Kenneth Chesebro has flipped in Fulton County – and it’s an even bigger deal than just his testimony
When Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell filed for speedy trials awhile back, I never bought into the popular narrative that they were doing it to help Donald Trump. Instead I figured they were trying to very quickly find out whether they were going down in Fulton County, so they could decide whether or not to flip before the rest of Jack Smith’s indictments came down.
That’s pretty much what ended up happening. After Chesebro and Powell both lost all of their pretrial motions, Powell cut a plea deal yesterday, and now Chesebro has cut a similar plea deal this morning. This gives DA Fani Willis two cooperating witnesses that she can (and will) use to try to pressure the rest of the bunch into also cutting plea deals. And of course Powell and Chesebro will also end up testifying against Trump (and anyone else who doesn’t flip) at trial. But there’s more to this.
It seems more obvious than ever that Chesebro and Powell weren’t trying to help Trump or anyone else when they filed for speedy trials; they were trying to help themselves. But it did incidentally help to set up the grouping order, so to speak. There was no way this judge was going to allow these defendants to split themselves up into more than two or three groups for trial. Chesebro and Powell took the first slot, and their trial was supposed to start today, and probably run for the rest of the year. The second trial would have started whenever this one ended.
But now, because Chesebro and Powell both pleaded out, there is no trial. Fani Willis and the judge don’t have to wait for this trial to end before they get to work on the next trial. While the rest of the defendants will still have to go through their nonsense filings, that only takes a finite amount of time. The bottom line is that the next Fulton County trial – the one that the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis and John Eastman and Mark Meadows will likely be grouped into – may now start sooner. And that puts even more pressure on them to hurry up and cut deals. Chesebro and Powell may have been the first big names to flip, but they won’t be the last.
