Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, charged alongside the former president for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia, has pleaded guilty as part of a cooperation agreement with prosecutors just days before her trial was scheduled to start.
The conversion of Powell into a cooperating witness marks a major victory for the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, given Powell’s involvement in some of Trump’s most brazen schemes to reverse Trump’s election defeat – which she could now testify about.
Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit interference with election duties. She was sentenced to six years’ probation, a $6,000 fine, $2,700 in restitution to the state, and is required to turn over documents and testify truthfully in her co-defendants’ trials.
The plea deal formalizes Powell as the second defendant charged in the sprawling 2020 election subversion case brought by Fulton county prosecutors to plead guilty; the first was a local Republican bail bondsman, Scott Hall.
Powell was initially accused of racketeering and computer trespass crimes related to efforts to allow Republican election deniers gain unlawful access to voting machines in Coffee county. Powell faced a problem when Hall flipped, because he had potentially incriminating evidence against her.
The most far-reaching consequence of Powell taking the plea deal could be her agreement to testify in future trials, given her proximity to Trump in the final weeks of his presidency and her close involvement in various schemes to reverse Trump’s election defeat.
Among other episodes, Powell was a key player in a contentious December 2020 meeting at the White House, where Trump named Powell a special counsel to investigate supposed election fraud, after she pitched a plan to suspend normal laws and use military force to seize voting machines.
The meeting, details of which were previously reported by the Guardian, involved Trump, his White House counsels and Rudy Giuliani, the former Trump lawyer who has also been charged with seeking to overturn the 2020 election results by Fulton county prosecutors.
In that sense, legal experts said, Powell’s cooperation marks a significant moment in the case because the threat of Powell testifying against Giuliani could compel him to take a deal in turn to testify against someone such as Trump himself.
Powell was also involved in the Coffee county conspiracy, which involved Trump allies hiring a team of forensics experts gaining access to voting machines and copying virtually every part of the election systems, before uploading it all online.
A day after the Capitol attack in Washington, surveillance footage showed data experts from SullivanStrickler, a firm that specializes in “imaging”, or making exact copies, of electronic devices, arrive at the Coffee county election office.
What happened inside the elections office is only partially captured on surveillance video, but records show the SullivanStrickler team imaged almost every component of the election systems, including ballot scanners, the server used to count votes, thumb drives and flash memory cards.
Powell’s involvement is alleged to have come in helping to organize the data breach, though she had previously argued she did nothing wrong because it was her non-profit company that paid the forensics experts and there had been prior authorization from local officials.
