WATCH: Pro-Trump Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro Pleads GUILTY in Georgia Election Case
Alyssa Pointer/Pool Photo via AP, File
Pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro pled guilty to the charges against him in a Fulton County, Georgia courtroom Friday afternoon, admitting in open court that he had participated in a scheme to interfere in the state’s 2020 election results to benefit former President Donald Trump.
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 Chesebro, 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.
On Friday, Chesebro pled guilty for one felony count, conspiracy to commit filing false documents, related to the fake elector scheme. The Harvard Law grad was accused of being the architect of a plot to send slates of false electors to Washington, D.C. from Georgia and other swing states to attempt to replace, invalidate, or otherwise remove those Electoral College votes that Joe Biden won in order to declare Trump victorious.
The recommended sentence from prosecutors allows him to avoid jail time, serve five years of probation, pay $5,000 in restitution, complete 100 hours of community service, write a letter of apology to the people of Georgia, and testify in future proceedings.
Chesebro is the third of the 19 co-defendants in the case to plead guilty. Former Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall pled guilty in late September, followed by former Trump attorney Powell on Thursday.
Powell’s guilty plea — which came as a surprise — specifically is viewed as instrumental in pressuring Chesebro to take a deal and avoid ending up behind bars and risking his law license, and combined, the guilty pleas from these two attorneys is not a positive development for Trump, to put it mildly. In addition to agreeing to testify, both Powell and Chesebro’s plea deals included admitting to committing key elements of the criminal charges against them, and since many of the charges in the indictment are conspiracy-based and allege joint actions among Trump and his co-defendants, these admissions from co-conspirators directly relate to how the prosecutors will attempt to prove the charges against the former president.
It’s even more problematic because the count against Chesebro names Trump, Meadows, Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Ellis, and others as co-conspirators. And unlike Powell, who spent months flinging unhinged accusations and baseless conspiracy theories in courtrooms and in front of television cameras, Chesebro will be a far more credible — and therefore damaging — witness.
According to a question Chesebro’s legal counsel asked the judge in court about his plea deal, the terms will include not designating the offense a “crime of moral turpitude,” which would have made it more likely that Chesebro’s law license got suspended or even a permanently disbarred.
Legal commentators have assessed these prior guilty pleas as dangerous for their co-defendants, including the ex-president and another attorney, Rudy Giuliani, because the deal with prosecutors requires them to provide testimony.
This is a breaking news story and has been updated.
Watch above via CNN.
