No. of Recommendations: 2
In theory, that means she is now exposed to nearly unlimited legal peril at the federal level.
I mean - maybe? She didn't plead to a state Rico charge. She only pled to counts of interfering with local, Georgia election rules. Specifically, the counts she pled to were to interfering with the operations of one of their local election precincts - trying to access computers, trying to access voter data, trying to remove Dominion software from one of the machines, etc. None of those are really predicates to the conspiracy that Jack Smith is charging, which relate to the "paperwork coup" of getting the Congress to ignore the actual electors that resulted from the 2020 election. The facts that she's admitting to in the Georgia case ("We tried to illegally access the Georgia voting machines") aren't especially pertinent to the crimes charged in the federal case.
So I think her counsel probably did an excellent job. That's a great plea deal - no jail time at all and a miniscule fine. And since we know that the federal and state prosecutors are coordinating on all of this, I actually think this is a good sign for Powell that she's not in Smith's sights for future prosecution. Otherwise there would have been a little more effort on the part of federal prosecutors to get the state to make her deal contingent on a similar deal in the federal case. This good a deal means that either the feds don't care about her, or that the information she's giving up (not testimony) is so useful that it's worth it for the feds to lose this leverage over her.
