‘If I Knew Then What I Know Now’
Jenna Ellis becomes the latest Trump functionary to learn that his emphasis on loyalty only flows one way.
The symmetry is striking: two lawyers, two different eras of Donald Trump’s career, and two courtrooms in different regions of the country. The lessons from Jenna Ellis and Michael Cohen, however, are the same. Loyalty to Trump is seldom returned, with disastrous results for those who offer it.
In an Atlanta courtroom today, Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Trump, pleaded guilty to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements. She agreed to five years’ probation and will pay restitution and testify in future cases. Ellis is the third lawyer—following Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro—to plead guilty in the past week as part of the wide-reaching racketeering case over attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. But she is the first to make a statement in court as she entered her plea, and what she said was revealing.
“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion. “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 whole experience with deep remorse.”
Also earlier today, 750 miles north, in Manhattan, Michael Cohen was testifying as the star witness for the New York attorney general’s office in a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump. Like Ellis, Cohen worked as a lawyer for Trump, engaging in actions on the fringes of the law; like Ellis, he is now a convicted felon.
Ellis’s remarks today echoed what Cohen told the House Oversight Committee in February 2019: “I regret the day I said ‘yes’ to Mr. Trump. I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way. I am ashamed of my own failings, and I publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York.”
If Ellis and Cohen are not in good company, they are at least in big company. Over the years, many people have agreed to work for Trump and put their reputations, to say nothing of criminal records, on the line for him. The former president demands near-total fealty, browbeating and punishing allies for any deviations. (Just ask Representative Tom Emmer, who became the GOP’s latest nominee for speaker of the House today, and then almost immediately became the former nominee, after Trump blasted him on his social-media site.) But when these loyal lieutenants need the favor repaid, Trump ghosts them.
This one-way loyalty has burned boldface names and relative nobodies alike. Many of the people who served in Trump’s administration or served as his allies in Congress have found themselves diminished and sometimes legally ensnared. Many of the people convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol have expressed anger at Trump and said they felt hoodwinked by him. He has floated the idea of pardoning them if he regains the presidency. Even if he wins, they should know that his track record of following through is bad.
Trump tried to publicly intimidate Cohen into friendly testimony, but didn’t offer a federal pardon that would have prevented a conviction or spared his former fixer prison time. In Ellis’s case, she complained that Trump wasn’t doing much to help her raise funds for her legal defense, even though she was being targeted for working on his behalf. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast last month. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Ellis’s plea deal appears to be especially bad news for Rudy Giuliani, yet another former attorney who debased himself on Trump’s behalf and was then charged in Fulton County. Ellis worked closely with Giuliani, and though she did not mention him by name in her statement in court, she pointedly said she had relied on the wisdom of more experienced attorneys—a possible preview of testimony incriminating Giuliani for his role in the election-subversion push.
Giuliani, ironically enough, has experienced some of the same abandonment that stung Ellis. Giuliani has begged the former president for legal assistance as well as millions in payment for legal services rendered as part of the election schemes, according to The New York Times: “Among those who remain close to Mr. Giuliani, there is bafflement, concern and frustration that the former mayor, who encouraged Mr. Trump to declare victory on election night before all the votes were counted, has received little financial help.” Trump has since agreed to hold a pair of fundraisers on Giuliani’s behalf, but the amounts raised still seem to pale against both what Giuliani believes he is owed by Trump and what he owes to his own lawyers.
The mystery is why people keep agreeing to work for Trump despite the hazards. Cohen at least got rich out of his long employment with Trump. What Ellis thought she was getting is less clear, other than public attention that was tainted with ridicule from the start. Trump does occasionally bestow favors on those who jump on grenades for him. Some of the aides who waded most deeply in the muck for Trump received presidential pardons, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon.
But these are exceptions. More often, even those who place themselves in grave legal or reputational danger end up facing it alone. “I failed to do my due diligence,” Ellis said today of her legal work for Trump in 2020. She could just as easily have been talking about the personal risks she took when she chose to work for him—despite ample warning about how things were likely to turn out.