With 4 plea deals, Fani Willis builds momentum
District attorney had no lack of doubters at start of the case
ATLANTA » Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, had no shortage of doubters when she brought an ambitious racketeering case in August against former President Donald Trump and 18 of his allies. It was too broad, they said, and too complicated, with so many defendants and multiple, crisscrossing plot lines for jurors to follow.
But the power of Georgia's racketeering statute in Willis' hands has become apparent over the last six days. Her office is riding a wave of momentum that started with a guilty plea last Thursday from Sidney Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who had promised in November 2020 to “release the kraken” by exposing election fraud, but never did.
Then, in rapid succession, came two more guilty pleas — and promises to cooperate with the prosecution and testify — from other Trump-aligned lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis. While Powell pleaded guilty only to misdemeanor charges, both Chesebro and Ellis accepted a felony charge as part of their plea agreements.
A fourth defendant, a Georgia bail bondsman named Scott Hall, pleaded guilty last month to five misdemeanor charges.
With Trump and 14 of his co-defendants still facing trial in the case, the question of the moment is who else will flip, and how soon. But the victories notched thus far by Willis and her team demonstrate the extraordinary legal danger that the Georgia case poses for the former president.
And the plea deals illustrate Willis' methodology, wielding her state's racketeering law to pressure smaller-fry defendants to roll over, take plea deals, and apply pressure to defendants higher up the pyramids of power.
The strategy is by no means unique to Willis. “This is how it works,” said Kay L. Levine, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, referring to largescale racketeering and conspiracy prosecutions. “People at the lower rungs are typically offered a good deal in order to help get the big fish at the top.”
But Willis, 52, is particularly well-versed in this aspect of the prosecutor's art. She used the same strategy a decade ago, as the lead prosecutor in a high-profile racketeering case against Atlanta public school educators accused of cheating to improve their students' standardized test scores.
In that case, 35 people were indicted, but more than 20 of them took plea deals.
A number of the educators who went to trial were convicted, although the most prominent defendant — Beverly Hall, who had been the Atlanta schools superintendent — died of breast cancer before her case was resolved.
Willis has been using a similar tactic in another attention-getting racketeering case, this one involving Jeffery Williams, the rapper who performs as Young Thug, and 27 others charged with gang activity. In that case, too, a number of lower-level defendants have entered plea deals to get out of jail, avoid a lengthy and costly trial, or both, though it remains to be seen whether she will win any convictions at trial.
The election case lays out a number of ways prosecutors say Trump and his codefendants sought to overturn his narrow loss to Joe Biden in Georgia in 2020.
The deals will also likely prove harmful to the cases of other major defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, who was the most prominent lawyer working on Trump's behalf after the election. At the time, he often appeared with Ellis and Powell at his side. (Notably, Giuliani, who made his name as a federal prosecutor by successfully using racketeering laws, has derided the case as “a ridiculous application of the racketeering statute.”)
Another lawyer-defendant, John Eastman, worked with Chesebro on a plan to deploy fake Trump electors in swing states.
On Tuesday, Steve Sadow, the lead lawyer for Trump in the Georgia case, tried to put the best face on the latest plea deal.
“For the fourth time, Fani Willis and her prosecution team have dismissed the RICO charge in return for a plea to probation,” he said in a statement. “What that shows is this so-called RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for DA Willis.”