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.
BREAKING: Jenna ELLIS is taking a guily plea in Georgia for a count of "aiding and abetting false statements/writings." pic.twitter.com/mQMmbMXtCG
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 24, 2023
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.
“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.
