It happened the way Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, described going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Last month in Georgia, Scott Graham Hall, an obscure bail bondsman and Trump supporter, took a plea. Hall had been indicted in Fulton county prosecutor Fani Willis’s Georgia election fraud case on charges of helping Trump surrogates steal election data from voting machines in rural Coffee county. Hall bargained his felony conspiracy and racketeering charges down to misdemeanors, for which he would pay nominal fees and serve no jail time. To many of his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, it must have looked like an appealing deal.
Hall was a small fish in the Georgia scheme, just a minor player in what Willis had charged as a sprawling conspiracy. But the bizarre excursion to Coffee county that he had agreed to testify about was central to the charges against a much bigger fish: Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer who pursued the most bizarre and brazen of the president’s post-election lies. Last week, she flipped too. Powell, who was facing multiple felonies, accepted probation and restitution fees in place of jail time – conditioned, of course, on her willingness to testify against her co-defendants.
