Jenna Ellis Sings in Arizona

The one-time member of Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team has turned state’s evidence.

John Bazemore/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Jenna Ellis is in the news, again, for being among the first to flip on her fellow defendants in yet another state criminal case concerning attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

If you don’t remember who Ellis is from Season One, here’s a quick re-cap.

Ellis, somewhat astonishingly, was Trump’s senior legal advisor from 2019 until late January 2021. I’ll explain the “astonishingly” part later. She was part of the absurd, self-described “elite strike force” legal team that had advised Trump as he sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Others in that illustrious group included “release the Kraken” crackpot attorney Sidney Powell and the recently disbarred and newly bankrupted inadvertent spokesperson for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Rudy Giuliani.

Along with Giuliani, and while famously subjected to his flatulence during hearings, Ellis spread false claims of election fraud across the battleground states and worked with him to implement key parts of the plan to upend the election and keep Trump in power.

In today’s piece, I’ll briefly walk through Ellis’s unusual path to the heights of power and her calamitous fall from Trumpland grace. I’ll then describe the gist of the Arizona case, including which defendants are charged. Finally, I’ll review the basis of Ellis’s deal with prosecutors and explain why it’s bad news for the other defendants.

The unlikely way up

To say Ellis was unqualified to be a senior legal advisor to the President is quite an understatement. Seven years before taking that job, she was a deputy district attorney in Weld County, Colorado, prosecuting basic crimes like theft and assault. 

She broke through in Republican circles, however, by working with James Dobson, the founder of the extremist religious group Focus on the Family, which condemns homosexuality and anything outside traditional gender norms. Ellis also took a position at Colorado Christian University and began to do radio shows as a “legal commentator.”

She made the move to cable news in 2018, where she was frequently described as a “constitutional law attorney,” even though she never practiced constitutional law. As the New York Times noted in its investigation of Ellis’s background,

She holds herself out as an expert on the Constitution based on her self-published book and her teaching of pre-law classes to undergraduates. She has never appeared in federal district or circuit court, where most constitutional matters are considered, according to national databases of federal cases, and does not appear to have played a major role in any cases beyond her criminal and civil work in Colorado.

It was Ellis’s aggressive defenses of Trump after he came under investigation and impeachment that seem to have drawn his admiration. Trump made her one of his most visible spokespersons in the period after the November 2020 election, where she appeared in public alongside Giuliani to press Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.

The quick way down

Following Trump’s loss and departure from the White House, and as more information emerged about the illegal role the “elite strike force” had played in his attempted coup, an ethics complaint was brought against Ellis in her home state of Colorado by the States United Democracy Center. It asked the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel (OARC) to investigate whether Ellis had violated her professional and ethical duties, alleging among other things, that Ellis had

• Knowingly spread falsehoods about the 2020 election;

• Assisted in Trump’s efforts to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the electoral count; 

• Provided misleading legal advice based on false claims that there was more than one lawfully certified slate of electors in each of the battleground states; and

• Amplified false theories of voter fraud and the “operation of state law” to persuade state legislators to overturn the election results.

Ellis actually wound up accused by OARC twice of misconduct. The first resulted in her censure by a judge for misrepresentations she had made around the 2020 election. The second came after Ellis pled guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writings as part of a plea deal in Georgia. That guilty plea resulted in a three-year suspension of her law license in Colorado, following an agreement struck between Ellis and state authorities.

While a three-year suspension instead of outright disbarment may feel like a light punishment, it’s also clear that Ellis’s life has been turned upside down by the indictments and the huge cost of defending them—made even more problematic now that she cannot currently practice law to earn a living. As for getting help from her former boss, Ellis famously complained on Twitter, after getting indicted in Georgia,

I was reliably informed Trump isn’t funding any of us who are indicted.

Would this change if he becomes the nominee? Why then, not now?

I totally agree this has become a bigger principle than just one man. So why isn’t MAGA, Inc. funding everyone’s defense?

(This did not change, of course, when Trump became the nominee.) Others responded with thoughts on Ellis’s complaint:

Grand schemes and a grand jury in the Grand Canyon state

As part of Ellis’s efforts to undermine faith in the 2020 election, she made baseless and false claims of widespread election fraud in the state. As the Washington Post reported,

She accompanied Giuliani to Phoenix for a meeting, where unfounded claims of election fraud were circulated as Trump dialed in to speak to the crowd. Ellis was also by Giuliani’s side during a meeting with then-Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R), who testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack that Giuliani repeatedly sought to persuade him to help overturn Trump’s 10,457-vote defeat in the state.

“We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence,” Bowers recalled Giuliani telling him and others present.

Per reporting by AP, prosecutors allege that Ellis also encouraged members of the Arizona legislature to reverse the election outcome, and that she urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to accept Arizona’s fake elector slate.

Earlier this year, a grand jury in Arizona indicted 18 defendants, including Ellis, for attempting to overturn the state’s 2020 election. Included were the state’s 11 fake electors and several key Trump allies, such as Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Christina Bobb and John Eastman.

A fully cooperative witness

It was already clear that at least one member of the scheme to overturn the election, Kenneth Chesebro, had been assisting several state prosecutors in their investigation. His name also did not appear as one of the defendants in the Arizona indictment, leading legal experts to conclude Chesebro had been cooperating with State Attorney General Kris Mayes’s office.

After the charges were filed, the next question became which named defendant would be the first to rat out the others. That answer arrived yesterday with a cooperation agreement between state prosecutors and Ellis.

Ellis has agreed to cooperate fully with authorities in exchange for the state dropping all charges against her. Basically that includes, per a summary by Katie Phang on MSNBC, the following terms:

• Ellis waives her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and “shall provide truthful information in any and all interviews given to representatives of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.”

• Ellis “shall testify completely and truthfully at any time and any place requested by the Arizona AG’s Office, including at any state or federal grand jury proceeding, forfeiture proceeding, bond hearing, pretrial hearing, civil and criminal trial, retrial or post-trial hearing.”

• Ellis must provide information and testimony that is “truthful, honest, candid, and complete with no knowing material false statements or omissions.”

• Ellis shall provide “any materials within [her] custody and control” that are related to her charges and the related investigations.

• Ellis provided sworn, recorded statements on June 17, 2024, to the Arizona AG’s Office and she affirms that the information provided was “truthful, honest, candid, and complete with no knowing material false statements or omissions.”

• If the Arizona AG’s Office “in its sole discretion” determines Ellis violated the cooperation agreement, it can withdraw from the agreement and file charges against Ellis. If it withdraws, the AG’s Office isn't limited in the types of charges it can file against her.

This almost certainly means Ellis has proffered valuable information in that June 17th statement, or prosecutors wouldn’t have struck such a sweetheart deal. Further, it’s clear prosecutors will have quite a tight leash here. If Ellis lies or isn’t fully cooperative, they can act immediately against her. That will tend to bolster confidence in her truthfulness when it comes time for her to testify.

Having someone on the inside of all of the conspirators’ schemes and plans who will testify against her fellow defendants is a real game-changer. Importantly, Ellis can provide context for the actions taken by others and help establish their guilty states of mind—something outsiders like Rusty Bowers, as good a witness as he is, could not as easily do. Together with Chesebro, prosecutors will now be able to tell a coherent story, from start to finish, about both the scheme to create and deploy the false electors and how the defendants illegally planned to cause Arizona to flip to Trump well after the election was over.

Ellis’s flip has got to have Giuliani, Meadows and Eastman quite concerned. Perhaps they were all hoping a Trump reelection would somehow save them from trials in Georgia and now Arizona. Even if Trump were re-elected, however, he could do little to stop state-level charges from moving forward against his former aides. And in any event, Trump’s chances of regaining the White House and control of federal law enforcement are much diminished these days as the Harris/Walz ticket continues to rise in the polls.

It remains a hard time indeed to be a Trump coup defendant.