machine rustling in Coffee County. The more important role for Powell likely stems from what she knows about the two men at the top of the indictment: Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani.
Both Trump and Giuliani are facing over a dozen charges, including that RICO charge. Neither of them should expect to make a deal like the one Powell received. The fact that she is exiting this embarrassment with nothing more than probation and a small fine is a decent indicator that what she has to offer has value.
A good sign of where this is going can be found in Powell’s statement on Thursday that she “did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign.” It doesn’t square with some of Powell’s own past statements, but it seems absolutely intended to address attempts to suppress Powell’s testimony on the grounds of attorney-client privilege. That doesn’t mean Trump’s attorneys will make such a claim, because of course they will. But Willis has to believe that there’s a very good chance that Powell’s testimony will stick, and that it has value against Trump, Giuliani, or both.
As a lawsuit, Powell’s “kraken” was never much of a threat. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know enough to make calamari out of her former boss and partner.
Former Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, whose jury selection is also slated to begin tomorrow, is charged on seven counts unrelated to Powell’s actions in Coffee County. ABC News reports that Chesebro rejected a plea deal that would have had him plead guilty to a single felony count of racketeering.
Chesebro and Powell were to be tried together after both opted to exercise Georgia’s “speedy trial” option. It’s unclear if any of Powell’s testimony would apply to Chesebro, whose charges are mainly related to the effort to seat a slate of false electors.
