Former President Donald Trump 2020 election campaign attorney Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to criminal charges as part of a deal with Fulton County prosecutors in the Georgia 2020 election subversion case.
Her “guilty” plea came Thursday morning during a livestreamed court hearing, just days before a criminal trial is slated for Oct. 23 with co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro. Prosecutors agreed to diminish her seven felony counts to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties.
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Powell was accused of having a significant role in the January 2021 breach of an election system in rural Coffee County, Georgia. Local GOP officials and a group of Trump supporters accessed and copied information from the county’s election systems in an effort to prove there was fraudulent activity in the election.
Daysha Young, a Fulton County prosecutor, asked Powell how she pleaded to the six counts.
“Guilty,” Powell said.
Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee accepted the plea and said she could not withdraw it. She was sentenced to six years’ probation, a $6,000 fine, and $2,700 restitution. Powell will also be required to testify “truthfully” at future trials and write an apology letter to the people of the Peach State.
She is the second person in the 19-defendant case to plead guilty to charges since a grand jury handed up the indictment against the former president and his allies in August. Seventeen others, including Trump, have maintained their innocence.
Bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty on Sept. 29 to five counts and was accused of willfully collaborating with multiple co-defendants, including Powell, to tamper with electronic voting machine equipment.
Attorneys for Powell had strongly denied prosecutors’ claims that she helped formulate the Coffee County breach. They said at pretrial hearings that prosecutors are “incorrect” and that “the evidence will show that she was not the driving force behind” the incident.
Powell was commonly known for her vows to “release the Kraken” about 2020 election fraud following Trump’s election loss in November of that year.
Before participating in several failed challenges to the 2020 election, Powell was riding off her success in June 2019 for her former client, Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser to Trump. Powell sought to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian ambassador and raise allegations of prosecutorial misconduct by the agency in handling the Flynn case.
Some of Trump’s closest allies — including his former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, another defendant in the Georgia case — began to distance themselves from Powell shortly after Trump’s election loss. Giuliani said on Nov. 22, 2020, that Powell was “practicing law on her own” and was “not a member of the Trump Legal Team.”
She was initially charged on seven counts by District Attorney Fani Willis, including a violation of the state’s racketeering act, two counts of conspiracy to commit election fraud, and four other conspiracy counts, including to defraud the state.
Young said Thursday that if the case had gone to trial, prosecutors would have proven Powell engaged in a conspiracy to “intervene with the performance of election duties” of Misty Hampton, a co-defendant and elections director for Coffee County.
“The purpose of the conspiracy was to use Misty Hampton’s position to unlawfully access secure elections machines in Coffee County, Georgia,” Young said.
“Good luck, Ms. Powell,” McAfee said toward the end of the hearing.
After the guilty plea, an attorney who previously worked with Powell on the Flynn case, Molly McCann Sanders, released a sympathetic statement on X, formerly Twitter, underscoring that Powell’s plea doesn’t mean she “flipped” on any other defendants in the case.
“Sidney Powell is absolutely innocent,” Sanders posted. “The fact that Fani Willis dropped all 7 felonies tells the tale. She had no case, but she did have the coercive power of the state.”
Sidney Powell is absolutely innocent. The fact that Fani Willis dropped all 7 felonies tells the tale. She had no case, but she did have the coercive power of the state.
Criminal prosecution is crushing, and it has become clear that juries are no longer the protection to unjust… pic.twitter.com/98sP307xA7
— Molly McCann Sanders (@molmccann) October 19, 2023
Powell is licensed to practice law in Texas, where critics have sought without success so far to have her license revoked over her ties to Trump’s alleged election subversion efforts. Her guilty plea may revive that effort.
Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, expressed a mixed analysis about the upshot of her guilty plea in relation to other defendants in the case.
“What she did not plead guilty to was the racketeering conspiracy,” Turley said. “That was the most serious charge and tied in former president Donald Trump.”
“She agreed to testify truthfully. She is no longer facing a threat of prosecution and can now testify freely. That could make her a dangerous witness for both sides,” Turley posted to X.
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The Washington Examiner contacted a lawyer for Chesebro, as the pair of defendants had planned to head to trial together on Monday. A spokesperson for Trump did not respond.
Chesebro had sought to sever his case from any other defendant in the trial so he could challenge his case alone.
