Another plea in Georgia...

Another person getting off with no jail time, a small fine, and no requirement to plead guilty to any sort of RICO or conspiracy charges...

Now I am no lawyer. But it seems like the Prosecutor is offering significantly understated plea bargains for the people who she would most need to prove were part of the grand conspiracy to illegally overturn an election. I have never heard of a serious racketeering case that did not involve anyone actually being found guilty of racketeering. But this is where we are at with this case.

In this case, the person pleading guilty is former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis. But her statement appears to be an admission of very little. In fact, it places the blame on others, suggesting that her crime was simply not paying close enough attention:

“as an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all my dealings. … In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, I believed that challenging the results on behalf of President Trump should be pursued in a just and legal way. I endeavored to represent my client to the best of my ability…What I did not do, but I should, was make sure the facts that the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence.”

That just doesn't sound like someone able or willing to provide any first hand testimony to anything having to do with Trump. In fact, she carefully and very specifically calls out "other lawyers" and specifically avoids making any statement about Trump. If she had anything at all on Trump, one would fully expect that she provided a statement suggesting that Trump (possibly along with other attorneys) were the real culprits. Why would Fani Willis not insist that Ellis point to Trump, if in fact Ellis did could provide evidence that points to Trump?

After all this is really about PR at this point. These guilty pleas are designed especially for the "we got him now" crowd, who have been chanting the same thing for seven years now. Willis is trying to paint the picture of the walls closing in. I don't see any reason why she would play coy.

Either way.... my two favorite legal experts are not seeing it exactly the same way. Turley suggests noncommittally that it could implicate Trump.

Ellis pleaded guilty to false false statements that could conceivably implicate the President if she claims that he was aware of the falsity and facilitated the crime. Moreover, Ellis recently broke with Trump. She called him a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes — and said that she would never vote for him again.

Meanwhile McCarthy sort of sees it how I am seeing it:

Because all four guilty-plea defendants are now cooperating with the state, the lack of a RICO plea is telling: Ordinarily, prosecutors require the first cooperators in a major case to plead guilty to the major charges, offering them sentencing leniency in exchange for their testimony against other defendants. Those kinds of pleas convince the public that there is a strong case and put pressure on other defendants to plead guilty. But not only have none of Willis’s cooperators conceded that there was a RICO conspiracy, much less pled guilty to it; none of them faces even a single day of imprisonment.

I suspect this is as much a difference in expertise as anything else. Turley being more of an academic and constitutional law expert, whereas McCarthy spent years as a Federal prosecutor. Not saying that Turley is not an accomplished attorney outside of his academic and opinions, just saying that in this situation McCarthy seems to have more experience with dissecting a legal case brought by a prosecutor.

If McCarthy is correct then Fani Willis is really using up her leverage by allowing the low hanging fruit to get away with a series of slaps on the wrist. The reality is that people "flipping" are generally "flipping" to avoid a longer sentence to whatever it is that they pled guilty to. The bigger the crime, the bigger the incentive to cooperate and reduce the sentence. But when you (as Willis has) given away the farm on these charges, you are left with very little leverage.

Perhaps she is expecting these people to turn on someone else who will then turn on someone else who will then turn on Trump. But this looks and feels a lot like the Special Counsel on Russian collusion, where prosecutors kept charging people with process crimes and unrelated charges in what appeared to be a manner to get someone to "flip" and provide evidence that millions of dollars and thousands of man hours could not find. I doubt Willis has anything right now on Trump. Just trying hard to look good for the masses by getting these guilty pleas.