Jenna Ellis' fatal error was peddling 'complete nonsense': Analysis

Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis on Tuesday pleaded guilty to charges related to her efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election on behalf of former President Donald Trump.

In an analysis for the Washington Post, Philip Bump pinpoints the fatal flaw that let to Ellis' legal downfall: Namely, she was peddling "complete nonsense."

In fact, writes Bump, Ellis all but acknowledged this during her tearful courtroom hearing on Tuesday morning.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

"I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information,” Ellis said while entering her plea. “What I did not do, but should have done, your honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were, in fact, true."

Bump then goes on to dissect the incentive structure in play that essentially offered Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, or any other Trump attorneys willing to represent him, no reason at all to vent the wild claims being made about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Essentially, he writes, so long as Trump and his voters demanded to be told untruths about the 2020 election, then no one working on the election fraud case could have possibly been expected to tell the truth and still keep their jobs.

"The core problem, again, was that it was almost all nonsense, that almost none of it was credible," Bump concludes. "But credibility wasn’t the goal, utility was. So lots of useful, false things were offered up, having the effect of making other false things more useful and making those original false things more useful still. Layers upon layers of nonsense."