PHOENIX – Jenna Ellisa lawyer for Donald Trump his 2020 presidential campaign pleaded not guilty Tuesday in the Arizona “fake voter” case, where they and 17 other defendants face charges of forgery, fraud and conspiracy in connection with alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results to make.
All eighteen defendants have pleaded not guilty in Arizona. Ellis pleaded guilty in 2023 in the Georgia election interference case, in which Trump was also charged.
Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and Jim Lamon, a 2022 Republican Senate candidate, also appeared virtually in court Tuesday for their arraignment in the case, pleading not guilty. Epshteyn served as a lawyer and adviser to the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and recently appeared in court with Trump in New York during the former president’s hush money trial. Lamon was on Trump’s list of potential electors heading into the 2020 election.
The charging documents allege that a month after the 2020 election, 11 Trump supporters gathered at Arizona GOP headquarters in Phoenix to sign a certificate claiming to be Arizona’s 11 electors to the Electoral College, even though Joe Biden the state won by 10,457 votes and state officials declared its electors. The Republican Party documented the signing of the certificate in a social media post and sent it to Congress and the National Archives.
Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were also among those indicted by a state grand jury in April in connection with the scheme.
Ellis was a senior legal advisor to the Trump campaign from early 2019 until shortly after he left office in January 2021. She was part of the legal team that advised him as he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, an experience that has seen her subpoenaed, censured and sued in multiple jurisdictions.
During Ellis’ guilty plea in Georgia in 2023, she said she had “failed to do my due diligence” in other states as she wiped away tears.
“In the frantic pace of efforts to address the elections in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence,” Ellis said in Fulton County Superior Court last year. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this entire experience with deep remorse.”
In 2023, a Colorado Supreme Court judge convicted Ellis, a Colorado resident, of violating a state rule of professional conduct that prohibits “misrepresentation” by attorneys. Recently, her law license in Colorado was suspended for three years.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
