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In just 11 days, 450 potential jurors will arrive at the Fulton County Courthouse for voir dire in the election interference case. Another 450 Georgia citizens are scheduled to arrive on October 27. Jury selection is expected to take weeks, because everyone in the world has thoughts about this case, and, probably more saliently, most people would rather give up a kidney than be trapped in a jury box for weeks on end.
Donald Trump will not be a defendant in the upcoming trial — at least not technically. But assuming it actually takes place, this will be an important test case for the larger RICO prosecution of Trump and his co-conspirators next year.
Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell and her fellow attorney Ken Chesebro asserted their rights to a speedy trial and succeeded in having their cases severed from the larger group. They did not, however, succeed in getting away from each other, and will be tarred by association during the upcoming trial. That is the whole point of RICO charges — you are guilty of conspiring with your co-defendants, even if you didn’t participate in every part of the conspiracy.
Powell is alleged to to have participated in the breach of voting machines in rural Coffee County, paying the forensic auditing firm Sullivan Strickler to illegally image the devices and rendering them unusable. Chesebro, along with that dingbat John Eastman, were the intellectual architects of the fake electors plot, with the Cheese Man crafting memos identifying legal hurdles each of the swing states. For instance, in Georgia, he noted that the law requires the governor to ratify substitute electors, something that did not happen when some of the original electors backed out. He also appears to have advised Georgia Republicans to file a pretextual lawsuit as justification for signing a fraudulent electoral certification.
Cheese and Crackers have lobbed a volley of motions at Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee seeking to have their cases dismissed, or at least whittled down. So far, they’ve been almost totally unsuccessful, although they did persuade the court to allow them to put out feelers to see if any of the grand jurors want to indulge the defendants’ desperate attempt to find some technical defect in the prosecution that will ONE WEIRD TRICK away the charges.
Lady Kraken filed a motion to dismiss alleging that she was innocent, ipso facto there must be prosecutorial misconduct. The court declined to take her up on the suggestion, because that’s an argument you present to the jury, and “Defendant cannot expect a weighing of the evidence to occur via pretrial motion.”
Last week, Judge McAfee slapped down a motion for dismissal filed by Chesebro, who theorized that the indictment was invalid because of defects in the deputization oath sworn by outside counsel Nathan Wade, who is prosecuting the case on behalf of the Fulton County District Attorney. After thoroughly rubbishing the legal reasoning, Judge McAfee invoked the famous Monty Python parrot sketch to describe the status of Chesebro’s pleading.
“And if this parrot of a motion is somehow not yet dead, the Defendant has failed to establish how Special ADA Wade’s actions resulted in prejudice, i.e., how his assignment singlehandedly changed any specific actions taken during the investigation or resulted in the true bill of indictment,” he wrote. “Nor has Defendant established a constitutional violation or structural defect in the grand jury process sufficient to justify outright dismissal.”
This does not augur well for the eleventy-seven pending motions these two goobers filed arguing that their cases must disappear because of some procedural defect. Perhaps they’ll move on to howling that the indictment must be dismissed because prosecutors ate THE ONE VEGETABLE YOU SHOULD NEVER CONSUME IF YOU’RE FIGHTING UNWANTED BELLY FAT.
While the upcoming trial poses a substantial risk for the defendants, it forces prosecutors to make their entire case publicly, giving the remaining defendants a preview of all the evidence and the state’s trial strategy. There’s also the possibility that the jury won’t convict, which would be a massive handicap going into the second trial. The DA says she’ll offer plea deals to both lawyers, but judging by their hyper-aggressive posture thus far, they seem highly unlikely to accept.
In the meantime, the first defendant his flipped, and it’s bad news for Mama Krak. Bail bondsman Scott Hall, who coordinated the Coffee County intrusion and was in close contact with the Trump campaign in the weeks after the election, pled guilty to several misdemeanors and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. This is also not great for Trump and Giuliani, who are at the center of the alleged conspiracy.
Who’s going to be the next one to cash in and take that “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Because while the DA takes a risk by showing her hand at this trial, if she wins, there will be a rush to her door to take a deal and testify against the remaining defendants.
Tick tock, assholes!
Catch Liz Dye on Opening Arguments podcast.
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