Donald Trump’s former attorney Jenna Ellis scrambled to secure a plea deal for herself in the Georgia election subversion case after watching two other indicted lawyers fold, it was revealed on Wednesday.
The haste in which her legal team acted to snag an advantageous agreement for their client was laid out by Ellis’s own attorney Frank Hogue in an exclusive interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He said surprise guilty pleas by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, charged alongside Trump in Fulton county over the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, injected urgency into discussions with the prosecutor, Fani Willis.
“I think what really accelerated it was Powell and Chesebro falling as they did, one right after the other. It looked like timing was of the essence for us,” Hogue told the Journal-Constitution.
A tearful Ellis, 39, pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings last week, becoming the fourth of 19 defendants to admit a role in the plot by Trump and his allies to keep him in office.
She avoided a trial and the possibility of up to a five-year prison sentence. Her cooperating with prosecutors could include her testifying against Trump in his upcoming trial on 13 charges including racketeering, forgery, perjury, filing false documents and false statements.
Negotiations took place over a three-day period, Hogue said, although he did not say if they were initiated by the prosecution or defense. Originally, he said, Willis offered a deal in which Ellis would plead guilty to an offense under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) often used in mob prosecutions.
“That was about a three-second conversation. Long enough to say, ‘No, we’re not doing Rico,’” he said.
The final deal was struck on the afternoon of 23 October, and announced in court the following morning, he told the newspaper’s legal podcast Breakdown.
Hogue said it was “a good deal” for Ellis, because it ensured she was able to keep her license to practice law or maintain a pathway to earning it back if it was surrendered.
“To get out of it with five years’ probation, terminate in three, which I’m sure it will for her, and the restitution and the other conditions of probation, none of it’s onerous for her,” he said.
“She’s already back in Florida and resuming her life and doesn’t have to face any of this any more. So for her, my feeling is it’s a good result.”
Unlike Chesebro and Powell, Ellis chose to read out in court a personal apology. Wiping away tears, she said she looked back at her 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, 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.”
In a radio appearance last month, Ellis said she also regretted ever becoming part of Trump’s team of lawyers. Instead, she switched allegiance to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.
“Why I have chosen to distance is because of [Trump’s] frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong,” she said on her American Family Radio show.
Ellis could be a star witness against Trump and the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, an alleged mastermind of the election plot who pleaded not guilty last month to 13 charges, including one of racketeering. Asked if Giuliani should be worried, Hogue said: “I think he should be. I think there’s enough for Mayor Giuliani to worry about that wouldn’t have anything to do with Jenna Ellis.
“She wouldn’t be a help to him, I don’t think, if she was to be called as a witness,” he added. “But I think his troubles extend far beyond her.”
