Here’s why.
Here’s why.
W hile the media spin will be different, my first impression of Sidney Powell’s guilty plea in the Fulton County election-interference case is: It signals that District Attorney Fani Willis’s much-heralded RICO indictment — in which 19 are charged, including Powell’s famous co-defendant Donald Trump — is a dud.
Powell is the second defendant in the case to be offered a misdemeanor plea to dispose of what was publicized as an indictment of the grand conspiracy to destroy American democracy.
A bail bondsman named Scott Hall, who was implicated in the same scheme as Powell in Willis’s sprawling indictment — namely, a plot to access voting data in rural Coffee County, Ga. — was permitted to plead guilty on September 29 to misdemeanor charges involving intentional interference with the performance of election duties. Like Powell (and Trump), Hall was hit with the big RICO-conspiracy charge, as well as several felony charges. Like Powell, his plea to the minor charges will assure him of a non-prison sentence.
Powell likewise pleaded guilty to intentional interference with the performance of election duties, as well as five other misdemeanors, without being required to plead guilty to the RICO charge — or even admit that she was guilty of it. Powell has been given a sentence of six years’ probation and a fine of $6,000 (with an additional $2,700 restitution assessment). Like Hall’s sentence, Powell’s includes an agreement to write a letter of apology to the people of Georgia. (Hey Fani, good luck ever getting Trump to agree to that one!)
Like Hall, Powell is cooperating with prosecutors. On that score, as part of her plea bargain, she gave a statement to the state. It is under seal . . . so we have some intrigue.
Obviously, Powell’s cooperation is potentially more consequential for Trump than Hall’s. The lengthy indictment does not suggest that Trump is directly implicated in the scheme to get election data from Coffee County — an oddball plot given that it was a pro-Trump bastion whose database was unlikely to have yielded evidence of ballot manipulation favoring now-president Biden. It is thus doubtful that Hall would have much admissible testimony about Trump, with whom he may not have been acquainted or had any contact.
Powell, on the other hand, had extensive contact with Trump throughout the “stop the steal” campaign in the weeks following the 2020 election. In taking a statement from her, Willis’s prosecutors may not have limited themselves to the discrete scheme to which she pleaded guilty.
Moreover, it is entirely possible that Willis’s team is consulting with Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, given that their case overlaps significantly with his federal election-interference prosecution (in which, to this point, only Trump has been charged, although it appears that Powell may be among the unindicted coconspirators whose names Smith did not include in the indictment). It’s possible — in fact, I’d say it’s likely — that Powell has been interviewed by prosecutors (at least from Fulton County, and perhaps from the special counsel’s office, too) about all her dealings with Trump, not just about the Coffee County doings.
But let’s put this in context. As I pointed out throughout the Mueller investigation, when prosecutors cut plea deals with cooperators early in the proceedings, they generally want the pleading defendants to admit guilt to the major charges in the indictment. That indicates to the public that the major conspiracy charged is real. It puts pressure on other defendants to plead guilty to serious charges and cooperate. And it shores up the case against the major culprits.
Here, to the contrary, Willis is not only abandoning the RICO charge; she’s not even getting felony guilty pleas of any kind.
If these were serious prosecutions, we would not be seeing probation sentences. If Willis truly believed in her ballyhooed RICO charge — the flaws of which I’ve discussed here, here, here, here, and here — she’d induce her cooperators to plead guilty to the RICO charge and explain, in the plea allocution, what they did, particularly in conjunction with Donald Trump, that makes them guilty.
Willis is not doing that.
Yet I wouldn’t call these sweetheart plea deals. A plea bargain is properly branded “sweetheart” when, as in Hunter Biden’s situation, there appear to be serious charges that the prosecutor could easily prove but refrains from charging.
Willis’s case appears to be the opposite. She filed the grandiose allegations in an indictment that depicts Trump as if he were the boss of a Mafia family — with Powell as one of his lieutenants. Now she’s pleading people out to minor infractions.
There’s good reason to believe that’s because minor infractions are all she’s got.