#sidney powell

[follow-up-news]

The apology letters that Donald Trump-allied lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro were required to write as a condition of their plea deals in the Georgia election interference case are just one sentence long. The letters, obtained Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, were hand-written and terse. Neither letter acknowledges the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Georgia’s 2020 election nor denounces the baseless conspiracy theories they pushed to claim Trump was cheated out of victory through fraud. “I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” Powell wrote in a letter dated Oct. 19, the same day she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties. “I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” Chesebro wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20, when he appeared in court to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the election interference case, declined Thursday to comment on the contents of the letters. Powell and Chesebro were among four defendants to plead guilty in the case after reaching agreements with prosecutors. They were indicted alongside Trump and others in August and charged with participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally keep the Republican in power. The remaining 15 defendants — including Trump, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — have all pleaded not guilty.

[reasonsforhope]

Donald Trump charged in Georgia for efforts to overturn the 2020 election

Link here, because WaPo's security measures stop Tumblr previews. Non-paywall link here.

"Former president Donald Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia on Monday in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an indictment made public late Monday night [on August 14, 2023].

Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.

The Recap

The historic indictment, the fourth to implicate the former president, follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D). The probe was launched after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state.

Willis’s investigation quickly expanded to other alleged efforts by Trumpor his supporters, including trying to thwart the electoral college process, harassing election workers, spreading false information about the voting process in Georgia and compromising election equipment in a rural county. Trump has long decried the Georgia investigation as a “political witch hunt,” defending his calls to Raffensperger and others as “perfect.”

The Details

“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment states.

A total of 41 charges are brought against 19 defendants in the 98-page indictment. Not all face the same counts, but all have been charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Willis said she has given those charged until Aug. 25 to surrender.

Among those charged are Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election; Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; and several Trump advisers, including attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro...

Prosecutors brought charges around five subject areas: false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County; calls Trump made to state officials, including Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers; and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger enterprise to undermine the election."

-via The Washington Post, August 14, 2023

[mysharona1987]

[destielmemenews]

"Fulton County prosecutors are recommending a sentence of six years probation. Powell will also be required to testify at future trials and write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia."

source 1

source 2

[liberalsarecool]

The Kraken was a joke and MAGA got played. 'Stop the steal' was a con job to fundraise.

Being gullible is core MAGA quality. Sidney touched Trump and died. See the pattern?

Want to die a fool? Join MAGA.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

Much of the armchair quarterbacking over Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House centers around claims that Trump would have never been a position to run again had the Justice Department moved more quickly to prosecute him for absconding with classified documents and his role in the 2021 insurrection. Well, excuse me, but I disagree. Those criticizing Merrick Garland for waiting almost two years to start a criminal investigation against Trump need to ask themselves what would have happened had he moved quickly to investigate and indict Trump, only to have the case come unstuck in court. If you think Trump and his minions were screaming “WITCH HUNT!” now, imagine what would have happened had he been acquitted because a rushed investigation resulted in missteps at trial.

We would have risked a repeat of the Freddie Gray case, which came apart because Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby rushed the cases to court without ensuring there was enough evidence to show that the negligence of the officers who shackled Gray into a police van without a seat belt amounted to criminal conduct. We may have known their actions amounted to a callous disregard for life, but Mosby didn’t take the time to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m also reminded of the Bill Cosby case, where prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania cared more about chasing headlines than doing the actual work of putting Cosby away for sexual assault. In so doing, they relied too much on testimony Cosby gave in a civil suit—a Fifth Amendment violation that couldn’t be ignored on appeal, even if there was no real-world doubt that Cosby was a pervert.

From where I’m sitting, the real hackles should be directed at the Democratic campaign apparatus. It got the equivalent of manna from heaven in the form of voluminous evidence that showed not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt, that when Trump was ranting about having a second term stolen from him, he did so when he damned well knew that he had lost to Joe Biden. And yet, in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, neither the party nor the Kamala Harris campaign (née the Joe Biden campaign) made a dedicated effort to ensure that evidence stayed in voters’ minds.

The first time that a lot of people learned that Trump knew he had lost came in late January 2021, when The New York Times reported that Trump’s legal team concluded as early as Nov. 12—nine days after the election—that it could not win enough legal challenges to overturn Biden’s lead in Arizona. Earlier that day, Trump’s legal team filed legal challenges to 191 ballots—not even a fraction of Biden’s 10,000-vote lead there. Ethically, they were required to tell Trump, or at the very least make sure he received that information. At the same time, Rudy Giuliani started ranting about supposed malfeasance by Dominion Voting Systems. By then, the deplorable tubes were percolating with talk that Dominion-powered voting machines had switched thousands of votes from Trump to Biden. Even though deputy campaign manager Justin Clark told Trump this was bullshit, Trump sided with Giuliani. This started what the Old Grey Lady called “an extralegal campaign” to wangle a second term. In light of what we now know, “extralegal campaign” is a polite term for “insurrection” or “attempted self-coup.”

A few days later, William Saletan of Slate compiled a list of articles that suggested Trump knew or reasonably should have known even earlier than Nov. 12 that he had lost. The two things that jumped out at me were articles in Axios and The Washington Post that indicated Trump knew his odds of overturning Biden’s lead were extremely slim. According to Axios, Clark and his boss, Bill Stepien, told Trump on Nov. 7, soon after most networks declared Biden president-elect, that he had only one shot shot at reelection. He needed to run the table among outstanding ballots in Arizona and Georgia, and also win a legal challenge to Wisconsin’s count. Clark told Trump that at best—AT BEST—he only stood a 10% chance of pulling it off. According to The Post, Trump “signaled that he understood” what Clark was telling him—he needed a political Hail Mary to win another term.

The significance? As early as Nov. 12, Trump had to have known that on the latter date, he had no legitimate claim to Arizona’s 10 electoral votes. As anyone who was paying attention in 2020 knows, Trump had no politically realistic path to 270 that didn’t include Arizona’s 10 electoral votes. He damned well knew or damned well should have known that path had closed off as early as nine days after the election, and was still railing about fraud.

[...] And yet, a mere five days later, Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held an absolutely bonkers press conference in which they aired out claims that they knew or should have known were false. So the president of the United States damned well knew or damned well should have known that the Big Lie was, well, a lie. He damned well knew or damned well should have known said lie that was causing innocent people—election officials, poll workers, voting tech company workers—to be harassed, trolled, and threatened. And yet, he didn’t do a damned thing about it. Worse, actually—he allowed his legal team to make those very same claims to the American people. The ads wrote themselves—or at least should have written themselves. And yet, in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, they never came. Any concerns the Biden campaign might have had about tainting a potential jury should have been put to rest with how that campaign memo came to light. It wasn’t obtained through a leak. It was obtained via a legal filing by Eric Coomer, the former Dominion employee who had taken the Trump campaign, Giuliani, Powell and several other elements of the right-wing fever swamp to court for defaming him. Coomer had been forced to go into hiding due to a litany of death threats stirred up by the Big Lie, and his lawyers got his hands on that memo via discovery. News reports are one thing. Legal filings are another. The timeline is laughably easy to follow. Trump knew as early as Nov. 7 that he was shooting his last legal bolt to win another term, and knew as early as Nov. 12 that said bolt had missed. On Nov. 14, his own communications team unearthed hard evidence that would have made it clear to anyone with a brain that the Big Lie was, well, a lie. And yet, five days after that memo came out, Trump’s own lawyers held a press conference centered around claims that they knew or should have known were false. Seen in this light, that press conference was the first overt act in the insurrection—and everything Trump and his team did after that date was in furtherance of that insurrection. That includes all of those hair-on-fire fundraising emails from the Trump campaign warning about fraud. Seen in this light, it’s clear that the insurrection actually started sometime in November. It was almost certainly underway by Nov. 19 at the latest; that day’s bonkers press conference was the first overt act in the insurrection.

[...] The Democrats had a chance to make Trump pay the ultimate political price for his lies—and in so doing, make it far easier to make him pay in court for it. And they blew it eight ways to Sunday. If there is any doubt that Democrats have a messaging problem, the Democrats’ failure to make the American people remember Trump lied and knew he was lying should put it beyond all doubt.

This post from Darrell Lucus is spot-on: Donald Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but kept on pushing the lie that he “won” even after being told that he didn’t win.

See Also:

Adam Kinzinger: Trump's Shield of Power: Evading Justice

[inthefallofasparrow]

Some Grifters Who Finally Faced Consequences |SOME MORE NEWS

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

[randyite]

[yeahiwasintheshit]

AAHHAHHAHAHHA!!

Tear each other apart you fucking piles of shit!!

[thingstrumperssay]

(Some of) the mugshots are in!

(Mark Meadows)

(Harrison Floyd)

[porterdavis]

Nice try, but....nope

[macwantspeace]

"Never knew them, they only made coffee." For the umpteenth time we hear that "only the best people" were not so spiffy. Most of the stories covering the plea start out "former trump attorney". Strange how that goes. Even Wiki seems to be confused and says she was part of the legal team in 2020 when they started suing everybody [and failing]. here's the article from raw story via msn.com: 'Was not my attorney, and never was': Trump melts down on Sidney Powell over plea deal (msn.com)

[mysharona1987]

[follow-up-news]

Former Trump attorney Sidney Powell pleaded guilty Thursday morning in the Georgia election interference case just a day before jury selection in her trial alongside co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro was set to begin. Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts in Fulton County Superior Court as part of a deal reached with prosecutors. Powell agreed to serve six years of probation and pay a $6,000 fine and $2,700 in restitution to the state of Georgia. She also agreed to submit an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia and to testify at related court proceedings. Powell was one of 19 defendants named in District Attorney Fani Willis' indictment, which also charged former President Donald Trump. Powell, who acted as one of Trump’s lawyers after his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, was charged with racketeering, conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to commit computer theft, trespassing and invasion of privacy, and conspiracy to defraud the state.