Pro-Trump attorney named a witness in Georgia election case – Spectrum News NY1

A pro-Trump attorney who played a key role in spreading conspiracies about the 2020 election was named as a witness by Georgia prosecutors in the election interference racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and 18 others.

Lin Wood was among a number of witnesses identified by Fulton County prosecutors in a court filing on Wednesday outlining potential conflicts of interest defense attorneys and co-defendants may have as a result of their previous work representing or working with witnesses and other co-defendants.

Wood told Spectrum News on Thursday his attorney was contacted by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office late last week and was told Wood would be subpoenaed to testify at the October trial of Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, two lawyers charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act who successfully had their trials severed from the other co-defendants.

“I don’t know why I’m involved. But I’m an American citizen. If I receive a subpoena, I will go testify truthfully. I don’t have any problems testifying truthfully,” Wood told Spectrum News. ”I’m happy to tell the truth and answer their questions. I am a supporter of Donald Trump. I have been unwavering. But I don’t have any knowledge firsthand about the President as it relates to the accusations made against him.”

Wood also denied he “flipped” on Trump, saying he was being compelled by a subpoena and did not believe he had anything incriminating to offer about Trump or other defendants.

“I have not flipped on President Trump,” he said, later adding he was a ”staunch supporter” of Trump’s. He also continued to falsely claim the former president “won a landslide victory in 2020.”

And the attorney, who gave up his law license earlier this year after nearly 50 years of practice as he faced possible disbarment for his efforts to prove false claims of voter fraud, said he hasn’t had any communication with Trump or representatives of the former president since the first half of 2021. Around June of that year, he received a note at his personal residence in which Trump raised him, writing “you will always be great in my book. Keep fighting — you are one of a kind!” He also said he may have received a Christmas card from Trump in the years since.

Wood never worked officially for Trump’s legal team, but emerged as a major proponent of some of the more bizarre and unfounded conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his allies in the wake of the 2020 election. He filed lawsuits in Georgia attempting to prove those theories and subvert the election in the state, but his efforts ultimately failed. Two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, where Trump supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” Wood posted “Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST” on the right-wing social media site Parler, later telling CNN it was “rhetorical hyperbole.”

Prior to his advocacy for the baseless election fraud conspiracies, Wood had a long career as an attorney specializing in defamation cases for clients including the parents of JonBenét Ramsey, Richard Jewell, the man falsely accused of being behind the 1996 bombing of the Olympics in Atlanta, and a woman who accused basketball star Kobe Bryant of sexual assault. He later served as a lawyer for Kyle Rittenhouse, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis couple who infamously pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in June 2020.

In Wednesday’s court filing, Georgia prosecutors indicated he may be called as a witness against at least one other defendant — Jeffrey Clark — but Wood said he had yet to see a subpoena and was unsure the full extent of what was being required of him. He previously testified to the grand jury that ultimately voted in favor of the indictments brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Clark, a former U.S. assistant attorney general who helped craft legal justification for Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss, is being represented in the Georgia case by Harry MacDougald. According to court filings, MacDougald represented and served as co-counsel with Wood in a federal lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger filed just days after the 2020 election arguing the state’s top election official unlawfully expanded access to absentee ballots during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wood said he never met MacDougald in person and only ever communicated with him over the phone or via email. Wood denied having a “formal engagement agreement” or paying MacDougald anything for lawsuits challenging the outcome of the election in Georgia that they both worked as attorneys on or where MacDougald was listed as representation for Wood.

“If necessary, I would waive the alleged conflict,” Wood said. “I don’t have a conflict with him representing Jeffrey Clark and examining me if he’s gonna examine me.”

Spectrum News reached out to MacDougald via his Atlanta law firm, but he did not immediately respond.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and a Trump loyalist, was among those on the right who speculated Wood had flipped on the former president, writing on social media he was “not surprised one bit” in response to his brother Joseph Flynn calling Wood a “rat b******.”

“Now that’s a Christian thing to say about someone,” Wood said. He called the brothers “liars” and expressed doubt about their loyalty to Trump. After speaking to Spectrum News and saying he hadn’t heard about the Flynns’ comments until asked about them, Wood posted the theme song to the 1960s TV show “The Rat Patrol” on his Telegram channel.

Wood and MacDougald also worked together with Sidney Powell, an attorney who worked on the Trump campaign legal team and is one of the 19 co-defendants in the Georgia case, in another federal lawsuit against Raffensperger, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and other election officials. The lawyers alleged “election software and hardware from Dominion Voting Systems, which was purportedly developed by Venezuelans to manipulate votes in favor of [Venezuelan President] Hugo Chavez, led to a fraudulent ballot-stuffing campaign,” according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections project.

The suit was dismissed by a federal judge and an appeal to the Supreme Court was ultimately withdrawn by Powell, MacDougald and other attorneys.

A lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney alleged to have helped develop and execute a plan to create a fake slate of electors to grant Georgia’s votes in the Electoral College to Trump, said on Thursday that Raffensperger and his wife had signed waivers dismissing any conflicts of interest with him. The lawyer, Scott Grubman, previously represented the husband and wife during their testimony to the grand jury.

Powell goes to trial next month alongside Chesebro. Powell is accused of breaching election equipment in rural Coffee County as part of Trump’s allies quest to prove their baseless claims of voter fraud.

In another possible conflict of interest, Fulton County prosecutors noted in their Georgia filing that MacDougald represented five other witnesses and another co-defendant — former Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham — in the latter lawsuit.

Other witnesses identified by prosecutors included C.J. Pearson, Vikki Consiglio, Gloria Godwin, James Carroll and Carolyn Fisher. Pearson didn’t sign the fake electors paperwork because he had moved to Alabama for college, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year, but the other four were all signatories, according to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request by the government watchdog American Oversight.