Scott Hall’s Plea Deal Could Be A Gamechanger

Mug shot of Scott Hall, Fulton County Sheriff’s Department

Today I want to talk about someone you may never have heard of before, but who likely will play a key role in determining the fate of several defendants in the Georgia RICO case, including Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell, former Justice Department coup attorney Jeffrey Clark, and possibly even Rudy Giuliani and the big guy himself.

His name is Scott Hall, and before the 2020 election, he was known as a successful bail bondsman in Atlanta. So how did he wind up named as a RICO defendant in the Georgia case alongside the likes of these folks?

Perhaps he flew too close to the fire due to his brother-in-law, David Bossie—a former president and chair of Citizens United and Trump’s 2016 deputy campaign manager. Or perhaps he bought into the wild conspiracy theories being pumped out by Trump-aligned lawyers like Giuliani and Powell and felt it was his “patriotic duty” in some warped way to help break into election machines in Coffee County, Georgia.

Whatever his motivation, Hall has figured out, to his credit, that he had better cop a plea and quickly. He’s escaping any jail time (with five years probation) and paying a mere $5,000 fine in exchange for his cooperation. As Prof. Joyce Vance notes, the very beneficial, light sentence indicates that prosecutors believe his help will be quite valuable and is worth the bargain.

So let’s take a look at the three ways Hall might be the little guy who refuses to take the fall for the bigger folks. As I indicated yesterday in my Week Ahead look, if I were Sidney Powell or Jeffrey Clark, I’d be worried over two of these ways. After all, Hall was named in the indictment alongside Powell in four separate overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy, all of which comprise predicate, criminal acts. He was also listed alongside Clark in one overt act that involved a 63 minute telephone call. You might ask, and the jury will want to know, what a bail bondsman from Atlanta and a rogue Justice Department official had to say to one another, and we’ll likely get to find out from Hall.

And then there’s a third, intriguing connection, which as far as I can tell was first spotted and fleshed out by legal observer Marcy Wheeler of the Empty Wheel newsletter. That connection ties Hall to Trump campaign efforts to intimidate election worker Ruby Freeman. If Hall has evidence on this—and I should caution that so far all we know is who he was talking to about it—it could prove nothing short of explosive.

Let’s jump in.

The Coffee County election machine break-in

After Election Day, as lawyers like Powell and Giuliani continued to make outrageous and false claims about massive election fraud resulting from Dominion Voting Systems machines, they came under pressure to produce actual evidence of this fraud. “Team Crazy” caught a lucky break in Antrim County, Michigan, where it seemed at first that machines had somehow flipped Trump votes to Biden.

But that was later proven to be human error. Here’s how Time Magazine described that error by the elections official:

When she added that last-minute candidate for village trustee to the ballots, she should have updated the counting machines with the new parameters. But she hadn’t. So when the numbers started rolling in, they dropped into the wrong columns. A little over two thousand Trump votes had been shifted to Biden’s column. Her error.

Then when she had tried to fix the issue, entering the correct numbers directly into the central computer, she hadn’t zeroed out the mistaken ones. So she had published a stack of both wrong and right totals.

The Trump campaign nevertheless seized upon Antrim County as an example of what they claimed was happening all over the country, even though it was one isolated incident, and even though it wasn’t election fraud at all. They needed more examples, and they were willing to break the law, apparently, to obtain them.

Anna Bower of Lawfare masterfully describes how the Coffee County election crimes tie into the larger scheme to overturn the elections, so for the rest of this section I will pull some salient points from her longer and highly detailed piece.

After Antrim County, Sidney Powell in particular was hungry for any proof to help establish her election fraud claims. She even joined several radicals at a fateful White House meeting on December 18, 2020 to argue in favor of the federal government seizing voting machines around the country. 

When that didn’t happen, Powell set her sights on Coffee County, Georgia—another improbable rural county where, like Antrim County, Michigan, massive election fraud was unlikely to have taken place. She had help, however, from extremist election officials in the county who had been claiming that they knew how the Dominion Machines could have been manipulated. But rather than go through normal court processes to try and obtain the evidence, Powell and a team of co-conspirators decided to do an old-fashioned break in (but they apparently forgot about things like surveillance video).

Powell, Hall and two other Georgia officials are charged with corruptly conspiring “to unlawfully access secure voting equipment and voter data” and with stealing “data, including ballot images, voting equipment software, and personal voter information” which was later “distributed to other members of the enterprise, including members in other states.”

They collectively face charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud (Counts 32-33), conspiracy to commit computer theft (Count 34), conspiracy to commit computer trespass (Count 35), conspiracy to commit computer invasion of privacy (Count 36), and conspiracy to defraud the state (Count 37).

So, some big questions here. Did Sidney Powell direct the break-in herself or otherwise instruct it to occur? Was she aware it was under way? Who else in the Trump world knew of this plan? Who received the data? Hall may be able to fill in a lot of the missing pieces here.

The Clark Connection

There is an intriguing paragraph in the Georgia indictment that indicates Hall was in direct communication with one of the highest members of the Trump coup plot. Specifically, there was a 63 minute phone call between Hall and Jeffrey Clark that took place on January 2, 2021, just days before the insurrection. So, what was that call about?

We know that the very same day, Clark met with Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Department official Richard Donoghue to urge them to send a letter he had drafted to Georgia state officials. Clark wanted the Department to advise them to call a special legislative session and to consider appointing the “alternate” slate of electors who had met a few weeks earlier on December 14, 2020 to create a false certification for Trump.

Richard Donoghue has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clark “began to talk about Georgia” and that he had “spoken to this individual in Georgia” regarding allegations of election fraud. In his notes, Donoghue wrote that the individual was “the largest bail bondsman in Georgia.” Ding ding ding.

According to Donoghue, Clark claimed that the Department would “need to get that letter out” to state officials “based on a discussion with this individual in Georgia and things that came up in the Georgia senate hearing.”

In other words, it appears Hall was passing on information, based on unfounded conspiracies and false claims, to Jeffrey Clark at the Justice Department. It’s important to remember that Clark worked in the Civil Division and was an environmental lawyer, not an elections expert or investigator. He was way outside his lane and apparently relying in part on Hall’s word to move forward with an official letter, one that could have completely upended the election by getting the Justice Department involved. Specifically, Clark wanted to state that the Department was investigating election fraud when in fact it had looked into the claims and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Hall will be able to flesh out to prosecutors what was said in that call with Clark. He may also have notes he took of the call, or otherwise prepared in advance given the subject matter. We will need to see.

The Ruby Freeman pressure campaign

I have written extensively about the illegal Ruby Freeman pressure campaign and come back to this part of the case again and again, not only because it is so emblematic of the depths the Trump campaign were willing to go at the time, but also because it humanizes the impact of their criminal actions. It’s something a jury can really sink its teeth into.

We already know that Rudy Giuliani spread vicious lies and impugned the character of Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, and that Trump disparaged them as well. This led to threats upon the election workers’ lives and their lawsuit for defamation, for which OAN has already paid a settlement to get out from under and in which Giuliani has already lost on a motion for summary judgment, with only the question of damages still to be decided at trial. 

We also know that Freeman suffered intense pressures from a set of on the ground co-conspirators that included the head of Black Voices for Trump, a shifty minister who apparently stalked her outside her home, and the former publicist of Kanye West, Trevian Kutti. (Can’t make this up.) The latter came for Freeman directly and in person and, on a speaker call with the other conspirators, made veiled threats that Freeman was in danger and that people would come to her home in 48 hours if she did not confess to election fraud. Very bad, shady and scary stuff.

A big question has always been, “Who if anyone in the Trump campaign knew about this illegal pressure campaign?”

It turns out, Scott Hall may possess key information. 

As Wheeler notes in her summary, Act 127 of the indictment lists a series of 20 phone calls on January 5, 2021. The calls occurred among operatives on the ground, including Hall and the Kanye publicist Kutti on the one hand, and a member of the Trump campaign, Robert Cheeley, on the other. Cheeley is a Georgia lawyer charged in the conspiracy who allegedly was coordinating the fake electors on the Trump side of things. Cheeley had also presented edited video clips of election workers that he claimed showed they were double or triple counting votes when in fact they were not.

We don’t know yet what was said among the plotters in those calls, or whether Cheeley was further relaying what was happening to anyone higher up in the Trump campaign. But Hall may know, and he is now cooperating with prosecutors.

In fact, in one of the calls, made at 11:35 pm, Hall is listed as being on the phone not only with Cheeley, the Trump campaign lawyer, but also with Kutti, the shady Kanye publicist. To my mind, they likely would have nothing in common to talk about except the illegal pressure campaign upon Freeman. Kutti was apparently only involved with that part of the conspiracy.

That raises the legal stakes for the Trump lawyer Cheeley significantly. Now that Cheeley knows that Hall is talking, he had better start figuring out what information he can provide that could be valuable to Georgia prosecutors in exchange for a plea deal. If Cheeley can connect Giuliani directly to the illegal pressure campaign, for example, it will prove the main point of the RICO conspiracy: that this was all one big criminal enterprise where dirty criminal gang-like tactics, including openly threatening an elderly election worker unless she changed her story, was a key part of it.