ATLANTA — Video interviews with former attorneys for former President Donald Trump provided to ABC News reveal new details about efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
ABC News obtained portions of videos of the proffer sessions of both Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.
The videos shed light on what they have told law enforcement after agreeing to cooperate last month in the district attorney’s election interference case.
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During a confidential interview with Fulton County investigators, Ellis said she was informed in the wake of the 2020 election that Trump was “not going to leave” the White House, despite having already lost the election and most of his subsequent challenges.
Powell explained to prosecutors her plans to seize voting machines nationwide and claimed that she frequently communicated with Trump during her efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Though she admitted she didn’t know much about election law to begin with, Powell reiterated the false notion that Trump won the election during the session.
“Did I know anything about election law? No,” she told Fulton County prosecutors. “But I understand fraud from having been a prosecutor for 10 years, and knew generally what the fraud suit should be if the evidence showed what I thought it showed.”
ABC News was provided excerpts from Ellis and Powell’s proffer sessions totaling nearly an hour and a half.
At one point in the interviews, prosecutors indicate that Powell answered nearly three hours of questions during her session.
In a statement to ABC News, Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead counsel in the Fulton County case, called Ellis’ interview “absolutely meaningless.”
“The only salient fact to this nonsense line of inquiry is that President Trump left the White House on January 20, 2021, and returned to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” Sadow said. “If this is the type of bogus, ridiculous ‘evidence’ DA Willis intends to rely upon, it is one more reason that this political, travesty of a case must be dismissed.”
Ellis recounted a conversation during the session that she had at a White House Christmas party weeks after the 2020 election with one of Trump’s top White House aides Dan Scavino.
“And he said to me, in a kind of excited tone, ‘Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave,’” Ellis said of the alleged Dec. 19 conversation with Scavino. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said ‘Well, the boss’, meaning President Trump -- and everyone understood ‘the boss,’ that’s what we all called him -- he said, ‘The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.’”
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Ellis continued, “And I said to him, ‘Well, it doesn’t quite work that way, you realize?’ and he said, ‘We don’t care.’”
As seen in the portions of the proffer interview obtained by ABC News, Powell told prosecutors that in her direct conversations and meetings with Trump, she never heard him concede that he lost the election even after being told by key aides that he had.
“All his instincts told him he had been defrauded, that the election was a big fraud,” Powell said. “Just general instincts that something wasn’t right here.”
When prosecutors pressed Powell over why the president followed her advice instead of other advisors, she said, “Because I didn’t think he had lost.” She later said, “I saw an avenue pursuant to which, if I was right, he would remain president.”
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