One day before her trial was set to start, Sidney Powell, Donald Trump’s former attorney, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case.
Powell has admitted to her role in the January 2021 breach of election systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia as part of her guilty plea. According to CNN, local GOP officials helped a group of Trump supporters access and copy information from the county’s election systems in hopes of proving that the election was rigged against Trump.
Currently, Fulton County prosecutors are recommending six years of probation as a sentence. Powell will be required to testify at future trials, write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, pay nearly $9,000 in restitution and fines, as well as turn over documents.
Trump, who is a co-defendant in the Fulton County case, does not appear in Powell’s plea documents and was not mentioned at the brief plea hearing Thursday.
Sidney Powell pleads guilty
There is, however, one other Georgia defendant mentioned in the plea documents: Misty Hampton, who was the Coffee County elections supervisor during the 2020 election cycle. Powell admitted to entering into a criminal conspiracy with Hampton whom she would need to testify again if she goes to trial. Hampton had pleaded not guilty to seven felonies.
Following the 2020 election, Powell pushed conspiracy theories about purported fraud and false claims about millions of votes being flipped in a global scheme against Trump that supposedly involved Venezuela and other foreign powers.
Powell is the second person to plead guilty in this case, following bail bondsman Scott Hall who pleaded guilty last month and agreed to testify at future trials. All the other 17 defendants, including Trump, have pleaded not guilty.
According to new court filings, Powell has admitted to take actions after the 2020 election, “for the purpose of willfully tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines” and “with the intention of taking and appropriating information, data, and software, the property of Dominion Voting Systems Corporation.”
Powell is also admitting to hiring a data forensics firm and sending its employees to Coffee County in order to unlawfully access government computers with the purpose of “examining personal voter data, with knowledge that such examination was without authority,” according to the fillings.
Up until now her attorneys have been denying prosecutors’ claims that she orchestrated the Coffee County breach and have stated that prosecutors are “incorrect” and that “the evidence will show that she was not the driving force behind” the incident.
This last second plea has changed the trial which was supposed to begin Friday and it appears Powell's co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro will be moving forward on his own. Chesebro has pleaded not-guilty to the seven crimes related to his role in the fake-electors plot.
Powell is facing more legal problems than just this; she is also an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal election subversion case that was filed against Trump by special counsel, Jack Smith. That investigation is ongoing and has scrutinized Powell, although she has not been charged.
Powell is also facing defamation lawsuits from two voting technology companies who are suing her for the false accusations she made against them pertaining to rigging the 2020 elections against Trump. This lawsuit was filed in 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic and art still in the pre-trial discovery phase.
