When lawyer Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to election interference in Atlanta late last month, she tearfully told the judge: “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges.”
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Kenneth Chesebro, another attorney who pleaded guilty in the Fulton County case for his role advising the former president during his effort to reverse his 2020 defeat, also no longer believes the claims still voiced by Trump and many of his allies that the election was stolen. “If you ask Mr. Chesebro today who won the 2020 presidential election,” said his lawyer, Scott Grubman, “he would say Joe Biden.”
But more recently, a novel defense is emerging from two of Trump’s remaining 14 co-defendants in a case alleging a vast conspiracy to steal the 2020 election through a pressure campaign that included cajoling state officials, harassing local election workers and urging Trump electors to cast ballots in seven states that Biden won.
The argument? The 2020 election really was stolen.
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Lawyers for one of those defendants, Harrison Floyd, appeared in court Friday morning to argue why their client is entitled to thousands of pages of election records from Fulton County and the Georgia secretary of state.
“They opened the door, we didn’t,” Chris Kachouroff, one of Floyd’s lawyers, argued during the hearing — a reference to the Fulton prosecution’s assumption in the indictment that Trump lost. “We have the right to rebut that.”
To do so, they argued, they must be allowed access to some of the same material for which election conspiracists have been clamoring for years: cast-vote records from voting machines, ballot reports, every envelope received with absentee ballots, every absentee ballot application from and much more.
The argument serves as a major test of the breadth of the Fulton indictment. Because prosecutors have alleged that Floyd and the other defendants “knowingly” lied, his lawyers say they have the right to try to prove it wasn’t a lie at all.
The issue could also test Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case and has shown a tendency for discipline and tight deadlines. Floyd’s defense strategy gives McAfee a potential opportunity to rule from a courtroom that the 2020 election was not stolen — or, in the alternative, to give election deniers space to make their preferred defense, but in the process potentially allow a new platform for them to disseminate false claims and further complicate an already sprawling case.
In their brief, Floyd’s lawyers indicated plans to examine many of the same claims that circulated in 2020 among Trump loyalists but were dismissed in multiple court cases: that tens of thousands of votes weren’t verified, that some ballots were counted two or three times, and a “legion” of other irregularities that “clearly affected the result.”
Dozens of judges across the political spectrum ruled against Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, including in Georgia.
Floyd, a little-known player who helped run Trump’s 2020 campaign outreach to Black voters, faces three charges in the Fulton case: racketeering, conspiracy to solicit false statements and influencing witnesses. The charges stem from his alleged efforts alongside a professional publicist and a preacher to pressure a local election worker, Ruby Freeman, into falsely confessing to election crimes that she did not commit.
Freeman was the target of repeated false statements by Trump and his supporters in the days and weeks after the 2020 election. The former president mentioned her 18 times in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) on Jan. 2, 2021, at one point calling her a “professional vote scammer and hustler.”
Whether McAfee will allow such an unwieldy volume of information into the case — and the chaos it could create — is uncertain. A key question for McAfee to consider is whether Floyd — and potentially other defendants, whose lawyers watched Friday’s hearing with great interest — is entitled, as part of his defense, to cast doubt on an election result that has been decided.
Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Kenneth Chesebro, another attorney who pleaded guilty in the Fulton County case for his role advising the former president during his effort to reverse his 2020 defeat, also no longer believes the claims still voiced by Trump and many of his allies that the election was stolen. “If you ask Mr. Chesebro today who won the 2020 presidential election,” said his lawyer, Scott Grubman, “he would say Joe Biden.”
But more recently, a novel defense is emerging from two of Trump’s remaining 14 co-defendants in a case alleging a vast conspiracy to steal the 2020 election through a pressure campaign that included cajoling state officials, harassing local election workers and urging Trump electors to cast ballots in seven states that Biden won.
The argument? The 2020 election really was stolen.
Subscribe to The Trump Trials, our weekly email newsletter on Donald Trump's four criminal cases
Lawyers for one of those defendants, Harrison Floyd, appeared in court Friday morning to argue why their client is entitled to thousands of pages of election records from Fulton County and the Georgia secretary of state.
“They opened the door, we didn’t,” Chris Kachouroff, one of Floyd’s lawyers, argued during the hearing — a reference to the Fulton prosecution’s assumption in the indictment that Trump lost. “We have the right to rebut that.”
To do so, they argued, they must be allowed access to some of the same material for which election conspiracists have been clamoring for years: cast-vote records from voting machines, ballot reports, every envelope received with absentee ballots, every absentee ballot application from and much more.
The argument serves as a major test of the breadth of the Fulton indictment. Because prosecutors have alleged that Floyd and the other defendants “knowingly” lied, his lawyers say they have the right to try to prove it wasn’t a lie at all.
The issue could also test Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case and has shown a tendency for discipline and tight deadlines. Floyd’s defense strategy gives McAfee a potential opportunity to rule from a courtroom that the 2020 election was not stolen — or, in the alternative, to give election deniers space to make their preferred defense, but in the process potentially allow a new platform for them to disseminate false claims and further complicate an already sprawling case.
In their brief, Floyd’s lawyers indicated plans to examine many of the same claims that circulated in 2020 among Trump loyalists but were dismissed in multiple court cases: that tens of thousands of votes weren’t verified, that some ballots were counted two or three times, and a “legion” of other irregularities that “clearly affected the result.”
Dozens of judges across the political spectrum ruled against Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, including in Georgia.
Floyd, a little-known player who helped run Trump’s 2020 campaign outreach to Black voters, faces three charges in the Fulton case: racketeering, conspiracy to solicit false statements and influencing witnesses. The charges stem from his alleged efforts alongside a professional publicist and a preacher to pressure a local election worker, Ruby Freeman, into falsely confessing to election crimes that she did not commit.
Freeman was the target of repeated false statements by Trump and his supporters in the days and weeks after the 2020 election. The former president mentioned her 18 times in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) on Jan. 2, 2021, at one point calling her a “professional vote scammer and hustler.”
Whether McAfee will allow such an unwieldy volume of information into the case — and the chaos it could create — is uncertain. A key question for McAfee to consider is whether Floyd — and potentially other defendants, whose lawyers watched Friday’s hearing with great interest — is entitled, as part of his defense, to cast doubt on an election result that has been decided.
