Third former Trump attorney pleads guilty in Georgia election interference case News
© WikiMedia (Phil Roeder)
Third former Trump attorney pleads guilty in Georgia election interference case

Jenna Ellis, one of former President Donald Trump’s ex-attorneys charged in the Georgia election interference case, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. Ellis is the third former Trump attorney to plead guilty in the case, with attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleading guilty last week.

Ellis pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal, which reduced her charges from two felony counts to one. The plea deal also required Ellis to agree that she “aided and abetted” fellow co-defendants Rudy Giuliani and Ray Stallings Smith III in making false statements to the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, including claims that over 2,500 people who were found guilty of felonies illegally voted in the state during the 2020 presidential election, over 66,000 underage people voted and over 10,000 dead people voted.

During the plea hearing, Ellis tearfully expressed remorse for her involvement in spreading election falsehoods, stating:

As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings…I relied on others including lawyers with many more years of experience than I to provide me with true and reliable information, especially because my role involved speaking to the media and to legislators in various states. What I did not do and should have done was to make sure the facts that other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true….If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse.

Ellis is the former Deputy District Attorney for Weld County, Colorado, where she mostly handled minor criminal proceedings. She then became a legal and political commentator in 2018. Despite claims that she was a member of Trump’s legal “elite strike force team,” she has since claimed that her role in challenging the 2020 presidential election on behalf of Trump was mainly public-facing. While Ellis did not sign onto the majority of Trump’s 2020 election challenges as an attorney, she did speak at multiple press conferences and to multiple state legislatures, including the Georgia legislature. She proclaimed her innocence in September, but has since refrained from mentioning her legal troubles publicly outside of the courtroom. Ellis has also been censured in Colorado for making false 2020 election fraud claims.

Georgia Judge Scott McAfee has not yet set a trial date for the remaining defendants in the Georgia case, including Trump himself.