Johannah James
jrj004@marietta.edu
Jenna Ellis pled guilty on Tuesday October 24th to felony charges of aiding and abetting the presentation of false statements and false accusations regarding vote counts in the 2020 presidential election. Ellis is one of nineteen defendants charged in the ongoing Georgia case investigating the Trump legal team’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Ellis elected to address the court during her hearing to apologize for her behavior, stating that, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Trump in these post-election challenges.”
Jenna Ellis served as a legal advisor on former president Donald Trump’s reelection campaign starting in 2019. After Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden, he appointed Ellis to work alongside Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to challenge and potentially overturn the election results. Within days of the November election, Trump’s election challenge team called for a recount of votes specifically in Georgia, and again two weeks later. Both counts confirmed Biden’s victory in the state.
After failing to achieve his intended outcome from the recounts, it was alleged that Trump incentivized election investigators to back his cause by implying they would be rewarded for finding errors in the count. Following this, the Washington Post published a recording of a phone call between Trump and the chief election investigator which revealed that Trump demanded they ‘find’ enough Georgia votes for him to win the state.
The charges filed against Ellis in particular originated when she made the following statement in a public address between the two recounts, “All of your fake news headlines are dancing around the merits of this case and are trying to delegitimize what we are doing here. Let me be very clear that our objective is to make sure to preserve and protect election integrity.”
The charges against Ellis pointed to this public address as the beginning of Ellis’ involvement in the election interference, arguing that the statements made by Ellis and the other lawyers at this press conference gave false evidence and made false accusations regarding election fraud.
Ellis’ indictment further claimed that she furthered the interference by pushing to replace legally selected Electoral College members with electors that would vote for Trump. The specific charges Ellis is facing for these actions address her alleged violation of the RICO act, Georgia’s racketeering and corruption policy, as well as her alleged solicitation of a public officer’s violation of oath.
As a part of the plea deal, she will be serving five years probation with mandatory community service, as well as paying $5,000 in restitution to the state of Georgia; maintaining truthful testimony and cooperation in the ongoing proceedings; and writing an apology letter for her behavior.
