[Fani Willis got a second guilty plea. What could it mean for
Trump? ]
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ANOTHER DOMINO FALLS IN GEORGIA  
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David A. Graham
October 20, 2023
The Atlantic
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_ Fani Willis got a second guilty plea. What could it mean for Trump?
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Kenneth Chesebro,

 

Three down, 16 to go.

With the attorney Kenneth Chesebro agreeing to plead guilty to a
single felony today, the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case
against Donald Trump and others for attempting to steal the 2020
election has one more conviction and one fewer defendant.

As part of the deal, Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of
conspiracy to file false documents. He’ll pay $5,000 in fines, write
an apology letter, and face five years of probation. Perhaps most
important, he agreed to testify in upcoming trials. Chesebro faced
seven counts that portrayed him as central to a scheme to send slates
of false electors to Washington, D.C., after the 2020 election and to
efforts to disrupt the certification of the election on January 6,
2021, in Congress. He had argued that he was merely offering legal
opinions to clients. Chesebro’s plea came on the same day that jury
selection began in his case, and one day after the attorney Sidney
Powell took a somewhat similar plea deal
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Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman, pleaded guilty in September.

David A. Graham: What Sidney Powell’s deal could mean for the Fulton
County case against Trump
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The question for anyone watching the proceedings now is whether these
pleas portend the sort of falling-dominos scenario that prosecutors
hope for in a big racketeering case like this, in which low-level
defendants decide to cut their losses and aid prosecutors in
convicting the biggest names—in this case, a group including Trump,
Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer John Eastman, and the former Justice
Department official Jeffrey Clark.

Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who
has closely followed the case, cautioned against expectations of a
flurry of pleas now. But he told me that the agreements will force
other defendants to think carefully about their choices.

“Do you want to drag it out and risk being lumped in with Donald
Trump and the other top-tier people in this alleged racketeering
scheme?” he said. “Are [defendants] willing to take the deals of
the kind that Powell and Chesebro took, or are they going to fall on
their swords for Donald Trump and go down with him?”

David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture
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This week’s pleas appear to be a win for all parties. Chesebro and
Powell both got fairly lenient sentences and, as first offenders, can
have their convictions wiped from the record if they comply with the
terms of the deals. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis,
meanwhile, scored two convictions and will now be able to draw on
testimony from two people who were deeply enmeshed in the paperwork
coup
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The pleas also spare all parties the rigamarole of a trial. Chesebro
and Powell were the only two defendants who had requested a speedy
trial under state law; others preferred more time to mount a defense.
Now neither has to deal with the stress—and legal bills—of a
trial. Nor do Willis and her team have to go through the exercise and
risk revealing their strategy before the other defendants go on trial,
which is expected sometime next year. This might help explain why both
Chesebro and Powell got what many observers feel were favorable deals.

David A. Graham: The cases against Trump—a guide
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“It was an open-ended question as to what the district attorney was
willing to do for them in terms of a deal, and where the district
attorney saw them in the pecking order [of defendants],” Kreis told
me. “It’s clear to me now that the D.A. sees them as linchpins,
and they want them to testify.”

What’s not clear is what exactly Chesebro might testify about.
Unlike Powell, he doesn’t have much of a public profile and didn’t
spend time in front of cameras. In fact, he was one of the last
witnesses to testify to the House committee investigating the 2020
election subversion, because investigators took time to chase him down
in Puerto Rico. A quiet man and reputedly a skilled lawyer
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he attended Harvard Law School, was a protégé of the prominent
liberal legal mind Laurence Tribe, and worked for Al Gore’s 2000
presidential campaign before getting involved in conservative legal
causes starting around 2016, including working with Eastman to
challenge birthright citizenship.

David A. Graham: The paperwork coup
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Given that Chesebro has been described as a key architect of the
false-elector scheme, he could presumably speak to the actions of the
major players, perhaps even Trump’s. But Chesebro’s deposition
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the House committee gives few hints of what he might be able to
divulge. He said that his main contacts on the campaign included the
close Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, and that he had spoken with
Giuliani only once or twice. But in most cases, he invoked both the
Fifth Amendment and attorney-client privilege to avoid giving answers,
including about whether he had any direct communication with Trump.

That will be different if and when he is called to testify in Fulton
County. The judge in the case has already ruled that attorney-client
privilege does not apply to some of Chesebro’s communications under
an exception that covers the commission of crimes, and having pleaded
guilty, Chesebro can’t cite his right against self-incrimination.
His role, instead, will be to incriminate others.

_David A. Graham
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writer at The Atlantic._

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* Kenneth Chesebro
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* Fani Willis
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* Donald Trump
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