What a day Trump had yesterday— and he still had time to wreck whatever slim chance the GOP had to elect a speaker! First thing in the morning, a third Trump attorney, Jenna Ellis, flipped on him, tearfully pleading guilty and agreeing to testify against Trump (or go to prison). Fulton County D.A., Fani Willis, is absolutely D.A. of The Year! After getting Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro to flip on Trump, she managed to get Ellis to plead guilty to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.
“According to the details of the agreement,” reported the Washington Post, “Ellis agreed to complete five years probation and 100 hours of community service, and to pay $5,000 in restitution to the Georgia secretary of state. She agreed to write a letter of apology to the state of Georgia… Ellis is the second co-defendant with known direct links to Trump to plead guilty in the case. A onetime Fox News regular who was hired in late 2019 as a legal adviser to the Trump campaign, Ellis was part of the post-2020 election legal team, appearing alongside former New York mayor and personal Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell at press conferences where she echoed false claims of election fraud. She worked closely with Giuliani, traveling to battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania where prosecutors say she spoke to lawmakers urging them to reject the popular vote results in their states. The Georgia indictment also pointed to memos she wrote for Trump outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the election results.
Ellis was later admonished by a Colorado judge for the false statements she made about the 2020 election. As part of that proceeding, Ellis admitted that several statements she said back then were false— stating that she acted “with “a reckless state of mind” and telling the court she had acted with “selfish” motives and that her actions had "undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.”
It is not known what Ellis told prosecutors or what documents she might share in the case. Rumors had swirled for weeks that Ellis might be among those seeking a plea deal— in part because of her public complaints that Trump was unwilling to pay her mounting legal bills.
Ellis, who hosts a podcast for the American Family Network, also publicly declared in September that she was unlikely to support Trump’s bid for the 2024 nomination. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast in September. “I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Even bigger news came a few hours later when it was reported— something many observers had long suspected— that former far right congressman Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s last chief of staff, flipped on his boss as well. ABC News reported that Meadows has spoken with Jack Smith's team “at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath… Meadows informed Smith's team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump's prolific rhetoric regarding the election… Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being ‘dishonest’ with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in. ‘Obviously we didn’t win.’… Trump has called Meadows, one of the former president's closest and highest-ranking aides in the White House, a ‘special friend’ and ‘a great chief of staff— as good as it gets.’”
WARNING: Marcy at EmptyWheel cautions that “flipped” may be too strong a word to describe what’s going on with Meadows. She explains her reticence at the link. And now a break for a little Mafia-style witness tampering from the manwho was on TV Tuesday evening whining about how "flipping" show be illegal:
Sources told ABC News that Smith's investigators were keenly interested in questioning Meadows about election-related conversations he had with Trump during his final months in office, and whether Meadows actually believed some of the claims he included in a book he published after Trump left office— a book that promised to "correct the record" on Trump.
ABC News has identified several assertions in the book that appear to be contradicted by what Meadows allegedly told investigators behind closed doors.
According to Meadows' book, the election was "stolen" and "rigged" with help from "allies in the liberal media," who ignored "actual evidence of fraud, right there in plain sight for anyone to access and analyze."
But, as described to ABC News, Meadows privately told Smith's investigators that— to this day— he has yet to see any evidence of fraud that would have kept now-president Joe Biden from the White House, and he told them he agrees with a government assessment at the time that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in U.S. history.
…Nevertheless, public testimony has shown that in the weeks after the election, Meadows helped Trump vet allegations of fraud that were making their way to Trump from people like Rudy Giuliani, whom Trump put in charge of legal efforts to keep Trump in the White House.
But Meadows said that by mid-December, he privately informed Trump that Giuliani hadn't produced any evidence to back up the many allegations he was making, sources said. Then-attorney general Bill Barr also informed Trump and Meadows in an Oval Office meeting that allegations of election fraud were "not panning out," as Barr recounted in testimony to Congress last year.
…Meadows went even further while promoting his book on right-wing media in November 2021. When asked by a podcast host if he believes the outcome of the 2020 election was fraudulent, Meadows responded, "I do believe that there are a number of fraudulent states... I've seen at least illegal activity in Pennsylvania [and] in Georgia”— referring to two key states that clinched the White House for Biden.
Under the penalty of perjury, Meadows offered a vastly different assessment to Smith's investigators, telling them he's never seen any evidence of fraud that would undermine the election's outcome, according to what sources told ABC News.
The final report by the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol accused Meadows of including "a number of intentional falsehoods" in his book, but the committee's report focused on allegations about Trump's actions on that fateful day, not claims about the election more broadly.
Portions of what Meadows told investigators appear to align with broader testimony that other top White House aides, including former Meadows assistant Cassidy Hutchinson, provided to the House committee, describing a president seemingly hesitant to take decisive action to stop the violent mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
Sources said Meadows confirmed that at one point, as the riots were unfolding, Trump got on a call with then-House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, and told McCarthy, "I guess these people are more upset than you are."
And while this news was breaking, Michael Cohen, former Trump fixer was in court testifying against Trump— with Trump, flipping out, in the room. Cohen told the judge that Trump had ordered him and CFO Allen Weisselberg to falsify financial documents in order to reflect whatever numbers Trump wanted at the time.
Cohen said Trump would call him into his office to discuss them. “He would look at the total assets and he would say, ‘I’m actually not worth 4.5 billion, I’m really worth more like 6.’ OK,” Cohen said. Trump would then order Cohen and Weisselberg, who is also a defendant in the case, to go to Weisselberg’s office “and return after we had achieved the desired goal.”
Cohen said there was “no specific program” by which they changed the numbers, but that they would often derive new figures by looking at other properties, typically ones that were more valuable than the Trump properties.
“Are those called comparables?” asked the lawyer for the attorney general’s office, Colleen Faherty, using a real estate term.
You could call them comparables, but that would imply they were similar,” Cohen replied, saying the properties they assessed were often more desirable, with higher ceilings or unobstructed views.
Cohen testified that falsified documents concerning Trump’s net worth were used for various purposes, including in Trump’s failed effort to purchase the Buffalo Bills football team.
And Cohen said they were presented to insurance underwriters, along with a staged dramatic flourish by Trump. About three-quarters of the way through meetings during which insurance underwriters would be presented with documents, Trump would enter the meeting and “there would be a conversation about his extensive net worth,” with Trump telling the representatives that “he was actually worth more than the insurance companies” and wondering aloud if “maybe we should go self-insured.”
Faherty asked if those episodes were pre-planned. “It was coordinated so that he would arrive like that,” Cohen said.
Cohen was scheduled to return to the witness stand on Wednesday. His testimony is likely to be some of the most contentious of the monthslong trial, in part because of his own court record. He is a convicted felon who served a prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2018 to federal tax evasion and campaign finance violations tied to his role in paying hush money during the 2016 presidential election to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who claimed she had an affair with Trump. Cohen told a federal judge that it was Trump who ordered him to pay Daniels.
Cohen also subsequently pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts to help build a Trump Tower in Russia.
You wondering how all this is impacting Trump psyche? This is from a speech he made in New Hampshire Monday, the speech that has everyone talking about how his senility has advanced so aggressively in the last couple of months. Watch: