Guilty pleas from two key allies in Donald Trump's Georgia election interference case put new pressure on the former president and raise questions about whether his once-loyal associates may flip on him, reports USA Today. Attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to related crimes last week and agreed to testify against other defendants. They had been charged with playing roles in an alleged conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Coming after a third defendant, Scott Hall, pleaded guilty in September, their deals bolster prosecutors' weapons and may pressure other defendants to flip -- a move that would raise the legal stakes for Trump. ''Once you get a couple people pleading, it starts sort of an avalanche of pleas," said Chandelle Summer, a former Georgia prosecutor and public defender.
Chesebro, Powell, and Hall will turn over documents to the state and are barred from communicating with witnesses or defendants in the case. Norman Eisen of the Brookings Institution, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, said information from the former Trump associates, could bolster the government's evidence in another pending Trump trial -- the federal election meddling case scheduled to start in March in Washington, D.C. "Both Powell and Chesebro were unindicted co-conspirators in the federal case, so they're central to it," Eisen said. "It is ominous for the other defendants in the state or federal cases, above all Donald Trump." Chesebro, an election lawyer, pleaded guilty Friday in Atlanta to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. Chesebro offers an inside view of the scheme to recruit fake presidential electors to vote for Trump in states that President Biden won. Chesebro created and distributed false documents in Georgia and other states for people to submit to the National Archives and Congress posing as presidential electors, said Daysha Young, the executive district attorney in Fulton County.
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