Team Trump never dreamed Sidney Powell would flip on them — and then Kenneth Chesebro flipped too
Sidney Powell was the wildest of MAGA diehards — someone who swore long past the bitter end that Donald Trump won by a landslide in 2020, and insinuated that a long-dead Venezuelan dictator helped hatch a plot that flipped votes away from her guy. That’s why the former president and much of his inner circle didn’t think the conspiracy-addled lawyer would ever cooperate with prosecutors seeking to convict the ex-president. “Crazy as she was, she really believed what she was pushing,” a lawyer close to the former president says.
Her extreme convictions apparently weren’t enough to stop her from working with prosecutors seeking to imprison the former president. Powell pleaded guilty in Fulton County on Thursday and agreed to cooperate in the case against Trump.
“[Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her team] managed to break the woman who was never supposed to be breakable,” says one of the sources with knowledge of the matter, who has known both Trump and Powell for years.
For months, Trump and his advisers have discussed which co-defendants in the Fulton County case and alleged co-conspirators in the Washington, DC special counsel investigation were most likely to cooperate with prosecutors and turn against him.
Trump, according to two sources familiar with the matter, has been intensely curious about which of his former allies might turn on him as the cases progress.
Trump’s attorneys have also tried to game out which of those potential cooperators may pose the greatest risk to his defense. So far, the Trump legal team has been keeping a close eye on the case of Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of Trump’s fake-electors plot, who was due to stand trial alongside Powell in Fulton County. [Continue reading…]
Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who helped orchestrate the Trump campaign’s 2020 fake electors plot, pleaded guilty Friday in the Georgia election subversion case to being part of a conspiracy alongside former President Donald Trump and others.
The plea deal is another blow to Trump and a major victory for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who charged Trump and 18 others in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It comes one day after former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell also pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Chesebro pleaded guilty to one felony – conspiracy to commit filing false documents. Fulton County prosecutors recommended that he serve 5 years of probation and pay $5,000 in restitution, and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee imposed that sentence at Friday’s hearing.
Chesebro has also agreed to testify in future court proceedings. [Continue reading…]
A state judge fined Donald Trump $5,000 Friday after finding that the former president’s campaign website continued to display a social media post attacking the judge’s law clerk in violation of a gag order imposed by the judge earlier this month.
Justice Arthur Engoron also indicated that he would consider jailing Trump for future violations of the gag order.
Engoron, who is overseeing a $250 million civil fraud trial against Trump and his business empire, issued the gag order on Oct. 3 after Trump used his Truth Social platform to attack Engoron’s principal law clerk. Trump quickly took down the post from Truth Social that day, but it remained on his campaign site until Thursday night.
Engoron wrote in a two-page order that while Trump’s lawyers had called the violation of the gag order “inadvertent,” “the effect of the post on its subject is unmitigated by how or why it remained on Donald Trump’s website for 17 days.”
“In the current overheated climate, incendiary untruths can, and in some cases already have, led to serious physical harm, and worse,” Engoron wrote.
In stern terms, he warned Trump against further violating the order. “Make no mistake: future violations, whether intentional or unintentional, will subject the violator to far more severe sanctions, which may include, but are not limited to, steeper financial penalties, holding Donald Trump in contempt of course, and possibly imprisoning him,” Engoron wrote. [Continue reading…]