Georgia prosecutors are picking up cooperators in the Trump 2020 election case. Will it matter?

ATLANTA — Sidney Powell was present for a now-infamous December 2020 meeting at the White House where participants hatched far-fetched schemes to keep Donald Trump in power and was so tied to the then-president that he once considered naming her a special counsel to probe claims of election fraud.Kenneth Chesebro was part of a small coterie of advisers who prosecutors say prodded Republicans in battleground states to submit slates of fake electors who would falsely assert that Trump, not Democrat Joe Biden, was victorious.Yet rather than continue to stand behind Trump, the two lawyers cut deals last week with prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, agreeing to plead guilty and cooperate instead of face trial in the indictment that charged them, the ex-president and 16 others with illegally plotting to overturn the 2020 election.The deals ensure the cooperation of two witnesses who could presumably offer insider accounts of the desperate scheming to help Trump remain president — a boon for prosecutors striving to develop incriminating evidence against higher-profile targets. Even so, it’s hard to forecast how much their assistance heightens the legal peril for Trump, especially since Powell’s own history of outlandish and ill-supported claims of fraud could open her to attacks on her credibility and a bruising cross-examination.”It’s not a slam dunk that she is the knife to the heart of the former president, but it’s not a good day for him when she pleads guilty,” John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said of Powell. “She’s going to do something that hurts him. The level of the hurt, we don’t know yet.”Neither agreement — Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, Chesebro to a felony — called for prison time. That’s a generous resolution for two defendants alleged to have played significant roles in what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has called a “criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result.” But such an outcome could nonetheless signal to other defendants the benefits that await them if they, too, plead guilty while also helping prosecutors winnow down an unwieldy racketeering case so they can focus their attention on even bigger names.”In terms of immediate things that might shake out of it, I think it’s a question of what the people next down in the pecking order might do in order to free up the DA’s office a little bit more,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor. “I think that’s really what the DA’s office is trying to do now. They’re trying to shake as many of these co-defendants loose as they can and focus on the people they want to focus on and just step on the accelerator and get things moving.”Beyond the Georgia case, the cooperation could potentially aid Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, who in August charged Trump with conspiring to undo the election. Powell and Chesebro are referenced, though not by name, as unindicted co-conspirators in that case, making their statements to investigators in Georgia of potential interest to Smith in his prosecution of Trump, which is set for trial next March.”There’s considerable overlap in the case that Jack Smith has charged and the case that Fani Willis has charged,” said Jessica Roth, a professor at Cardozo School of Law. “They’re clearly part of the story in Jack Smith’s indictment.”