Who’s next to make a deal with Fani Willis?
Donald Trump, 15 others remain indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, election interference trial.
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Three down, 16 to go.
Last week’s plea deals Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro made with the Fulton County District Attorney’s office are leading to speculation as to who might be the next co-defendants to make a cut a deal with DA Fani Willis.
Former Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall was the first of 19 people indicted in Willis’ massive, historic indictment of former President Donald Trump to plead out.
“The next people who would be the logical choices to plea are Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton from the Coffee County scheme,” said Amy Lee Copeland, a Savannah, Georgia-based attorney and partner of Rouse + Copeland. “People turn in other people and make [the case] spread.
“The best step Judge Scott McAfee could make right now is set a deadline,” Copeland said. “Lawyers love to kick the can down the road. With no time pressure its going to be difficult to have people willing to talk about negotiations unless the DA is offering incredible deals.”
Latham is one of 16 Georgia Republicans who signed a certificate falsely Trump had won the state and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors.
Latham was also chair of the Coffee County Republican Party. She was at the county elections office for much of the day on Jan. 7, 2021, and welcomed a computer forensics team that arrived to copy software and data from the county’s election equipment in what the secretary of state’s office has said was “unauthorized access” to the machines.
Hampton was the elections director in Coffee County. She was present in the county elections office on Jan. 7, 2021, when a computer forensics team copied software and data from the county’s election equipment. She also allowed two other men who had been active in efforts to question the 2020 election results to access the elections office later that month and to spend hours inside with the equipment.
Hall was involved in commandeering voting information that was the property of Dominion Voting Systems from Coffee County.
Copeland, a former Appellate Chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Georgia, also stressed the importance of Hall’s plea deal. “There’s probably a reason the state approached him and reached a misdemeanor deal,” she said.
Copeland said Hall had a 63-minute phone call with Jeffery Clark, the ex-Department of Justice official who allegedly presented colleagues with a letter pushing Georgia officials to convene a special legislative session on the state’s 2020 presidential election results. Clark wanted the letter sent, but his superiors refused.
Hall also had a phone call with Georgia attorney Robert Cheeley, who allegedly presented video clips to legislators of election workers at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena and said the workers were counting the same votes two or three times.
Hall could lead prosecutors to offer deals to Latham and Hampton, “and then that could lead to [former Georgia GOP chair] David Shafer, maybe [state Sen.] Shawn Still and others,” Copeland said.
Copeland also said she doesn’t believe Trump will stand trial in Georgia before his federal classified documents trial is over, which is set for next March.
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