Legal Experts Say First Guilty Plea in Trump GA Election Case Is ‘Bad News’ For Co-Defendants
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File
Scott Hall, a former Georgia bail bondsman and one of the 19 co-defendants in the Fulton County election fraud case filed against former President Donald Trump, pled guilty on Friday to five counts – a development that could spell major trouble for the ex-president and his alleged co-conspirators.
In August, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others (including former New York City Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, former Trump staffer Mike Roman, and several lawyers who have represented Trump and his campaign, including Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, and John Eastman) for their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election in that state.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged Trump and his co-defendants with a total of 41 counts in a 98-page indictment.
As reported by CNN, the indictment accused Hall “of conspiring to unlawfully access voter data and ballot counting machines at the Coffee County election office on Jan. 7, 2021,” including “spen[ding] hours inside a restricted area of the election office when voting systems were breached, which was connected to efforts by pro-Trump conspiracy theorists to find voter fraud.”
Surveillance video at the election office showed Hall inside, and when he testified before the Fulton Count grand jury, he admitted that he had entered and “gained access to a voting machine,” the CNN report added.
Hall is the first of the nineteen co-defendants to enter a guilty plea, and the agreement with prosecutors recommends a sentence that would allow him to avoid jail time: five years probation, a $5,000 fine, 200 hours of community service, and writing a letter of apology. He pled to five of the seven counts against him, all of which were misdemeanors.
As part of the plea, Hall appeared in court Friday afternoon and admitted there was a factual basis for the charges against him for those five counts. These are admissions that can now be used against the other co-defendants, making it easier for prosecutors to prove their case.
NYU law professor and former Department of Defense special counsel Ryan Goodman posted a series of tweets on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter describing how Hall’s guilty plea “spells bad news” for the other defendants, especially attorney Sidney Powell.
The danger for Powell and others, Goodman explained, was the multiple “alleged joint actions” in the indictment, where Hall, Powell, and others are accused of conspiring together of “willfully and unlawfully tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines,” “to possess official ballots outside of the polling place,” “using a computer with knowledge that such use was without authority and with the intention of removing voter data and Dominion Voting Systems data from said computer,” and so on.
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig also viewed Hall’s plea as dangerous for Powell. In an appearance on The Lead with Jake Tapper, Honig called the guilty plea “definitely a win for the Fulton Count District Attorney,” Fani Willis, and noted the pressure that came with charging “19 defendants at once…they start taking pleas, they start turning on each other.”
Honig was interested in finding out whether or not Hall’s deal including him agreeing to testify, and then discussed how this could affect Powell.
“The person who needs to be most worried about this is Sidney Powell because Scott is charged in the scheme to access voting equipment,” said Honig. “And Sidney Powell is also charged in that count. So if he is providing testimony, then she is going to be implicated.”
Watch above via CNN.
