Attorney Jenna Ellis, a former legal advisor to Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign, pled guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings on Tuesday morning.
Ellis, who was charged alongside Trump and seventeen others with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering laws, has become the latest co-defendant to enter a plea deal in the case to overturn Georgia’s election results from the 2020 presidential election. Ellis’s guilty plea also implicates claims of voter fraud made by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers during a December 2020 Georgia Senate committee hearing.
Ellis distanced herself from the former president in a tearful statement before the court. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-challenges,” Ellis said. “I look back on this experience with deep remorse.” Ellis said she mistakenly trusted more experienced lawyers to provide accurate information about the 2020 election. “What I should have done, but did not do, was to make sure the facts that other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. I failed to do my due diligence.”
In a September episode of a podcast she hosts for the American Family Network, Ellis had already declared she would not support Trump in the 2024 election. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
As part of the deal, Ellis will serve five years of probation, pay $5,000 in restitution to the Georgia secretary of state and complete 100 hours of community service. She will also have to write a letter of apology to the state of Georgia.
The indictment in the Georgia election case details several accusations against Ellis, including that she helped author plans to delay congressional certification of the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021 and pushed state legislators in Pennsylvania to appoint presidential electors loyal to Trump. The indictment says she also urged state lawmakers to back pro-Trump electors in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan.
Ellis is the fourth Trump co-defendant to reach a plea deal in the Georgia election case. In September, Atlanta bail bondsperson Scott Hall pled guilty to five counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties. Former Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro each plead guilty to conspiracy last week, just days before their scheduled joint trail.
