Donald Trump’s top co-defendants charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia have not been offered plea deals since they were indicted, people close to the matter said, fueling concerns among some in the group that prosecutors are vindictively forcing them to trial.
The co-defendants without offers include the former US president himself, former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and former Trump lawyers John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, the people said – individuals who played leading roles in the alleged conspiracies.
Trump and his original 19 co-defendants pleaded not guilty in August to charges that they violated the Rico statute in Georgia in trying to reverse his election defeat. But the pressure on Trump’s closest allies has increased in recent weeks after four co-defendants accepted plea agreements.
The lack of offers from the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has caused some of Trump’s top co-defendants to reconsider their legal strategy and weigh options such as seeking an expedited trial or trying to sever their cases.
The Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee has not set a trial date for the remaining co-defendants in part because he has been advised that further plea deals are possible, a person familiar with the matter said, though on Thursday he scheduled a motions hearing for Trump in December.
At least part of the reason why Fulton county prosecutors have not extended plea offers to Trump’s top allies could be a strategic decision to move from the lower-level defendants upwards, where each defendant provides incriminating evidence against the next biggest prosecution targets.
That has been a preferred tactic for the Fulton county district attorney’s office in other Rico cases, with defendants who agree to plea deals earlier than others receiving the most favorable terms – a process that prosecutors have jokingly compared to bingo, a person briefed on the matter said.
For the moment, prosecutors have discussed the prospect of plea deals with at least seven co-defendants on a list that includes several Trump 2020 campaign associates and the fake electors who did not end up with plea agreements pre-indictment, the person said.
The list includes the Trump 2020 election day operations director, Michael Roman, and the Trump 2020 Georgia lawyer Robert Cheeley, though Cheeley is understood to have declined the offer made weeks ago. CNN earlier reported prosecutors have been in touch about deals with multiple co-defendants.
A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office could not immediately be reached for comment on the status of the plea deals.
It remains unclear whether they will accept any offers and several appear to still be weighing their options, the person said. But the fact that they received offers at all stands in contrast to some Trump officials who claim they have had no such contact with prosecutors whatsoever.
That has led to those Trump officials to start preparing for the possibility that they may never receive plea offers, leading them to weigh potential defense strategies such as seeking an expedited trial or otherwise severing their cases from the other co-defendants.
One exception, at least for the moment, has been Giuliani. His associates have suggested he never expected to be offered a plea deal and wanted to remain loyal to Trump, who is scheduled to host a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December for Giuliani to raise money to pay his compounding legal debts.
“The only deal the mayor is making is to tell the truth and unfortunately, every single prosecutor in this case is a partisan Democrat focused on their own partisan political ambitions and keeping President Donald Trump out of the White House,” Giuliani’s spokesperson Ted Goodman said in a statement.
Additional apprehension in that group has come from speculation among their lawyers that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows is “in the market” for a plea deal to be rid of the case, after he evaded charges in the federal 2020 election subversion case in Washington.
Meadows appears to have emerged unscathed from the federal criminal investigation led by the special counsel Jack Smith after he was forced to testify in March to the federal grand jury under a court order that gave him so-called limited-use immunity.
But the fact that Meadows testified only after being compelled by a court order appears to suggest he was a reluctant witness, which may not help his negotiating position with Fulton county prosecutors, legal experts said. Reached by phone, Meadows’s local counsel, Jim Durham, declined to comment.
