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Former President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom during his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court, November 6, 2023, in New York.
CNN
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Four elders Donald Trump Loyalists who pleaded guilty in Georgia’s 2020 election interference criminal case shed new light on their efforts in videotaped conversations they had with prosecutors, according to portions of those videos obtained and released by the media, notably on the fact that the former president was not going to leave the country. The White House “under no circumstances”.
Statements from Trump’s former lawyers Jenna Ellis, Sydney Powell And Kenneth Chesebro and surety based in Atlanta Scott Room The prosecutors were asked as part of plea deals they reached with Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis in the sprawling racketeering case filed against them, the former president and 14 others.
Ellis told Willis’ team that Dan Scavino, Trump’s former deputy chief of staff at the White House, dismissed her concerns that Trump’s legal options to challenge the election were becoming increasingly limited, according to the one of the videos obtained by ABC News And The Washington Post. The media obtained only portions of the videotaped statements of the four defendants.
“And he told me, you know, in a little excited tone, ‘Well, we don’t care and we’re not going to leave,'” Ellis told prosecutors in the video. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?'”
“And he said, ‘Well, the boss,’ which meant President Trump and everyone understood ‘the boss,’ that’s what we all called him, he said, ‘the boss will not leave under any circumstances,’” she said. according to the video.
An attorney for Scavino did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment. Scavino did not respond to ABC News.
ABC News first reported details of Ellis and Powell’s so-called statements to prosecutors. The Washington Post later Monday published details of the statements of the other two defendants, as well as excerpts from some of the videos, which the newspaper said ranged in length from half an hour to several hours.
Some stories are consistent with what has been widely reported before, including by CNN and other media outlets in late 2020 and early 2021, on delays in authorizing the transition between the Trump presidency and that of Joe Biden. But the videos released Monday nonetheless provide new details about efforts by Trump’s inner circle to overturn the election in his favor.
The former president has pleaded not guilty to more than a dozen charges in the Georgia case.
Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead lawyer in the case, told ABC News in a statement that Ellis’ “alleged private conversation,” as described by the lawyer, was “absolutely meaningless.”
“The only highlight of this absurd investigation is that President Trump left the White House on January 20, 2021, and returned to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” Sadow told ABC. “If this is the kind of false and ridiculous ‘evidence’ that DA Willis intends to rely on, that’s all the more reason why this political travesty of a case must be dismissed.”
Other information was revealed to prosecutors by Powell, Chesebro and Hall, according to the Post, which reported that Chesebro said in his statement that he briefed Trump in a White House meeting “about election challenges in Arizona and had summarized a memo in which he offered advice on gathering slates of alternative electors in key battlegrounds to vote for Trump despite Biden’s victories in those states.
Powell, who was known for pushing some of the most fringe legal theories after the election, told prosecutors in her videotaped statement that if Trump had appointed her special counsel to investigate election irregularities, as she wanted, ” she reportedly sought to seize election materials and used the military to do so if necessary.
Powell also said she “still believes ‘mechanical fraud’ tainted the 2020 presidential election,” according to the videotaped statement obtained by the newspaper.
Hall, who was the first defendant to plead guilty, had been charged with conspiring to illegally access voter data and ballot counting machines at the Coffee County Election Office on January 7, 2021.
He told prosecutors as part of his statement that his role in the episode was that of a “political tourist,” according to the Post, which said the bail bondsman claimed he had not been to the county rural than “for holidays and vacations”. laughter.”