Who is Jenna Ellis and what was her role in the Georgia election interference case?

On 24 October, Jenna Ellis, a member of former president Donald Trump’s legal team, pled guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements in writing after being indicted as a part of the wider conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election by putting pressure on state officials in Georgia. Ellis is one of eighteen co-defendants named in the case alongside the former president and the fourth to plead guilty to charges included in the indictment handed down in mid-August.

Ellis will avoid jail time and instead received a sentence that will keep her on probation for five years, require her to pay $5,000 in restitution and complete one hundred hours of community service. During her appearance in court, Ellis issued an apology; holding back tears, she blamed other members of the legal team for misleading her. “In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, I believed that challenging the results on behalf of President Trump should be pursued in a just and legal way,” argued Ellis. Continuing, she began to point fingers at others, adding that she “relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” Ellis acknowledged that she should have “made sure that the facts that other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true.”

Ellis also admitted that her actions were particularly harmful because of her responsibility to communicate with the media and state legislators.

Ellis’ involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election

Like many other members of the GOP, Ellis was not always a supporter of Donald Trump and only decided to throw her support behind him when he received the Republican nomination for president in 2016. Throughout Trump’s tenure in the White House, she quickly changed her tune, which earned her the favor of the former president, and in 2019, she was hired as a senior legal advisor for his 2020 re-election campaign. According to The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, between December 2019 and November 2020, she was paid nearly $174,000 for her legal consulting.

After the election, Ellis was named by Trump as a member of the legal team led by Rudy Guiliani, who would challenge the election results alongside Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, and Sidney Powell. Ellis gave press conferences throughout November, and even after an independent federal agency, various state officials, and media outlets had acknowledged Joe Biden as the winner, she made public statements to the contrary. Throughout late November and December, Ellis and Guiliani worked closely, meeting with public officials in swing states, putting pressure on them to ignore the popular vote of their electorate, and proposed that they appoint their own electors loyal to Trump when the time came allocating votes for the electoral college.

After the electoral college convened and Joe Biden was recognized as the winner, Ellis’ efforts did not end. Together with Mark Meadows and other White House staff, Ellis is believed to be part of the team that advocated for Vice President Mike Pence to question the electoral results of various states during the certification process. However, the Vice President and his team concluded that he did not hold this power and refused to participate in the last-ditch effort to keep Trump in the White House. Since the events of January 6th, Congress has passed a law that confirms that during the election certification process, the role of the Vice President is purely ceremonial. When called before the House Select Committee on January 6th, Ellis pled the fifth.