Weekly The Generation, Year 1, Issue 13
November 28, 2023
Fulton county prosecutors do not intend to offer plea deals to Donald Trump and at least two high-level co-defendants charged in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, according to two people familiar with the matter, preferring instead to force them to trial.
The individuals seen as ineligible include Trump, his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Aside from those three, the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis has opened plea talks or has left open the possibility of talks with the remaining co-defendants in the hope that they ultimately decide to become cooperating witnesses against the former president, the people said.
The previously unreported decision has not been communicated formally and could still change, for instance, if prosecutors shift strategy. But it signals who prosecutors consider their main targets, and how they want to wield the power of Georgia’s racketeering statute to their advantage.
A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.
Trump and 18 co-defendants in August originally pleaded not guilty to a sprawling indictment that charged them with violating the Rico statute in seeking to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the state, including by advancing fake Trump electors and breaching voting machines.
The preference for the district attorney’s office remains to flip as many of the Trump co-defendants as possible, one of the people said, and prosecutors have asked the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee to set the final deadline for plea deals as far back as June 2024.
The prosecutors on the Trump case appear convinced that they are close to gaining more cooperating witnesses.
On Monday, former Trump lawyer and co-defendant John Eastman asked the judge to allow him to go to trial separately from the former president, and earlier than the August 2024 trial date proposed by prosecutors.
In a statement, Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow suggested the former president was uninterested in reaching a deal. “Any comment by the Fulton county district attorney’s office offering ‘deals’ to President Trump is laughable because we wouldn’t accept anything except dismissal,” Sadow said.
But the lack of a plea deal would be a blow to Meadows. The Guardian previously reported that the former Trump White House chief of staff has been “in the market” for a deal in Georgia after he managed to evade charges in the federal 2020 election subversion case in Washington after testifying under limited-use immunity.
It was unclear why prosecutors are opposed to negotiating with Meadows, though the fact that he only testified in Washington after being ordered by a court suggested he might only be a reluctant witness. Reached by phone on Monday, Meadows’s local counsel declined to comment.
Source: The Guardian
