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- cross-posted to:
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Loraine Pellegrino admitted to misdemeanor charge of filing a false document, with 17 other people charged in case
A Republican activist who signed a document falsely claiming Donald Trump had won Arizona in 2020 became the first person to be convicted in the state’s fake elector case.
Loraine Pellegrino, a past president of the group Ahwatukee Republican Women, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document, the Arizona attorney general’s office spokesperson, Richie Taylor, said on Tuesday, declining to comment further. Records documenting her guilty plea have not yet been posted by the court. Still, court records show Pellegrino was sentenced to unsupervised probation. Before the plea, she faced nine felony charges.
Seriously? She pleaded down from 9 felonies to 1 misdemeanor and was sentenced to unsupervised probation? Was this another cooperation agreement? Is she going to testify against her co-conspirators or what?
That’s what a plea bargain is. If she doesn’t complete the terms of the bargain, the charges will be reinstated. It is likely to testify against the other defendants but whatever it is, it wasn’t trivial.
Not necessarily. In some cases, prosecutors will allow a defendant to plead to a lesser charge because simply it saves time and money. Trials are expensive and prosecutor time is valuable so sometime they just take the win on a lesser charge to put the trial to bed. In this case, there is no further comment from anyone about the details of the plea. This suggests that Pellegrino pleaded guilty to the lesser charge, said she was sorry, and the court let her off with something that isn’t even a slap on the wrist.
Jenna Ellis also took a plea deal in this case. However, in the reporting on that deal, it specifically says that she will cooperate with the prosecution.
All they are saying about Pellegrino is that there is no further comment on the plea in this article. Axios has slightly more. They say she’s getting three years unsupervised probation (The Guardian article left out the length of the sentence) and adds this:
Why would they seal this plea agreement but not the Ellis agreement where she is required to fully cooperate? Why is Pellegrino getting such a sweetheart deal?
That’s a great question.
Would not surprise me at all to hear she’s now a cooperating witness against some higher-up defendants.
Yeah, what astounds me that there aren’t more people willing to flip in these cases?
Possibly related?
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-likely-indicted-arizona-glenn-kirschner
One can hope.