Jenna Ellis, the attorney who played a top public role in the effort to reverse Trump’s 2020 election loss, agreed to take a plea deal to resolve the Georgia RICO case against her.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee approved the deal at a Tuesday morning hearing.
Per a copy of the plea agreement, Ellis has agreed to plead guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.
A prosecutor with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ office said at the hearing that Ellis had agreed to cooperate with the investigation and provide testimony per the agreement.
Per the deal, Ellis will receive five years of probation, and have to pay $5,000 in restitution to the state. Like the other three defendants to have pleaded guilty, she also has to submit an apology letter and provide records and other evidence to the prosecution.
Ellis played a starring role in Rudy Giuliani’s barnstorming of various state legislatures with outlandish claims of voter fraud.
Ellis appeared alongside Giuliani at a Dec. 3, 2020 hearing before a subcommittee of the Georgia state Senate. The panel had agreed to hear claims from the Trump campaign that voter fraud had marred the election.
Giuliani, Ellis, and attorney Ray Smith were charged with making statements about voter fraud which they knew to be false. That allegedly included a statement that more than 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia in the 2020 election, and that election workers at the State Farm Arena had committed misconduct.
Ellis admitted in the plea deal that she knew those claims, among others, were false.
Ellis is the third attorney who sought to help Trump reverse his election loss to plead guilty in Willis’ RICO prosecution.
‘Kraken’ lawyer Sidney Powell and fake electors scheme architect Ken Chesebro both entered guilty pleas in exchange for their cooperation last week.
Ellis did not have to make a statement to the court about her guilt, but chose to do so at the Tuesday hearing.
Choking up, Ellis told Judge McAfee that she trusted “lawyers with many more years of experience than me to provide me with true and reliable information” about wrongdoing in the 2020 election.
She then admitted that she had received wrong information, and that she had “failed” to do due diligence.
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump,” Ellis said.
Ellis’ plea further imperils Giuliani. She did not name him in her allocution, but she worked closely with America’s former mayor in the months leading up to January 6, appearing alongside him in state legislative and court hearings where Giuliani would make lengthy and often nonsensical presentations about voter fraud.
Though she did not plead guilty to involvement in the scheme to pressure Mike Pence into rejecting electoral votes on Jan. 6, Ellis wrote two memos in which she asserted that Pence could block Biden’s victory on that day.
It’s not the first time that Ellis has admitted she made false statements in the run-up to Jan. 6. She told the Colorado Supreme Court in March the same, as part of a deal where she agreed to be censured for her 2020 election fraud statements but managed to keep her law license. Afterwards, Ellis tweeted that she did not lie, because she did not “INTENTIONALLY” make false statements.
Watch the hearing below:
