Guess who’s flipping on Donald Trump first
Even though they’ve been indicted and are now being arrested, every one of these Fulton County defendants not named “Donald Trump” can still likely cut a cooperation deal. It’s just that as time goes on, they become less valuable as cooperators, so any deal they cut will become less lenient accordingly.
Prosecutors look at every defendant differently when deciding how lenient of a cooperation deal to offer. How valuable of a witness would they be? How reliable would they be? How serious were their crimes to begin with?
Someone like Mark Meadows could provide valuable evidence and testimony against Trump, and seems to be coherent enough to come off as a reliable witness. So even though his crimes were serious, Fani Willis probably would have given him immunity, and might still be willing to give him full immunity now.
But if Meadows screws around for another month while Willis continues to nail things down without his help, and then he finally decides he wants a deal, she’s more likely to say something like, “Okay, but now you have to plead out on one charge and do a year in prison.”
Someone like Rudy Giuliani is at a disadvantage because he comes off as totally unreliable in general, and thus would be of little use on the witness stand. But he likely has incriminating documents and can tell prosecutors about additional aspects of Trump’s crimes. The old adage is that if you know where the bodies are buried, you don’t have to be reliable or coherent. You just have to be able to take them to the right spot and say “dig here.”
And logically speaking, Giuliani seems like he’d be the first of the big names to flip. He’s broke, he can’t find a lawyer, and he’s way too old to go to prison. If he understands his own situation, he’ll flip. But he may be too far gone to understand that he has to flip. Then again, Trump just announced a legal fundraiser to help keep Giuliani loyal, suggesting that Trump thinks Giuliani is on the verge of flipping.
The complicating factor is that Georgia defendants like Giuliani, Meadows, Eastman, Clark, Powell and others can probably also expect to be indicted by Jack Smith soon. There’s no point in cutting a deal with one prosecutor but not the other. So anyone who decides to flip would need to coordinate the whole thing with Willis and Smith. Some of them may indeed be waiting to see whether they get charged by Jack Smith, and how serious those charges are, before deciding to cut some big coordinated cooperation deal.
But let’s remember that this isn’t about logic. If these defendants were thinking and acting logically, all eighteen of them would have flipped by now. That’s the thing about this kind of life altering decision: you may end up making the logical decision in the end, but you sure can take a lot of emotional detours getting there.
So if you’re trying to predict who’s going to flip in Fulton County first, there are a number of logical clues. But remember that this comes down to an emotional decision. You never know which day any of them is going to wake up and say “screw it, I’m screwed” and cut a deal.
I wouldn’t put money on any person flipping in any specific timeframe, or in any particular order. But I would bet money that at least some of these eighteen people will cut cooperation deals. Remember, eight would-be defendants in this probe ended up not getting indicted because they cut immunity deals with Fani Willis months ago. There will be more flipping. In a case this big there always is.
By the way, even Donald Trump could still theoretically cut a deal. But because he’s the biggest fish and has no one bigger to flip on, no prosecutor would give him a cooperation deal, or at least not much of one. The best Trump could hope for would be a straight up plea deal, the kind that any defendant can always take at any time ahead of trial, where they simply plead guilty in exchange for a slightly reduced sentence. But Trump really can’t take such a deal, because he’d still be going to prison for the rest of his natural life. Realistically, all Trump can do is sit back and watch while his “friends” cut cooperation deals against him, one by one, while he whines and cries about it on social media to no effect.
