In April, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes advanced the larger fake electors scandal in dramatic fashion: The Democrat worked with a grand jury to indict 18 people: 11 fake electors and seven Donald Trump aides. Nearly four months later, the larger case is advancing in some unexpected directions.
On Monday, for example, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis flipped and signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, who in turn agreed to drop the pending criminal charges against her. The good news for Ellis was that she no longer had to worry about ending up behind bars, while the good news for prosecutors was that they suddenly had a cooperating witness with key insights to share about the underlying scheme.
But as we discussed soon after, the question then became whether others might soon follow Ellis’ lead. Evidently, we didn’t have to wait too long for an answer. Politico reported:
An Arizona Republican who falsely claimed to be a legitimate presidential elector for former President Donald Trump — part of a sweeping effort by Trump and his allies to subvert the 2020 election — has pleaded guilty for her role in the scheme. Lorraine Pellegrino, one of 11 Arizona Republicans who falsely posed as Trump’s electors that year, accepted a guilty plea to a single charge for filing a “false instrument” — the fraudulent Electoral College certificate.
While the fake electors scandal has generated several dozen indictments across multiple states — a total unseen in a political scandal since the days of Watergate or Iran-Contra — the Politico report noted that Pellegrino “is the first participant in the elector scheme to accept criminal responsibility for signing the false documents.”
And as dramatic a development as this is, it turns out there’s a related revelation from the same investigation that’s also raised some eyebrows. The Washington Post reported:
An Arizona grand jury that indicted 18 Donald Trump allies this spring for their role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election had expressed interest in possible charges against the former president, according to a legal motion filed this week by state prosecutors. … The interest prompted the Arizona case’s lead prosecutor to give a PowerPoint presentation and request that jurors not indict Trump, according to the motion.
Oh. So if this report, which hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, is correct, the former president would be facing five criminal indictments — instead of four — if members of an Arizona grand jury had their way.
For those who’ve been watching this case closely, the reporting is striking, though it’s not altogether surprising. A couple of weeks after the indictments in Arizona’s fake electors case were issued, Politico reported that the grand jury’s members were “unusually aggressive” and were prepared to “cast a far wider net than state prosecutors had publicly foreshadowed.”
In fact, local prosecutors weren’t inclined to indict Ellis and Republican lawyer Christina Bobb, but “the grand jury indicted them anyway.”
In the indictment that reached the public in April, Trump was described as “Unindicted Coconspirator 1.” If the Post’s reporting is accurate, at least some of the grand jury was inclined to go even further.
