Donald Trump’s Former attorney Sidney Powell pleads guilty in the Georgia election interference case, a day before the trial was set to commence.
In her guilty plea, Sidney Powell is admitting her role in the January 2021 breach of election systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia. Powell spread unfounded claims of widespread election fraud after the 2020 contest that Donald Trump lost and worked with GOP officials to enable Donald Trump supporters to access voting machines in Coffee County, Ga., and elsewhere to further those assertions.
Sidney Powell admitted taking actions after the 2020 election “for the purpose of willfully tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines” and “with the intention of taking and appropriating information, data, and software, the property of Dominion Voting Systems Corporation,” according to new court filings.
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She is also admitting to hiring a data forensics firm and sending its employees to Coffee County so they could unlawfully access government computers with the purpose of “examining personal voter data, with the knowledge that such examination was without authority,” according to the filings.
Powell is one of 19 people, including the former president, who were charged with racketeering in the case tied to failed efforts to reverse his defeat in Georgia. She is now the second person in the sprawling racketeering case to plead guilty, Bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty last month and agreed to testify at future trials.
The other 17 defendants, including Trump, have pleaded not guilty. Trump, a co-defendant in the Fulton County case, does not appear in Powell’s plea documents.
Read: Donald Trump’s Indictment; What To You Need To Know
Powell admits to entering into a criminal conspiracy with Misty Hampton, who was the Coffee County elections supervisor during the 2020 election cycle. Hampton would be required to testify against her if she goes to trial. Hampton has pleaded not guilty to seven felonies.
Fulton County prosecutors are recommending a sentence of six years probation. Powell will also be required to testify at future trials, write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, pay nearly $9,000 in restitution and fines and as well as provide “any requested documents or evidence subject to any lawful privileges asserted in good faith prior to entering this plea.”
Sidney Powell pleads guilty Despite Facing Other Legal Battles.
She is an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal election subversion case that special counsel Jack Smith filed against Trump. That investigation has still been ongoing in recent months and has been continuing to scrutinize Powell. She has not been charged in that case.
Additionally, Powell is facing massive defamation lawsuits from two voting technology companies, who sued her for falsely accusing them of rigging the 2020 election against Trump. The companies, Dominion Voting Systems, and Smartmatic filed the lawsuits in 2021, and the cases are still in the pre-trial discovery phase.
One day before the scheduled start of jury selection for her joint trial with attorney Kenneth Chesebro — Powell appeared in Fulton County Superior Court to plead guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.
Powell and her attorneys previously denied wrongdoing, arguing that Coffee County officials — some of whom are also co-defendants in the case — invited the scrutiny of voting machines, servers, and other sensitive election equipment.
Lawyer Cheseboro authored memos detailing how Republicans could send false slates of electors to Congress. Cheseboro is now set to go to trial alone.
Chesebro has pleaded not guilty to seven crimes related to his role in the fake-electors plot.
A trial date has not been set for Trump and the remaining co-defendants.