Keeping Up With the Trump Trials: Donald Trump’s No Good, Very Bad Week

Keeping up with Trump’s court schedule is a dizzying task, since he faces two federal trials, a criminal trial in Georgia, and two separate civil and criminal trials in New York. (Oh, and he’s running for president.) To make things easier, we’ll be recapping the biggest Trump trial news at the end of each week.

This week, as the former president continued to appear in court for his New York fraud trial—in which he’s accused of overinflating the value of his real estate empire—two of his former attorneys, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, agreed to consequential plea deals in separate criminal cases out of Georgia.

Two of Trump’s former attorneys accepted plea deals for charges brought by Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis in her 2020 election subversion case, on the eve of their respective trials, which were set to begin on Friday.

Powell was charged with six misdemeanors related to conspiring to intentionally interfere with Georgia’s election process and racketeering, while Chesebro pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of conspiracy to file false documents. Powell admitted to being involved with a scheme to access voting equipment from rural Coffee County, Georgia, and then copying data from those machines in hopes of proving the state’s election was rigged against Trump. Her plea deal includes six years of probation, a $6,000 fine, and an apology letter written to Georgia residents.

Chesebro, who was a major player in coming up with the fake electors scheme (here’s a quick refresher of what that was), will also serve probation for five years, pay $5,000 in restitution, and write an apology letter as part of his plea deal. He will also serve 100 hours of community service. But the biggest news here: Both Chesebro and Powell agreed to testify against their co-defendants at future trials—yes, that includes Trump.

It’s an enormous about-face for both of them, from initially pleading not guilty in the Georgia case when charged and each paying a $100,000 bond. They both also tried to have their cases dismissed, but that failed. Chesebro and Powell have become the highest-level known cooperating witnesses against Trump. In case you missed it: Jeremy Stahl broke down how bad it’s likely to be for the former president and former federal prosecutor and defense attorney Robert Katzberg explained how the cooperation agreements blow a major hole in one of Trump’s previewed defenses.

Patrick Birney, a financial operations executive for the Trump Organization, testified in Trump’s ongoing New York fraud trial that he was told by his boss, Allen Weisselberg, that Trump wanted his net worth to be boosted in the company’s financial statements. (Weisselberg is the former financial officer for the Trump Organization who spent five months in jail for tax evasion.) Those financial statements, which are created annually and given to banks and insurance companies, are at the heart of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ case against Trump.

And on Friday, Judge Arthur F. Engoron fined the former president $5,000 after violating a gag order that was issued earlier this month banning Trump from publicly speaking about any court staff. It was prompted after Trump posted about Engoron’s law clerk, Allison Greenfield, on Truth Social, where he claimed that she was Sen. Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend and that she was running the New York attorney general’s civil lawsuit against him. Though Trump deleted this post off Truth Social, it remained on his campaign website until Thursday, 17 days after the gag order was issued.

While Trump is hoping to dismiss the federal indictment accusing him of unlawfully interfering in the 2020 election because he was president and should be “absolutely immune from prosecution,” Smith has weighed in on the matter in no uncertain terms.

In a lengthy court filing, the special counsel’s prosecution team wrote that “the implications of the defendant’s unbounded immunity theory are startling,” arguing that it would essentially place presidents above the law. The filing also noted that Trump used the prospect of this very prosecution by the Justice Department as his reason to argue why he could not be put on trial by the Senate during his 2021 impeachment trial, claiming that the Senate could not convict a president who had already left office and that the proper jurisdiction was the criminal courts. In fact, 30 Republican senators—including GOP leader Mitch McConnell—are cited in Smith’s filing as lawmakers who agreed with Trump’s argument at the time, believing it was best to deflect any legal responsibilities to the criminal justice system.

Well, now that time has come and federal prosecutors are pursuing charges against Trump, this time not for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol (what was charged in the impeachment case), but for scheming to subvert state and federal election processes. “The principle that no one is above the law underlies the universal consensus that a president may be subject to criminal prosecution at some point,” wrote federal prosecutors.

Judge Tanya Chutkan finally did what many experts have been predicting—she hit Trump with a gag order that prevents him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors, and court staff involved with his federal election interference case. She declared that Trump’s “presidential candidacy does not give him carte blanche to vilify … public servants who are simply doing their job.”

The gag order was initially requested by special counsel Jack Smith, who argued that Trump’s habit of disparaging people publicly online on Truth Social and at campaign rallies could intimidate witnesses, taint the jury pool, and fuel threats of violence. The former president has been posting statements attacking Smith, Chutkan, and other judges and prosecutors—basically anyone involved in legal proceedings against him.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s legal team immediately appealed Chutkan’s gag order. While Trump was attending a separate criminal trial in New York, he told reporters that Chutkan “took away my right to speak.”

Down in Florida, where Trump is facing a federal case over his handling of classified documents, Judge Aileen Cannon last week railed against the special prosecutor’s strategy during a conflict-of-interest hearing for defendant Waltine Nauta. (If you need a recap of what exactly Nauta’s role is in this case, look no further.) The hearing, known as a “Garcia hearing” and routine in criminal cases, is meant to help defendants understand potential conflicts of interest their attorneys may have so they can consider whether they want to keep or replace them.

Smith’s team of prosecutors raised new objections over whether Nauta’s attorney Stanley Woodward should be allowed to question “Trump Employee 4”—Yuscil Taveras, an IT worker at Mar-a-Lago—because Woodward has previously represented him. Notably, when Taveras had Woodward as his attorney, he told investigators he hadn’t heard any conversations about deleting surveillance footage that was requested by federal authorities. But after prosecutors emphasized the risks of lying in a federal case, Taveras replaced Woodward with a public defender, recanted his initial testimony, and admitted he had in fact been asked to delete surveillance footage. (Prosecutors agreed not to charge Taveras.)

But when federal prosecutors asked whether it was fair to allow Woodward to question Taveras during Nauta’s trial, Cannon became frustrated. She said they were “wasting the court’s time,” since they should have raised these arguments in filings ahead of the hearing, which would have allowed both sides to come prepared to discuss any objections. Cannon ultimately postponed Nauta’s conflict-of-interest hearing.

Cannon is a Trump-appointed federal judge, and her earlier decisions around the federal government’s classified documents case have cast doubt on her ability to handle this specific Trump case fairly.