2/ Powell & Chesebro, both lawyers, admitted in open court they committed crimes in connection w Ga election. Both gave prosecutors taped statements of sufficient evidentiary value for prosecutors to extend very favorable plea deals
Both Powell & Chesebro are obligated to testify truthfully at trial—if they don’t, they lose their deals, a pretty good guarantee they won’t back pedal. Trump isn’t only defendant in the Fulton County case, even if he’s the most important target of the prosecution.
3/ Chesebro, Harvard educ lawyer, was architect behind fake electors scheme. In 1 memo he authored, Chesebro acknowledged he was promoting “controversial strategy” that even SCOTUS, w its conservative supermajority, would “likely” reject.
Chesebro sugg there were polit (as opposed to legal) reasons to move fwd with it. It's likely there was extensive communications among the lawyers about it. We don’t know what all might be in his emails/texts messages or exactly who he can testify against.
4/ The possibilities include at least Giuliani, Eastman, Jeff Clark & Jenna Ellis. It's not just about obtaining testimony against Trump, it’s also about obtaining testimony to encourage defendants who are closer to Trump & can testify directly against him to plead guilty as well.
@GottaLaff Exactly. This is the whole point, or one of the points anyway, of conspiracy and RICO laws: they give prosecutors vast amounts of leverage over potential witnesses who might not otherwise want to testify. I'm a criminal defense guy, and as such I'm inclined to mentally frame that as "vastly too much leverage," but in this case I'm suppressing the urge.
I'm curious about the fate of Powell and Chesebro's law licenses. In California, anyway, you can be disbarred for even a misdemeanor conviction if it's for a "crime of moral turpitude," and what those two pled to sounds pretty darn turpitudinous to me. Fingers crossed on that one.
@jonberger @GottaLaff If memory serves it was specified at Powell's plea hearing that hers were *not* crimes of moral turpitude. I suspect the same was true of Chesebro.
@tienle47 @GottaLaff Now that's interesting. Is this something that a sentencing court can determine? Like, let's say I plead to something that's self-evidently a crime of moral turpitude, like perjury. If the judge says "I order that this not be considered a CoMT," does that settle the matter -- that is, does that mean that my bar association is prohibited from finding that it was? Not a rhetorical question; I really don't know. But if that is what it means, that's a bit counter-intuitive, to me anyway.
