More dominoes are falling behind the scenes in Fulton County
Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro have both cut plea deals instead of going to trial. They were the only two defendants scheduled to be tried in the first round (thanks to their speedy trial requests), but now that their trial is off, why hasn’t the next trial date been announced? Now we have our answer.
The judge in the case hasn’t scheduled the next trial because he’s been told that more plea deals are in the process of happening, according to the Guardian. Why is this a big deal? The judge isn’t a rube, and isn’t going to hold up the next trial just because a crackpot like Rudy Giuliani, for instance, begins incoherently claiming that he’s negotiating an imaginary deal.
For the judge to be holding off on announcing the next trial date, he must have been credibly told that more plea deals are in the works – and that pretty much means he had to have been told this by Fani Willis herself. When plea deals are being worked out, they don’t always end up happening. So it’s possible these deals will fall through. But they’re in a serious enough place that the courts are (presumably very briefly) holding off until the deal negotiations are resolved.
The kicker is that this same Guardian article says that while Willis has offered plea deals to six additional unnamed (presumably lower level) people, Giuliani, John Eastman, and Mark Meadows are not among them. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t get deals. It just means that Willis doesn’t see cutting deals with these three guys as crucial to getting convictions against people like Donald Trump.
That’s bad news for Trump, because it means Fani Willis is now certain she can get a conviction against Trump without even needing any cooperation from the remaining defendants who were closest to him. It’s also bad news for Meadows, Eastman and Giuliani. It means that if they want a deal, they may have to settle for a non-lenient one that sends them to prison. And if they don’t cut deals, they’re going to prison for a long time.
