PHOENIX — Jenna Ellis, an attorney for Donald Trump during his 2020 presidential campaign, pleaded not guilty Tuesday in the “fake electors” case in Arizona, where she and 17 other defendants face forgery, fraud and conspiracy charges related to alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
All 18 of those charged have pleaded not guilty in Arizona. Ellis in 2023 pleaded guilty 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 arraignments in the case, pleading not guilty. Epshteyn was an attorney and adviser to the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and recently appeared with Trump in court in New York during the former president’s hush money trial. Lamon was on Trump’s slate of potential electors leading into the 2020 election.
The charging documents allege that one month after the 2020 election, 11 Trump supporters convened at the Arizona GOP headquarters in Phoenix to sign a certificate claiming to be Arizona’s 11 electors to the Electoral College, though Joe Biden won the state by 10,457 votes and state officials certified his electors. The state Republican Party documented the signing of the certificate in a social media post and sent it to Congress and the National Archives.
Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were also among those charged by a state grand jury in April in connection with the plan.
Ellis was a senior legal adviser for 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 sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, an experience that has seen her subpoenaed, censured and indicted in multiple jurisdictions.
During Ellis’ 2023 guilty plea in Georgia, she said she had “failed to do my due diligence” in other states as she wiped away tears.
“In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election 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 full experience with deep remorse.”
In 2023, a Colorado Supreme Court justice censured Ellis, a Colorado native, for violating a state rule for professional conduct that prohibits “misrepresentation” by attorneys. She recently had her law license suspended in Colorado for three years.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
