Leaked Proffer Videos Lead To Bonkers Hearing In Fulton County

Is it bad to try to communicate to potential jurors?

It was a banner week for bonehead lawyers in Atlanta.

On Monday, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, ABC, and the Washington Post published excerpts of videotaped proffer statements by Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Scott Hall, the four defendants who have taken pleas in the Fulton County RICO case.

Ellis, who toddled along behind Rudy Giuliani echoing his lies and playacting as an election lawyer, testified that Trump never intended to leave the White House, no matter what the courts and Congress said.

She described a conversation with Trump’s comms chief Dan Scavino at the White House Christmas party in December of 2020, where she lamented the campaign’s failure to overturn Biden’s electoral victory.

“We don’t care, and we’re not going to leave,” Scavino responded. “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.”

Sidney Powell’s testimony broke little new ground, although she purported to be shocked when her co-defendant Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, failed to return her call in August about setting up a bond for her surrender.

“I was going to ask him about a bond, but he didn’t reply,” said the former federal prosecutor, apparently unaware that she’d be required to refrain from consorting with her co-defendants. “And then once I saw my bond conditions, I understood why.”

“Do I know anything about election law? No,” she asked rhetorically, before assuring her interlocutors that she can magically sense election irregularities which might be invisible to a normal observer. “I understand fraud from having been a prosecutor for ten years.”

How could you possibly doubt the legal acumen of THE DREAD KRAKEN?

Hall had his fingers in every part of the effort to steal Georgia’s 16 electors for Trump, including a 63-minute phone call with DOJ lawyer Jeff “We’ll Call You If There’s An Oil Spill” Clark and a just-disclosed effort to locate Ruby Freeman, the poll worker targeted by several of his co-defendants after being falsely accused of feeding fake ballots into the tabulator on election night. But in his proffer, he purported to have been in it for the LULZ.

I looked at it on my map and it was a longass way to Coffee County. And I had a friend of mine that occasionally charters these little jets. And I called him and I said, “For shits and giggles, what would it cost me to rent a plane to fly down to Coffee County, ‘cause I’d like to see how that shit works.”

[…]

It was a lot of freakin’ money, but at the end of the day I thought, ‘Shit, I’d like to see the process.

And indeed he did see it. In fact Hall watched for hours as Republican operatives and paid auditors breached the county’s voting machines, later bragging on a recorded call that “we scanned every freakin’ ballot.”

Chesebro has always presented himself as a nerdy lawyer who just traded emails and erudite memos with his law professor chums. In fact, Chesebro accompanied Alex Jones from the Ellipse to the Capitol on January 6 and admitted as part of his plea that he’d played a role in transporting the fake electoral certificate from Wisconsin to Congress in the hopes that Pence might accept it and toss out the real one.

But quite aside from the substance of the proffer testimony, the fact that major media outlets had the videos caused quite a kerfuffle yesterday. The District Attorney’s Office disclosed the tapes to defendants as part of discovery, and, despite the fact that there was technically no ban on releasing it, prosecutors were pissed.

The DA filed a motion for a protective order covering all discovery materials.

“The release of these confidential video recordings is clearly intended to intimidate witnesses in this case, subjecting them to harassment and threats prior to trial, constitutes indirect communication about the facts of this case with codefendants and witnesses, and obstructs the administration of justice, in violation of the conditions of release imposed on each defendant,” prosecutors argued.

Defendant David Shafer, the former state GOP chair who is alleged to have corralled the fake electors, filed an objection joined by several of his co-defendants, including the former president. (Wow, Dave, what an honor!) Shafer proposed a more narrow order, only barring dissemination of materials designated as “sensitive” by the prosecution. You know, just in case some of it should wind up on Truth Social.

At a zoom hearing this afternoon, Judge Scott McAfee heard from all parties, including the media intervenors, who were unsurprisingly opposed to any protective order at all.

Skip to just after the 20 minute mark to hear Jonathan Miller III, attorney for Coffee County election supervisor Misty Hampton, cop to being the one who gave the proffer videos to the media.

“In being transparent with the court, and to make sure that nobody else gets blamed for what happened, and so that I can go to sleep well tonight, Judge, I did release those videos to one outlet,” Miller admitted.

Asked by Judge McAfee WTF he was thinking (slight paraphrase), Miller responded that “to hide those proffers that show all the underlying things that went into those pleas misleads the public about what’s going on.”

“Two of those proffers help my client,” he continued. “The public needs to know that.”

Here’s Deputy DA Will Wooten at the moment Miller blabbed to the court about his bigly brain plan to help his client by sharing discovery with “the public,” AKA potential jurors.

And here’s how straight journalists tell you that a lawyer is in way over his head:

As a private attorney, Miller advertises legal services ranging from wills and divorces to criminal defense. Miller’s first career was in banking before he made a mid-career swap to law, attending Florida Coastal School of Law, a private, for-profit law school that closed its doors in 2020 amid accreditation issues and a class action lawsuit filed by former students.

Thanks, AJC. And good luck, counselor, on getting one of those sweet, non-custodial plea deals for your client.

Judge McAfee then explained to Miller and the media intervenors that Georgia law provides a right of access to evidence, but the proffer statements are not that, and until such time as those videos are admitted into evidence, nobody needs to see them. By then the parties had conferred and agreed that they could all mostly get behind Shafer’s narrower order, if grudgingly.

Judge McAfee promised to review the relevant First Amendment law and issue an order imminently. And with that, the grid of Zoom windows closed.