Trump election subversion case: Witnesses’ plea videos detail moves to overturn election

ATLANTA — A former attorney for Donald Trump explained to Georgia prosecutors that a top presidential aide told her a month after the 2020 election that “the boss” did not plan to leave the White House “under any circumstances.”

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The Washington Post and ABC News reported that they had obtained a video recording of Jenna Ellis, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for her testimony in the election subversion case in Fulton County, Georgia.

In the video, Ellis told prosecutors that Dan Scavino, who was Trump’s deputy chief of staff in December 2020, did not seem concerned by her view that Trump was running out of options to challenge the results of the election, the Post reported.

“And he said to me, you know, in a kind of excited tone, ‘Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave,’” Ellis said in the video.

The videos were part of proffer statements of the four defendants who accepted plea deals in the case, according to the newspaper. They were required to make the recordings under the terms of their deals.

ABC News reported that it had obtained the proffer statements of Ellis and another former Trump attorney, Sidney Powell.

Powell told prosecutors about her plans for seizing voting machines nationwide and that she frequently communicated with Trump as she attempted to overturn the 2020 election, according to the news organization.

“Did I know anything about election law? No,” Powell told prosecutors, according to ABC News. “But I understand fraud from having been a prosecutor for 10 years, and knew generally what the fraud suit should be if the evidence showed what I thought it showed.”

In addition to Ellis and Powell, the Post reviewed the videos of attorney Ken Chesebro and Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall.

In his video, Chesebro said that at a White House meeting, he briefed the president on election challenges in Arizona and offered advice on how to assemble alternate slates of electors in key battleground states, the newspaper reported.

The indictment in Fulton County, which was unsealed in August, accuses Trump and 18 co-defendants of conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election.