kraken / elite strike team

---

see sidney powell

see oann

see paxton3 tx v

see big lie lawsuit

SEE FRAUDIT NINJA SIDNEY FUNDED

rudy 4

see disbar pjt 65

see jenna kraken 2

---

see thom 3 kari gohmert sidney 12th amend lawsuit

---

-=-=

DOCKET 10 26

Among the people now going to bat for Eastman are Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and a coalition of former Trump attorneys who helped his 2020 election subversion effort: anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell, former One America News Network reporter Christina Bobb, recently departed U.S. Department of Justice pardon attorney Ed Martin, lawyers Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, and others.

-=-=

Jenna Ellis Says Religious Freedom Only Applies To Christians

RWW

05/04/2026

Kyle Mantyla

During Friday's episode of her "Jenna Ellis In The Morning" radio program, former Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis declared that only Christians are entitled to religious freedom in the United States.

In 2020, Ellis was plucked from obscurity to serve as an attorney for President Donald Trump as he fought to overturn the results of the presidential election. As a result of her efforts, Ellis found herself facing a variety of legal troubles and saw her law license suspended.

Now, Ellis hosts a morning radio program on American Family Radio, where she interviews antisemitic figures like British cleric Calvin Robinson, who was stripped of his license to serve as a priest in the Anglican Catholic Church after he closed out his remarks at the National Pro-Life Summit in 2025 by delivering a Nazi-like salute.

Ellis interviewed Robinson about his forthcoming book "The Silent Jihad: Exposing The Islamification Of The West," which is being published by an imprint run by racist, antisemitic, and deeply misogynistic theocratic fascist Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon. During the conversation, Ellis insisted that the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom only applies to Christians.

"If we're going to prefer a religion, we need to prefer the Christian faith," Ellis said. "More Christians need to stand up and actually say that and suggest that and say our laws need to be based on truth and the biblical Christian worldview. We say that in a policy context, kind of, but because the left has been so diligent, frankly, in trying to confine Christians to only uttering the Bible as authoritative within the four walls of the church, we often don't use the Bible as being authoritative in the public square. And that needs to change."

"The whole point of having a civil society that recognizes the principles of religious freedom is so that we can go and evangelize, so that we can practice our faith, so that we can train up our children in the way they should go," Ellis insisted. "It's so that we can preserve and protect the Christian way of life. We don't have all of these protections for our rights that our founders recognize come from God, our creator, so that we can go out and live in a pluralistic society and say, 'Well, let's recognize the dignity of Islam.' I mean, that's not the point. That's not the purpose whatsoever. We have a civil government that protects the right of Christians to be able to live and work. And we have this whole perverted notion that somehow our Constitution demands pluralism that just isn't there if you take the whole context of the Declaration, the Constitution, the founding, and everything we're celebrating in America 250."

Video URL

IFrame Content

Ellis’s position, while certainly extreme and unconstitutional, is not entirely a surprise, given that she was a fellow at Liberty University’s Christian nationalist Falkirk Center – since renamed the Standing for Liberty Center – and that she once wrote a book that declared “divine law” is “the only legitimate basis for constitutional authority.”

---

sidney kraken georgia ballots 1 26

rww

James Fishback Says Don Lemon Is 'Lucky That He's Not Getting Executed In The Public Square'

01/30/2026

Kyle Mantyla

James Fishback is a far-right Republican candidate for governor in Florida whose campaign has overtly appealed to the white nationalist movement, with Fishback making multiple appearances on programs hosted by virulently antisemitic white nationalists and voicing his admiration for white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his "groyper" movement.

On Friday, Fishback appeared on the American Family Association's "Jenna Ellis In The Morning" program, hosted by one of President Donald Trump's former attorneys, where he opened the interview by praising the Trump administration for arresting independent journalist Don Lemon for his coverage of a group of anti-ICE protesters who invaded a church in Minneapolis earlier this month.

"It is a good day for law and order in America," Fishback declared. "A man ransacked a church during Sunday service with BLM and antifa thugs. If our Founding Fathers knew that a bunch of thugs, led by Don Lemon, had ransacked a church on Sunday morning while parishioners were praising our awesome God, they would have likely called for his public execution."

"Don Lemon should be lucky that he's not getting executed in the public square for his little stunt, his violence, his aggression," Fishback continued. "It's time that Christians stand up for our rights in this country. We cannot be bullied. We cannot be pushed around, least of all by Don Lemon, and so it's a good day for law and order. I'm proud of what President Trump and the DOJ are doing and let's see that justice is served in this case all the way through."

---

1 26 tulsi ed martin doj 3 grab ga ballots kraken sidney

Benny Johnson said “sources” have told him Nicolás Maduro was captured partially in relation to the 2020 election

01/30/26

:{---

---

ref 2

cyber Ninjas' ties to Trump during Arizona election 'audit' revealed in messages

Ryan Randazzo Robert Anglen

Arizona Republic

and

Jan. 26, 2023

Former President Donald Trump publicly kept his distance from the review of Maricopa County's 2020 election. But inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, his influence loomed over critical aspects of the "audit," according to messages sent and received by the man leading the ballot recount.

New records show Trump received direct updates from people at the coliseum, his allies pressured the lead contractor on when to report findings, and that contractor asked people close to the former president if he could help pay for it. This all happened as leaders of the state Senate publicly denied Trump had any involvement in their effort.

While messages from those working on the audit indicate they intentionally kept the president at arm's length to avoid the appearance of his influence, behind the scenes they sought Trump's approval — and money.

In April 2021, four days before the election review began, Cyber Ninjas founder Doug Logan used a private messaging system to discuss taking a donation from Trump and his team surreptitiously.

"I told them there was no way I could take funds directly," he said in the chat.

Once the audit concluded and the now-defunct Cyber Ninjas was millions of dollars in debt, Logan would lament that Trump never did directly fund his work.

"It's my understanding that our underfunded status is known all the way up to 45," Logan wrote to a subcontractor in a conversation about how to pay everyone. "Never talked with him, but I've been told the message has been received."

Presenters of the report on the election audit, from left, Ben Cotton, the founder of CyFIR, Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas and Randy Pullen, the audit spokesman, look on before the start of the presentation to the Arizona lawmakers in the Senate chambers of the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix on Sept. 24, 2021. David Wallace/The Republic

Logan has released tens of thousands of personal messages he sent to supporters and subcontractors involved in the audit in response to ongoing lawsuits from The Arizona Republic and a left-leaning watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., called American Oversight.

The messages reveal for the first time how Logan worked with Trump allies to help finance the work, shape media coverage and manage day-to-day operations as teams worked to hand count 2.1 million ballots cast by county voters.

Logan for months fought the release of his personal messages, which The Republic first sought through state Public Records Law. But after a $50,000-a-day sanction for noncompliance and exhausting all appeals, Logan’s lawyer has turned over many — but not all — text and Signal messages Logan sent and received while working on the audit.

Logan on Tuesday declined to comment on the pleas for money he made through extensive communication with Christina Bobb, a former Trump lawyer and conservative broadcaster who served as a go-between for the former president.

Arizona Senate Republicans hired Cyber Ninjas to recount and inspect ballots, and the so-called "audit" confirmed President Joe Biden’s win in the state and made no concrete findings of wrongdoing by election officials. But for months it served as a marketing tool for politicians who campaigned on unproven accusations that the election was compromised.

[

200 PhotosVIEW FULL GALLERY

Arizona Senate audits Maricopa County election resultsBallots from the 2020 presidential election were sent to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix in April 2021.](https://archive.ph/o/XXodN/https://www.azcentral.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/elections/2021/04/22/tabulation-machines-shipped-senate-election-audit/7312790002/)

Senate Republicans said from the outset that Trump did not push for the audit and did not provide any assistance for it, financial or otherwise.

Former Senate President Karen Fann, a Prescott Republican who hired Cyber Ninjas, repeatedly said the effort was not done to put Trump back in the White House.

"This absolutely has nothing to do with Trump," Fann wrote in an email to a constituent days after the audit began in 2021. "The election cannot be overturned. This audit is ONLY about election integrity, answering their questions, and hopefully proving there was nothing wrong with the election."

She reacted with surprise Jan. 19 to the newly released messages when contacted about them by a reporter. When the audit began, she said, she did not know the extent to which Trump allies were involved.

"I did not know," she said. "Since then I have now connected the dots. ... Obviously, in the subsequent months, it was very apparent."

Trump was watching, chatting with broadcaster

Several references in Logan’s messages indicate people in Trump’s circle were closely watching Maricopa County and reporting back to the former president, who they sometimes referred to as “45.” Trump was the nation's 45th president.

Logan in the messages discussed Trump’s interest in the work with Bobb, who was given broad access to the election review while working as a personality for the right-wing OAN Network.

Former One America News Network anchor Christina Bobb speaks at a Blake Masters election integrity event on April 30, 2022, in Chandler. Megan Mendoza/The Republic

Bobb worked in the Trump administration as an appointee in the Department of Homeland Security. She left in early 2020 to join OAN. But after Trump lost the 2020 election, Bobb volunteered to help his legal team challenge the results and was with his team until the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to her testimony to the congressional committee that investigated the attack.

Shortly after Trump's loss, she helped coordinate a meeting in Arizona at which Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani suggested the election was compromised.

Bobb continued to work as a personality for OAN and began covering the Arizona audit, where she messaged frequently with Logan. She also helped raise money for the audit through her connections to Trump and his organization.

Other media were restricted to a small press box in Veterans Memorial Coliseum — when they could get into the building at all.

Bobb at one point told Logan she would ask the Trump organization for recommendations for a lawyer to help with the audit because Logan didn't like the lawyer recommended to him at the time.

On June 19, 2021, Logan asked Bobb if Trump would pressure Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward to donate some of the money she was raising off the audit to the actual work, which he said she had not done. Bobb said Trump liked Ward because she was an "outspoken media personality" and was unlikely to push her to fund the audit.

In this series of messages, Doug Logan talks about audit funding with Christina Bobb. Logan, founder of Cyber Ninjas, turned over tens of thousands of personal messages in response to lawsuits. Text Messages Provided To Arizona Senate By Doug Logan

Logan followed up, asking if Trump could press people to donate to the nonprofits set up to fund the audit.

"I will ask him. He shies away from publicly supporting the audit. I will raise the money issue with him next time we talk," Bobb responded.

Then on June 25, Bobb discussed funding with Logan, telling him that a wire would come from “Sidney" from Defending the Republic. Trump lawyer Sidney Powell raised money after his loss through a nonprofit by that name.

“I reached out to her and she didn’t take my call. I’ll try again. If she doesn’t answer, I’ll have Trump call,” Bobb wrote to Logan.

Months later, Logan would report that Powell's group donated $550,000 to his work.

Bobb said in a recent interview with The Republic that she didn’t officially join the Trump team until April 2022. But she did communicate with Trump about the audit.

“I knew that he was very interested in the audit,” she said. “I was never officially communicating anything on behalf of anybody.”

Often, Trump just wanted more detail than what she had shared in her news stories, Bobb said.

She said she never received funding for the audit from Trump or any organization affiliated with him.

“He was not involved in funding. I did ask. It was a no,” she said.

Messages sought updates on counting, funding

In May 2021, as the work passed the one-month mark, Logan messaged with a man named Patrick Weaver who worked on the audit. Weaver was affiliated with The America Project, one of the groups that funded Logan’s work beyond the $150,000 paid by the state.

“Any total count numbers you can give me for Abby to give to Trump?” Weaver wrote to Logan on May 25, 2021. The identity of "Abby" is unclear.

In this message, Patrick Weaver asks Doug Logan for an audit update to provide Donald Trump. Logan, founder of Cyber Ninjas, turned over tens of thousands of personal messages in response to lawsuits. Text Messages Provided To Arizona Senate By Doug Logan

Logan responded with an update on the counting.

In July, Logan messaged with Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who worked with President Trump’s chief of staff after his 2020 defeat to concoct ways Trump might stay in office.Waldron said Trump had planned to send $1 million to the audit, but Logan said he had not received it.“Payment – 1 mil – supposedly Kurt talked to trump and they got 1 mil for you,” Waldron wrote to Logan. The identity of "Kurt" is unclear.

How we got here:An Arizona election audit timeline

Fann unaware of some connections to Trump

Fann acknowledged that Bobb and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani "called several times" before the audit began as part of an effort to call the election into question. But said she did not "know anything else that was going on in the background" of the ballot count.

Arizona needed the audit to assure voters there was no chicanery in the numbers, Fann said.

"My job was to make sure we had an honest election in Arizona," she said.

She confirmed Trump called her "a couple of times" to discuss the audit as it unfolded. She said she didn't recall him trying to exert influence over the process, but rather he asked about it.

"He told me, 'Thank you for doing this,'" she said.

Even as Bobb reported on and raised funds for the election review — and her network was selected to livestream camera footage from the coliseum — Fann said she believed Bobb was acting only in her capacity as a news host, not a Trump surrogate.

Senate President Karen Fann takes notes with a pen during a meeting about the audit the Arizona State Senate in Phoenix on July 15, 2021. Joseph Cooke/The Republic

'Is God really going to come through?'

Logan's lawyer has redacted several messages between him and Bobb sent during this time, despite clear orders from Arizona courts to turn over everything. Still, some of the unredacted messages show Bobb held out her connection to Trump as a way to influence Logan, who was desperate for money.

"Is God really going to come through in funding this thing?" Logan wrote to Bobb on June 26, 2021.

She replied: "I don't know what he's going to do, but I know in the end we win. I don't know how we get there. But yes, in the end it will all workout."

Logan told her that day he needed about $4.8 million more to complete the audit.

"I'll raise with 45 again next time we talk," Bobb replied.

The next day, Bobb messaged Logan asking if the Senate would issue a news release with his preliminary findings. Contractors had finished counting and inspecting ballots at the coliseum a few days before. It would be months before Logan made a final report.

"I'm getting a lot of concerned people calling me saying the audit will lose credibility if there isn't some type of announcement tomorrow," she wrote.

In this text message, Christina Bobb asks Doug Logan about a potential announcement about the audit. Text Messages Provided To Arizona Senate By Doug Logan

Logan didn't want to issue preliminary findings. He pushed back.

"That wouldn't be the case if there wasn't so much fake news that a number was expected tomorrow," he told the reporter.

Bobb lashed out.

"I strongly suggest you don't blame me for fake news," Bobb wrote. "I STRONGLY suggest that."

Bobb didn't pretend to be an independent observer about the ballot review.

"Remember we're on the same side," she wrote to Logan. "If you want to fight me, we both will lose."

Bobb said in an interview Jan. 19 she was pressuring Logan as a reporter, not on behalf of Trump.

“They needed to release the numbers. I remember that,” Bobb said. “I was holding him to the same standard that I was holding the election officials. Why don’t we have a result on election night? My personal opinion is when you are done counting, if you don’t release the numbers that looks sketchy. I’m not accusing anybody of doing anything wrong, but it raises a lot of questions.”

Asked whether she thought Logan did a good job on his final report, she said, “I don’t have a comment on that. I like Doug Logan. I think he’s great.”

:{Hobbs defends plan for state-funded travel for migrants[

Fann: 'We did not do this for Trump'

Fann sought to distance herself from Logan's fundraising efforts. She said it was clear when Logan said he needed to raise up to $5 million to pay for the audit that the money wasn't going to come from the Senate.

She said she did not know about any outreach to Trump or any other potential sources. Fann said her involvement with finances stopped with the Senate's authorization of audit expenses, which included $150,000 for Cyber Ninjas.

The audit has cost taxpayers so far about $5 million, the bulk of which came from Maricopa County. That includes legal fees it spent fighting with the Senate over access to voting information and the cost of new tabulation machines needed once the audit was completed.

Fann said the Senate's audit was a way to stand up for voters.

"We did this to do the right thing," she said. "We did this to answer questions. We did not do this for Trump."

Republic reporter Justin Price contributed to this article.

Reach reporter Ryan Randazzo at ryan.randazzo@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4331. Follow him on Twitter @UtilityReporter.

Reach reporter Robert Anglen atrobert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8694. Follow him on Twitter @robertanglen.

---

-----

OMFG

AN 1 26

When Donald Trump won the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, two of the four criminal prosecutions he was facing at the time stemmed from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: a federal indictment prosecuted by then-special counsel Jack Smith, and a Georgia indictment prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Both of those election interference cases were doomed when Trump defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in 2024's general election, and the president continues to claim, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

One of Trump's most aggressive supporters after he lost Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 was attorney Sidney Powell, who promoted a range of conspiracy theories on the election results in Georgia. And now, Powell is resurfacing after an FBI search in that state.

On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents searched a Georgia election center, looking for records on the 2020 election. And the following day on X, formerly Twitter, Ed Martin (a Trump appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice) posted a photo of him with Powell — writing, "Good morning, America. How are ya?"

The Bulwark's Will Sommer, in response to Martin's tweet, posted, "After FBI raid on GA election office for 2020 ballots, top DOJ official posts a picture with leading election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell."

Attorney David Colapinto, responding to the Martin/Powell photo, tweeted, "Are these two in charge of recounting the ballots?"

Powell was among Trump's many co-defendants in Willis' election interference case. In October 2023, she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor charges and avoided jail time but was sentenced to six months of probation.

---

TIME 11 25

President Donald Trump has ordered “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons for over 70 of his political allies who backed alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin.

In a social media post published in the early hours of Monday morning, Martin shared a signed proclamation of the list of names, which contains high-profile figures such as Trump’s former personal lawyer and one-time Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, lawyers Sidney Powell and John Eastman, and more.

“Thank you, POTUS, for allowing me, as U.S. Pardon Attorney, to work with the White House, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy AG Todd Blanche, and Solicitor General John Sauer to achieve your intent,” Martin wrote, crediting the team who worked on the pardons. “Let their healing begin.”

You can see the full list, here:

IFrame Content

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 presidential election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” reads the pardon signed by Trump on Nov. 7.

The pardon applies to those “for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities in, or advocacy for or of any slate of presidential electors… in connection with the 2020 presidential election.”

In a statement to TIME on Monday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of the pardons: “These great Americans were persecuted and put through hell by the Biden Administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy.”

Giuliani was held in contempt of court in January for failing to cooperate in the handover of $11 million of personal assets to Georgia poll workers he had falsely accused of helping to steal the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani later reached a settlement in the dispute.

Trump, meanwhile, said in September that he would be awarding his former lawyer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, days after Giuliani was injured in a New Hampshire car crash.

Trump has repeatedly made false claims that he, not former President Joe Biden, won the 2020 election. Rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, amid the fraught rhetoric.

In January, Trump pardoned almost 1,600 people convicted for their involvement in the Capitol Riots on Jan. 6, 2021, including commuting the sentences of violent offenders from the riots, such as Proud Boys leader Enrique Torrio, who was serving a 22-year sentence.

Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called the pardon “an outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol.”

---}:

an 10 24

On Wednesday, October 2, Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a 165-page legal brief in which special counsel Jack Smith makes a detailed, comprehensive case for moving forward with his election interference indictment against former President Donald Trump.

The document is mindful of the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial 6-3 immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States, which declared that a president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed as part of "core" duties but not for "unofficial" acts. And Smith, in the court filing, zeros in on acts he considers "unofficial" and therefore, subject to criminal prosecution.

In a listicle published by Politico, reporters Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein lay out 11 of the "most significant and striking details in Smith's brief."

"Much of Smith's brief focused on Trump's state of mind in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021," Cheney and Gerstein explain. "Smith described a slew of conversations suggesting that the then-president knew his claims of election fraud were spurious. And Smith laid out evidence that Trump's sole objective was to stay in power — not, as he and his lawyers have claimed, to exercise legitimate authority over election integrity."

The details that Cheney and Gerstein highlight are: (1) Trump "alone with his phone," (2) "Trump asked, 'So what'?," (3) Trump "disregarding the" election "results," (4) "inventing statistics," (5) "broken promises of evidence," (6) "mocking Sidney Powell," (7) "Trump's January 5 call to Steve Bannon," (8) "a view of forensic evidence," (9) "make them riot," (10) former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's "rise," and (11) "Rudy's follies."

Powell, like Giuliani, was among the Trump attorneys who promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And according to Smith's filing, Cheney and Gerstein note, the special counsel cites examples of Trump calling Powell "unhinged" and "crazy."

The Politico reporters point out that "well before" January 6, 2021, an "unidentified Trump campaign employee" described in Smith's brief "enthusiastically spoke of the potential for a riot in Michigan."

"The employee, whom prosecutors described as a co-conspirator, allegedly sought to 'create chaos' at a polling center in Detroit when it became clear a batch of election returns favorable to (Joe) Biden was legitimate," Cheney and Gerstein note. "'Find a reason it isn't,' the alleged co-conspirator said to a colleague, prosecutors wrote. When the colleague said an outbreak of violence appeared imminent, the campaign employee replied: 'Make them riot' and 'Do it!!!'"

*Read the full Politico article at this link.

---

===

no lnx?

Breaking

Giuliani Disbarred In D.C.: Here Are All The Other Ex-Trump Lawyers Now Facing Legal Consequences

Alison Durkee

Forbes Staff

Alison is a senior news reporter covering US politics and legal news.

Sep 26, 2024,12:38pm EDT

Updated Sep 27, 2024,

Topline Ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was formally disbarred in Washington, D.C., on Thursday—months after being disbarred in New York—as a string of lawyers are now facing consequences for their work with former President Donald Trump.

Rudy Giuliani

Key Facts

Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani, who led Trump’s post-election efforts, was formally disbarred in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ordering the penalty based on New York disbarring the attorney in July. The former New York City mayor has also been criminally charged in Arizona for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election—where he initially tried to evade being served—after already being charged in Georgia, and he’s also been sued for defamation by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. He was ordered to pay $148 million to Georgia election workers whom he defamed, which resulted in Giuliani declaring bankruptcy.

Jenna Ellis: Ellis was charged in Arizona after previously being indicted in Georgia and taking a plea deal in that case, and she took another deal in August that requires her to provide “truthful, honest, candid, and complete” testimonies after being suspended from practicing law for three years as a result of her Georgia guilty plea. She was also previously censured for violating rules that bar attorneys from engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” with the attorney admitting in court she had made “misrepresentations” while representing Trump after the election that had a “selfish motive.”

Kenneth Chesebro: The attorney, who is described as the architect of the Trump campaign’s “fake electors” scheme—in which GOP officials in battleground states submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won—was criminally charged in Wisconsin on one count of forgery, after previously being indicted in Georgia, though he took a plea deal right before his case went to trial.

James Troupis: Troupis was also reportedly charged in Wisconsin in June; another Trump attorney who helped organize the false electors scheme, the lawyer had previously avoided criminal charges in other states and settled a civil lawsuit regarding the electors plot in Wisconsin in March.

John Eastman: Eastman was also charged in Arizona, after already being indicted in Georgia and having 11 charges filed against him by counsel for the California State Bar stemming from his efforts to challenge the election results with Trump. A judge recommended in March that Eastman be disbarred and sanctioned $10,000 for his post-election efforts, which the lawyer intends to appeal.

Christina Bobb: Bobb was charged in Arizona, the first charges the attorney and former One America News anchor—who now serves as an attorney for the Republican National Committee—has so far faced. The lawyer joined Trump’s legal team in November 2020, according to the Washington Post, and the indictment cites a text message that ties the lawyer to the “fake elector” scheme in which GOP officials submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won their states.

Jeffrey Clark: Former DOJ attorney Clark, who faced charges from the D.C. bar for aiding Trump’s post-election efforts from within the agency, broke at least one rule of professional conduct related to his actions after 2020 election, a D.C. ethics committee found in a preliminary ruling, with a disciplinary panel ruling in August he should be suspended from practicing law for two years—Clark was also criminally charged in Georgia.

Sidney Powell: A judge dismissed an attempt by the Texas State Bar to discipline Powell in February after the bar alleged Powell’s post-election efforts had violated rules for professional conduct, though she now faces a separate disciplinary investigation in Michigan after being sanctioned for her post-election lawsuit in that state. After advising Trump and bringing her own post-election lawsuits in four states, Powell also still faces defamation lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, a reported federal investigation into her organization’s fundraising arm and was criminally charged in Georgia, though she later reached a plea deal.

Michael Cohen: Trump’s longtime attorney served a three-year sentence in prison and home confinement for tax evasion and campaign finance-related crimes, after he orchestrated a series of “hush money” payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal over allegations they had affairs with Trump.

Alina Habba: Habba, who’s representing Trump in many of his post-presidency legal battles, has been sanctioned multiple times in Trump’s failed lawsuit against Hillary Clinton; she was first ordered to pay with her co-counsel $50,000 in sanctions and $16,274 in attorneys’ fees to one defendant in the case, and she and Trump were then sanctioned in January for nearly $1 million payable to Clinton, her campaign and other Democratic operatives.

Cleta Mitchell: Mitchell, who participated in Trump’s phone call in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results, resigned from her law firm Foley & Lardner in January 2021, saying she left the firm due to a “massive pressure campaign” against her from the left to oust her over her associations with Trump.

Other Georgia Attorneys: Attorneys Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley were also indicted as part of the Georgia case against Trump and his allies, after Smith worked on behalf of the Trump campaign in Georgia and Cheeley pushed false claims of election fraud at a legislative hearing in the state.

Pending Complaints: Ethics complaints urging state bars and disciplinary boards to investigate attorneys have been filed and remain pending against multiple Trump lawyers who aided his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Mitchell and Boris Epshteyn, though court records show another complaint against Trump attorneys in New Mexico was dismissed.

Attorneys’ Fees: Trump and his campaign have been ordered to pay attorneys’ fees in a number of failed lawsuits—though it’s unclear if his attorneys have been forced to personally shoulder any part of those costs—including more than $20,000 to two Georgia counties over post-election litigation, $1.3 million to former White House advisor Omarosa Manigault and more than $54,000 to Daniels.

What To Watch For

Giuliani, Eastman and Bobb have all pleaded not guilty in Arizona, and their cases will still continue as Ellis’ charges are dropped. It’s unclear how long it will take for the criminal cases in Arizona and Wisconsin to play out. No trial date has yet been set for the defendants in Georgia who haven’t taken plea deals. (Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Smith, Cheeley and other defendants have all pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.)

Crucial Quote

“The seriousness of [Giuliani’s] misconduct cannot be overstated,” a panel of New York appeals court judges wrote in their July ruling disbarring Giuliani—which formed the basis of the Washington, D.C. decision—arguing he “flagrantly misused his prominent position” as Trump’s personal attorney and “repeatedly and intentionally made false statements ... in which he baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.” “In so doing, respondent not only deliberately violated some of the most fundamental tenets of the legal profession, but he also actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 Presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.”

Tangent

A number of lawyers who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but did not directly represent him in court or advise him, have also faced punishments. Powell’s co-counsel in the Michigan case—in which Trump was not a plaintiff—were all sanctioned and jointly forced to pay more than $175,000 in attorneys’ fees, as well as ordered to undergo legal education and referred to their respective state bars for potential discipline. Attorney Lin Wood, who was involved with the Michigan litigation along with other post-election lawsuits, has been under investigation by the State Bar of Georgia for his efforts since even before the Michigan order was issued. He ultimately retired before the State Bar could formally discipline him.

Chief Critic

Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman has not yet responded to a request for comment, but previously called the former mayor’s disbarment in New York a “politically and ideologically corrupted decision” in a statement, adding they “will be appealing this objectively flawed decision in hopes that the appellate process will restore integrity into our system of justice.” Giuliani has previously opposed his other punishments, with Goodman calling the Arizona case an effort to “eviscerate” the justice system and saying the former New York City mayor is “proud to stand up for the countless Americans who raised legitimate concerns surrounding the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.”

Trump’s attorneys have largely denied wrongdoing and opposed the efforts to punish them, with the exception of Cohen, who pleaded guilty to his crimes, and the attorneys who have taken plea deals. In a statement after she pleaded guilty in Arizona, Ellis said she had agreed to cooperate with the investigation and was told she wasn’t a target before being indicted, but “neither the AG nor I control the grand jury.” “So both sides are just following through with our original agreements: I’m telling the truth and they’re not prosecuting me.”

Powell still denies the defamation allegations against her, and told Forbes the sanctions against her in Michigan set a “dangerous precedent to stand that puts at risk every lawyer who represents an unpopular cause or client.” In a statement after the ruling on his disbarment, Eastman’s lawyer said the attorney “maintains that his handling of the legal issues” over whether the 2020 election could be overturned was based on reasonable legal precedent and that Eastman was following “the same process taken by lawyers every day and everywhere.” He also opposed Eastman not being able to practice law to pay his legal fees while he faces the charges in Georgia, saying, “That is not justice and serves no legitimate purpose to protect the public.”

Surprising Fact

After the court ordered sanctions in the Clinton case against Trump and Habba, Trump and Habba went on to voluntarily withdraw two cases stemming from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud litigation against the Trump Organization, which courts had suggested could be viewed as frivolous and result in sanctions.

Key Background

Trump and his allies filed approximately 60 court cases in the aftermath of the 2020 election seeking to change its outcome, ultimately losing all but one case, which was a minor dispute in Pennsylvania that did not impact the overall results. Since leaving office, Trump has continued to be deeply ensnared in legal issues, as he’s faced numerous lawsuits over his alleged role in the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, four criminal cases, James’ civil fraud case against him and his company and two defamation lawsuits from writer E. Jean Carroll. The fraud and Carroll cases have resulted in Trump being ordered to pay a combined $540 million to James and Carroll, though the former president has maintained the cases against him are “witch hunts” designed to harm his presidential campaign, and has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against him.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Jordan Green on X: "The "Seattle whistleblower" was a legend ... ›

Sabrina L Keliikoa, Age 52 in Tacoma, WA, (951) 247-8057 ›

Michael Flynn's rogue team terrorized a FedEx supervisor, Sabrina ... ›

===

---

Three attorneys who participated in former President Donald Trump's plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election are now facing disciplinary charges by the Washington, DC bar that could result in them permanently losing their ability to practice law in the nation's capital.

According to a Friday report in Politico, lawyers Judi Haller, Brandon Johnson and Lawrence Joseph are all now accused of making statements to the court that they knew to be false in filing election challenges on Trump's behalf, and could ultimately be disbarred over their actions. Haller and Johnson worked alongside fellow Trump lawyer Sidney Powell (one of the former president's co-defendants in the Fulton County RICO trial who has since pleaded guilty) on her post-election lawsuits in swing states that then-candidate Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Joseph is being investigated for a suit he helped Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) file against then-Vice President Mike Pence for pressuring him to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election while presiding over the US Senate's certification of Electoral College votes. That suit was ultimately thrown out by an appeals court panel after being denied by a federal district judge.

Politico additionally reported that following her work with Sidney Powell, Judi Haller went on to defend several participants in the January 6 insurrection, including Kelly Meggs — a member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia in Florida who was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. Haller now works at America First Legal, which is led by former Trump adviser (and outed white nationalist) Stephen Miller.

Haller, Johnson and Joseph are merely the latest Trump-affiliated attorneys at risk of losing their law licenses. Former Trump attorney John Eastman – who authored the infamous "Eastman Memo" that laid out the strategy for Pence to hand the election to Trump — just completed a lengthy disciplinary hearing in California, where a final decision is expected by late February.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had his law license stripped as a result of his efforts to subvert the election. And former assistant attorney general Jeffrey Clark is in the midst of his own disbarment proceedings, where Trump has threatened to invoke executive privilege and trigger what could be months of litigation. Both Giuliani and Clark are also defending themselves against felony charges in Fulton County.

A DC bar committee will conduct an initial hearing into the charges against Haller, Johnson and Joseph, and could recommend a range of penalties, including suspension and disbarment.

---

How Jenna Ellis’ 'crocodile tears' may come back to haunt her in a Philly courtroom - Alternet.org

---

https://www.alternet.org/smith-trump-sneered-ridiculousness-powell/

---

an 7 23

former Trump Administration official is heard in a newly unveiled audio recording trashing an attorney arguing on behalf of the former president that the 2020 election was stolen.

In the audio obtained by MSNBC's Deadline White House with Nicole Wallace, Peter Navarro, who served as Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, is heard expressing his disdain for Powell during a conversation with Fox News producer Abby Grossberg.

The recording begins with Grossberg saying she'd received emails with confidential information in the case against Michael Flynn in which she was representing the former National Security Advisor of 22 days.

"She sends me stuff by mistake. There's an Abby in her office," Grossberg is heard saying. "There's an Abby in her office and this whole – through the Flynn trial she sends me this stuff and then she frantically calls me saying please delete it. It’s confidential."

The conversation then turns to Powell trying to prove election fraud.

"You have no idea how much damage she did to our – to our efforts," Navarro said.

"She really – she really, I'm telling you Abby, when the history is written on this, she was like the turning point in our inability to prove the case because she was like so far out there that people like pulled back. We were on the verge of breakthroughs in the states and state legislature level and then that (expletive) happened. And I was like …was like damn, damn this is not good."

Navarro stood by comments in a statement to MSNBC that said: "Sidney Powell is basically the worst thing that ever happened to the election integrity issue…As always I’m being candid with Abby Grossberg just as I am being candid with the American people."

---

no lnx an 723

Trump’s post-election 'elite strike force' has been facing a 'legal reckoning': ex-federal prosecutor

Alex Henderson July 26, 2023

In late 2020 and early 2021, Donald Trump had an entire team of attorneys who enthusiastically promoted his false and repeatedly debunked claim that the presidential election was stolen from him. Among them were Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The lawyers were not successful. On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden — the legitimate winner of the election — was sworn in as president. But the Big Lie and the January 6, 2021 insurrection raised troubling questions about the fragility of U.S. democracy.

In an article published by Politico on July 26, attorney and former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori examines the repercussions that some of Trump's 2020 lawyers have been facing.

READ MORE: 'Shot down in court': Report details the legal headaches dogging Trump’s allies

Giuliani, Ellis and Powell, according to Khardori, described themselves as Trump's "elite strike force team" after the 2020 election but are now experiencing "modest signs of a reckoning within the legal profession."

:{:{}:

"Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York, and early this month, a disciplinary committee in Washington, D.C., recommended that he be disbarred for 'frivolous' and 'destructive' conduct," the attorney observes. "A federal appeals court recently upheld court sanctions against Powellfor making 'entirely baseless' claims and 'frivolous allegations of widespread voter fraud.' And in March, Ellis was censured by a judge in Colorado for making false claims 'on Twitter and to nationally televised audiences' that 'undermined the American public's confidence in the presidential election.'"

Khardori adds that another pro-Trump lawyer, Georgia residentLin Woods, "formally retired from" his practice in Georgia "in an apparent bid to avoid being disbarred." And former law professor John C. Eastman, who wrote an outline for overturning the election results, is facing possible disbarment in California.

"This is to say nothing of the fact that most — if not all — of these lawyers appear to be under scrutiny by federal prosecutors at the Justice Department, as well as by local prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia," Khardori explains. "Against this backdrop stands the65 Project, a legal advocacy group that was created to pursue accountability for the lawyers who sought to subvert American democracy in the 2020 election."

READ MORE: DC legal committee calls for Rudy Giuliani’s disbarment over election interference: report

The 65 Project was co-founded by Media Matters' David Brock.According to Khardori, the group "secured" the "disciplinary action" against Ellis.

The former federal prosecutor notes, "The group was watching closely during the 2022 midterms, and it's now gearing up for plenty of fights in the courts ahead of another potentially chaotic national election as Trump, the current frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination, desperately fights for both his political and corporal lives."

READ MORE: 'Brutal': Rudy Giuliani mocked after blistering takedown from the D.C. Bar Association

Ankush Khardori's full article for Politico is available at this link.

A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Here’s why the ‘tortured logic’ of Sidney Powell’s defamation lawsuit defense is so weak: conservative law professor ›

Giuliani said he was 'selling pardons for $2 million, which he and Trump would split': ex-associate complaint ›

Rudy Giuliani is still an honored man at these five colleges despite a tsunami of legal scandals ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Sidney Powell's legal defense: 'Reasonable people' wouldn't ... ›

Disciplinary panel calls for Rudy Giuliani's disbarment - POLITICO ›

Rudy Giuliani concedes he made defamatory statements about ... ›

---

https://www.alternet.org/trump-lawyer-jenna-ellis/

no lnx

Ellis, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, admitted in court that she “misrepresented” the truth at least 10 times on major TV news interviews and on social media while pushing Trump’s “Big Lie” about fraud “stealing” the 2020 presidential election from Trump/

Ellis made this admission by signing a legal document stating that she “violated professional ethics rules barring reckless, knowing or intentional misrepresentations by attorneys,” by pushing these lies despite having zero evidence to back them up, CNN reported.

For example, on the November 20, 2020 installment on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business, Ellis claimed, “We have affidavits from witnesses, we have voter intimidation, we have the ballots that were manipulated, we have all kinds of statistics that show that this was a coordinated effort in all of these states to transfer votes either from Trump to Biden, to manipulate the ballots, to count them in secret.”

Following the November 2020 election, Ellis repeatedly said that the election had been “stolen.” In her recently signed document, Ellis agreed that she, “through her conduct, undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election, violating her duty of candor to the public,” Colorado News Wire reported.

Responding to Ellis’ admission, Bryon M. Large, a disciplinary presiding judge in Colorado, censured Ellis, saying, “The parties agree that Respondent [Ellis], through her conduct, undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election, violating her duty of candor to the public.”

When asked in December 2020 about the criticism she received for pushing Trump’s “Big Lie,” Ellis told Fox Business anchorperson Charles Payne, “My life is in service and honor to the Lord Jesus Christ and so whatever anybody else says really doesn’t bother me. Ultimately at the end of the day, as long as I know that I’m pursuing truth and I’m doing the right thing for God and my country,. That’s all that matters. So that’s what gives me my optimism and my hope.”

In the biblical Book of Matthew, Jesus says, “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.”

Now-President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election with 7,061,839 more popular votes and 72 more electoral votes than Trump. Nevertheless, Trump and his legal team filed over 40 lawsuits alleging widespread voter fraud in key swing states in an attempt to overturn the election in Trump’s favor.

Nearly all of the lawsuits were thrown out or withdrawn for lack of evidence by judges across the political spectrum: conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, some who were appointed by Trump himself.

Some of Trump’s attorneys asserted that Republican candidates across the country had bribed communist countries to use voting machines to swing elections in their favor. Republican Iowa Senator Joni Ernst called the claim “outrageous” and “offensive.”

Other Republicans said that Trump and his lawyer’s lies about election fraud had compelled Trump supporters to send death threats to election officials.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'Reaping the consequences of eternal damnation': Jenna Ellis says Club Q victims are burning in Hell ›

Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis lashes out after Politico exposes her plans to block Biden's election win ›

'A line attorneys cannot cross': Ex-Trump legal advisor Jenna Ellis censured for false claims ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Ex-Trump Lawyer Jenna Ellis Censured in Colorado Over False ... ›

Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis joins legal team for Penn. GOP hopeful ... ›

Ex-Trump Lawyer Jenna Ellis Continues Attacks on LGBTQ+ ... ›

---

CYA? post domin discovery, sev execs say nuts but ordered to let her appear

https://www.mediamatters.org/mark-levin/foxs-mark-levin-denies-his-past-promotion-sidney-powells-dominion-conspiracy-theories

---

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000082296/pdf/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000082296.pdf

DAVID TOBIN 22 MARC EISENSTEIN 23 ROBERT HOLMES 24 ABIGAIL FRYE 25 BARRY COBURN

What was your concern in that regard? A Well, I think many people -- and certainly history has proven it correct -- it 14 3 was an area that was absolutely ripe for fraud, for ballots to be counterfeited, for ballots 4 to be harvested, for just election rules in general to be violated in an organized fashion. 5 Q Okay. I'll note for the record that Ms. Lofgren has joined the call -- or the 6 deposition, excuse me. 7 Was there a particular reason that you felt that there would be more fraud in the 8 2020 election with respect to mail-in ballots than had occurred in previous elections? 9 A Well, we'd been through the entire fabrication of the Steele dossier in an 10 effort to discredit the Trump administration. We had seen the special counsel results 11 because of that. We'd seen just what I would call an unprecedented effort to 12 delegitimize the Trump administration writ large. And, at that point, there was nothing I 13 would put past anyone to try to make sure Trump was not reelected. 14 Q And so you thought that that movement to target President Trump would 15 be -- would manifest itself in fraud relating to mail-in ballots? 16 A Fraud related to anything. I mean, I remember Attorney General Barr 17 expressing concern about the massive plan for mail-in ballots. The response to COVID I 18 thought was absolutely ridiculous on the part of the government -- draconian and 19 ineffective and punishing, if not destroying the middle class. 20 Q I'm curious about how you think that was going to manifest itself in the 2020 21 election with respect to mail-in ballots. 22 A Right. It gave cover for having a lot more mail-in ballots than were needed. 23 I think the absentee ballot program that exists in most States should have been sufficient 24 for people that needed to vote other than by in person to follow that procedure. But, 25 yet, the whole mail-in ballot -- or the, yeah, the whole mail-in ballot thing blanketed th

,,,

Q Okay. Did you work with -- at any time during the course of your election 2 challenge work, did you work with an attorney by the name of Cleta Mitchell? 3 A I know I talked to her on the phone once or twice. I think she was 4 stationed in Georgia. 5 6 Q A Did you coordinate efforts at all? I don't know that I'd call it coordinating efforts. I think we shared some 7 information, but I don't remember having very much interaction with Cleta. I always 8 thought highly of her. Did you ever meet a lawyer by the name of John Eastman? 44 9 10 Q A John Eastman? I met him at an airport recently if he's the one I'm thinking 11 about. 12 Q In the timeframe -- in the 2020 or very early 2021 timeframe, did you 13 interact with Mr. Eastman? 14 A If I did, it might have been on a large group phone call, but I don't have any 15 specific recollection of interacting with Mr. Eastman either. 16 Q And I'm including any interactions; email or other communications, not just 17 conversation or face-to-face meeting? 18 A Well, yeah. There could have very well been -- there were scads of people 19 on different emails. 20 Q Got it. But you don't recall a specific email correspondence that you had 21 with Mr. Eastman? 22 23 24 25 A Q A Q No. I don't recall any specifics. Have you ever heard of attorney by Kenneth Chesebro? That doesn't even ring a bell. Have you heard of an attorney by the name of Jeff, or Jeffrey Clark? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 A The name is familiar. Q So Mr. Clark worked at the Department of Justice. Is that -- does that ring a bell? A Q A Q Okay. Is that the person you're thinking of? I don't know. Do you recall ever talking about election law issues or election challenge 45 8 issues with Jeffrey Clark? 9 A No. I have no recollection of that. 10 Q Let me ask you about some non-lawyers you may have worked with or 11 interacted with in your post-election, sort of, efforts with regards to the election. 12 Did you ever interact with Steve Bannon regarding the 2020 election. We talked 13 about the podcast appearance. But outside of any appearances that you may have had 14 on his show, did you ever talk with or interact with Mr. Bannon regarding the challenges 15 to the 2020 election? 16 17 18 19 20 A Q A Q A I may very well have, but again, I don't specifically remember that. Do you know Alexandra Preate? I do. What's your relationship with Ms. Preate? We have an attorney/client relationship. We were friends. She was my 21 publicist for my book "License to Lie, Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice," 22 which is a true legal thriller and reads like a John Grisham novel, but names names. 23 Q Sounds like it's right off the blurb. Maybe Ms. Preate even came up with 24 that? 25 A No, I did.

...

Garrett Ziegler? Yes. I interacted with him some. Tell me about your interactions with Mr. Ziegler? The only one I remember was him -- I think he was one of the young men 5 that waived us in the night of December 18th. 47 6 Q How about when you were at the Weston? Did you ever have interactions 7 with Mr. Ziegler at the Weston? 8 9 A Q I don't remember seeing Mr. Ziegler at the Weston. I've heard it said that he would come -- he was working at the White House 10 at the time, but at night after he had gotten done with his day job, sometimes late into 11 the night, 10, 11, midnight, he'd come by the Weston? 12 13 A Q I don't remember him working with me at all then. Okay. How about Joanna Miller, also worked with Mr. Navarro, is that a 14 name you recognize? 15 16 17 18 A Q A Q No. Hannah Robertson? No. And this has nothing to do with Mr -- well, moving away from Mr. Navarro, 19 did you ever have any interactions with Roger Stone regarding your election challenge 20 work? 21 22 23 A Q A Not that I recall.

Do you know Mr. Stone? I don't think we've ever met in person. I think I've had a couple of phone 24 conversations with him that would probably be attorney/client privileged. 25 Q Now, I know -- speaking of attorney/client privilege, I know you have an 48 1 attorney/client relationship or did with Mr. Flynn, Mike Flynn? 2 3 A Q Yes. Correct. And I absolutely don't want to invade that or know anything about your 4 representation of him or the matter that you handled for him, but in connection with the 5 election challenge efforts, did you interact with Mr. Flynn? 6 7 8 A Q A Yes. Tell me what his role was, if any, in assisting in your work? I would call it logistics, and I think he -- I think he is the one that kind of put 9 together the team that was trying to vet, filter, whatever, the stuff that was flying at us. 10 11 Q A Okay. So -- and when you say logistics, what do you mean? Well, I mean, like, when I first got to Tomotley, I needed printers. He went 12 out and got me printers. He would occasionally crack open the door to my office and 13 say is there anything you need, that kind of thing. And I'm sure I saw him -- I saw him 14 every day that we were both at Tomotley, but I was essentially holed up in an office trying 15 to work in my seclusion, and he was out doing whatever he was doing. 16 Q Did you ever talk strategy with Mr. Flynn in terms of the election challenge 17 strategy, not the attorney/client matters that you were handling for him? 18 A I don't have any recollection of that other than I might have told him I 19 wanted to file four suits in four jurisdictions, and at least three -- three to five was the 20 goal, in my head anyway, and that they were going to challenge the massive fraud. 21 Q We'll talk about this a little bit later, but I believe you were involved at some 22 point in trying to get an executive order signed that would allow for the seizure and 23 inspection of voting machines; is that correct?

...

Do you know Connie Hair? A Q A Yes. How do you know Ms. Hair? She's a friend, and she works with Louie. 62 8 Q Did you interact with her at all with respect to claims of election fraud of the 9 2020 election? 10 A Yes. I'd forgotten about her completely. I think she actually was helping 11 collect some information. 12 13 14 Q A Q And I think she sent you some affidavits from time to time; is that correct? That's probably correct. What conversations do you remember with Ms. Hair about the issues you 15 were pursuing? 16 17 A Q Again, I don't have specific recollection of any conversations. Do you know if she shared your view of the -- of -- as you described it, your 18 view of what went wrong in the election? 19 A I don't recall. I know she knew something went wrong, but I don't know 20 whether she shared my view of what went wrong. I don't recall even expressing my 21 view of what went wrong to her. I was always trying to stay off the phone. 22 Q Okay. Did you ever -- and maybe the same sentiment of wanting to be left 23 alone to do all your work that you had will answer my next question. 24 But were you ever invited by Ms. Hair to speak to a group or like-minded 25 individuals regarding your concerns or claims of election fraud? group?

:{:{}:

other issues. 16 17 18 Q A Q 63 That's entirely possible. Did you ever speak with a group called ground swell? That's the one I always forget the name of it. Is that Ginni Thomas' group? Yes. Yes. Yes. Did you speak with -- I'm sorry, what? In the time after the election, did you speak to any ground swell gathering? I probably did. Do you remember when that was? No. Do you remember who asked you to speak in front of the groundswell No. That's another group that I've spoken to periodically in Flynn and on

:{:{}:

Do you know Ms. Thomas? Yes. Did you have any conversations with Ms. Thomas about your concerns or 19 your views on what went wrong in the 2020 election? 20 21 22 A Q A I don't recall a specific conversation. Do you recall any general interactions with her on that topic? Well, if I spoke to the group during that timeframe, I would have shared my concerns about everything. I'm pretty open in general with the world about what my views are to anybody that wants to listen. 25 Q Outside of the ground -- any ground swell meeting or videoconference, have 1 you had any interactions with Ginni Thomas regarding the 2020 election? 2 A Not that I recall. 3 4 5 6 Q A Q A Do you know someone by the name ofBarbara Ledeen? Yes. Have you spoken to Ms. Ledeen about the 2020 election? Again, I may very well have. I've known her for a long time. We talk 7 about a lot of issues. It's entirely possible. 8 9 10 Q A Q Yes but no recollection of any specific conversation? No

:{:{}:

. Your interactions with Mr. Biggs-- and he's one of the individuals who you 11 said there was attorney/client -- there might be attorney/client communications. 12 Did you have non-privileged communications with him regarding the 2020 13 election? I don't recall. 64 14 15 A Q How about Ms. Taylor Greene, any non-privileged communications with her 16 regarding the 2020 election? 17 18 A Q Again, I don't recall. Have you ever been in a meeting at which either Mr. Biggs or Ms. Taylor Greene was present in which the 2020 election was discussed? 20 A I don't know. I don't know whether they were at that big meeting with 21 Senator Lee or whether there was any other meeting. I know there was supposed to be 22 a meeting at the White House, and I think there was a meeting at the White House with a 23 bunch of Congress people, but I was excluded from that. 24 25 Q I think we're going to talk about that one in a bit. Was that the December 21st meeting at the White House?

...today, okay, so with all of the information that you were able to gather over the course of 2 your investigation and since, do you believe that foreign actors compromised voting 3 machines and manipulated votes in connection with the 2020 election? 4 5 A Q I think it is a strong possibility. Foreign actors. I'm sorry. I thought you were done. I apologize. 6 A Yeah, well, I thought I was too, and then I thought, you know, it could've 7 been more indirect. I mean, there's apparently $600 million invested from China into 8 the group that owns Dominion, shortly before the election. 9 All the parts are made in China of the Dominion machines. They could've been 10 hacked from anywhere in the world. They were specifically designed to leave ports 11 open. 12 If you look at their manuals and their operating instructions, you can see that 13 anyone can log in from anywhere. Because ports are left open, remote access is not a 14 problem. 15 We know Dominion has an operation in Serbia. In fact, a strong component of 16 their computer algorithms and information are done in Serbia.

We know that in 17 election 2016, the Serbia group ran the control center and help center for our election. 18 Yeah, there is foreign activity all over the place with respect to our election. 19 Dominion is actually a Canadian company with substantial operations in London and, of course, Serbia. 21 Smartmatic and the whole Venezuela connection, that is all still there. 22 It's a serious problem for the integrity of our elections that's been documented by Democrats, including Carolyn Maloney, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and the entire 24 HBO documentary called "Kill Chain," not to mention Harri Hursti's work in "Hacking Democracy." It's everywhere. 91 1 And the fact that people have known about it on both sides of the aisle for this long tells me it's an even bigger problem than I thought it was when I first got into this 3 and that the corruption is more widespread than I originally imagined. 4

Q So which foreign actor do you believe interfered with or manipulated votes 5 in connection with the 2020 election? 6 A I'm not saying -- I'm not saying that somebody in China sat there and 7 changed votes. I don't know whether that happened or not. But I do know by now 8 that the machines are designed to enable someone to do that, and I know that people on 9 both sides of the aisle, in Congress and in other places in our government, have known 10 that for 20 years and haven't done jack shit about it. 11 12 Q A In which States do you believe votes were manipulated? I think it's entirely possible that an algorithm was run in machines across the 13 country to lower the obvious nature of any massive deviation. The massive deviations 14 were in the swing States that shut down the night of the election, where you see a vote 15 spike of a hundred thousand or more votes, all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, 16 when nobody's even supposed to be counting. 17 That does not happen. That is mathematically impossible. If you look at the 18 videos byDr. Frank,he explains how he has calculated what the algorithm was for each 19 State. They apparently went in and injected false voters into the voter database, which 20 is part of the government-funded patent that I found, that allows them to do that, and 21 then mined from that to inject votes as needed to run, like, a thermostat what they 22 wanted to do to create the outcome they wanted of the election. 23 And, again, as I mentioned earlier, I found the patent for that. 24 So all this business of "oh, it can't happen" is total bullshit. It's patented. And 25 our Department of Defense holds the patent. So, if you guys really want to do an

...[OR code rejects trump votes]

1 Q So is it your belief that local election officials were part of this conspiracy to 2 adjudicate ballots in a nefarious fashion in the 2020 election? 3 A Not necessarily. Dominion had people in virtually all of its locations 4 running the election, as I understand it. I mean, we're still in -- I mean, we're just 5 starting discovery withDominion. 6 7 Q A Okay. So I hope to have a lot more information on these issues as time goes on, 8 but we know, for example, that, I think, Coomer was in Chicago; Nick lkonomakis was in 9 Detroit where there were massive problems. I don't remember who all was elsewhere. 10 I think there was actually a Nigerian running one of the elections, a Nigerian 11 citizen running one of the elections for Dominion in Georgia, and I -- I don't really 12 understand how that happens, but --

...

Q Did you ever have -- you're welcome -- did you ever have any conversations 2 with Mr. Giuliani about, "Hey, you know, you said this was going to happen and it didn't," 3 or any follow up with him on that? 4 5 6 A Q A I probably did. No recollection of anything in particular? Well, the one thing that just came to mind, and I don't know when this was, 7 but it was a conversation in Mark Meadows' office with Rudy and Katherine Friess and 8 Mr. Meadows, and I think Mr. Waldron, that was the epitome of devolution into name 9 calling and misogynistic behavior from Mr. Giuliani toward me. 10 Q Well, what else -- and I'm sorry to make you recount sort of that sort of 11 offensive type of conduct or statement. 12 13 A Q No. No. No. But can you share some more specifics about the conversation and, you 14 know, the parts that you considered troubling? 15 A Oh, I can't even remember what I said in the meeting. I do remember 16 Mr. Giuliani just absolutely lashing out about me being unfit to practice law, called me 17 several names. And, I mean, he just went on and on and on. 18 And Katherine Friess was sitting there. I trust her as far as I could throw her. 19 And I think Phil Waldron was in that meeting, too. 20 21 22 23 24 Q A Q A Q And this was in the White House? Yeah, it was in Mark Meadows' office. Do you remember what prompted the outburst from Mr. Giuliani? No. And it seems you were -- you may have had slightly different approaches, 25 but weren't you both trying to get to the same spot?

...

Do you remember having any conversations with Ms. Fancelli? Not in that time frame. 112 1 2 3 Q A Q Do you remember anyone at Sidney Powell, PC, or are you aware of anyone 4 at Sidney Powell, PC, or Defending the Republic Election Integrity Fund having any 5 conversations with Ms. Fancelli or any of her representatives? 6 A I have no idea. 7 Q So right now you have no idea how $100,000 from Ms. Fancelli came to be 8 donated to Sidney Powell, PC. 9 10 A Q That's correct. Okay. I wanted to ask you if you could clarify. The payment is to Sidney 11 Powell, PC, which I think earlier you said was your law firm? 12 13 A Q Yes. But if you look on the memo line, it says: Contribution Defending the 14 Republic Election Integrity Fund. 15 16 17 PC? 18 A Q A Yes. Can you explain what that entity is and how it's separate from Sidney Powell, It wasn't -- Defending the Republic Election Integrity Fund was not a 19 separate entity. It was an account I set up at Morgan Stanley equivalent to a client trust 20 fund for anybody that wanted to donate to helping fund the election efforts, to make it to 21 my PC, but to segregate it into that trust fund. 22 Q And sitting here, do you know what that $100,000 was for given that it was 23 made to the PC or given the memo for the contribution? 24 A I mean, my understanding is was that it was for us to fund whatever we 25 needed to do in our work on figuring out what happened in the election.

...

A The entire schematic of how the machines can be manipulated or 2 programmed, yes. 3 Q And as you sit here today, are you aware of any other non-manipulate -- you 4 know, claims that don't relate to the manipulation of voting machines? 5 Any other claims that you believe changed the outcome of the election? 6 7 A Q 8 came out -- 9 10 11 12 A Q A Q Yeah.2000 Mules. Okay. And on that, you're referring to the Dinesh D'Souza movie that just Yeah. -- regarding people dropping off ballots at drop boxes? Yes. Okay. And what's your understanding of what was happening there and 13 how that changed the outcome of the election? 14 A Well, I haven't gotten to watch it yet, but we know there was a significant 15 problem with the drop boxes, massive drops being made by multiple individuals of 16 multiple ballots after hours election night. 17 We had already had reports of massive quantities of absolutely pristine, unfolded 18 ballots. And I think there's an affidavit you've been provided of Scott Hall talking about 19 the perfectly marked ballots in stacks inGeorgia.20 There's also the video of the women in Georgia taking the suitcases of pristine 21 ballots out from under the table after the alleged water leak that supposedly required an 22 evacuation that happened to have been a toilet problem in another building, but they ran 23 off everybody in the middle of the night in Georgia, and that corresponds to a massive 24 spike in Biden votes at the same time when they weren't supposed to be counting votes. 25 She was seen on video running the same stack of ballots through the machine

...

Q Understood. On the13848 issue, did you have any role in drafting a 5 proposed executive order or findings for the President? 6 A I'm pretty sure I had a role in writing the findings of foreign interference. 7 have racked my brain and searched my computer for any evidence that I wrote the 8 original executive order. But I don't think I did. 9 Q One moment. 10 Take a lock at -- let's pull up 39, Exhibit 39. 11 Now, this isn't gonna show you or tell you whether you wrote it, but have you 12 seen this document before? 13 A Yeah. I've read it, and that's what I used to try to figure out if I had actually 14 drafted it. I know it's got portions of things I've said and I think things I wrote in it. 15 don't remember whether I wrote the whole thing or not. I don't think I did. But 16 doesn't bother me if I did. 17 18 19 20 21 22 Q A Q A Q A Do you know someone known Christina Bobb? I do. Do you know if Ms. Bobb had any role in drafting this document? I think that's distinct possibility, but I'm not sure if she did. Why do you think it's a distinct possibility? Because I remember talking to her about it. And now that I think about it, I 23 remember her being in a meeting at the Trump Hotel with Phil Waldron when we 24 discussed the possibility of doing this. 25 Q And when was that meeting in relation to the date on here, December 16th?

lindell org mtg? john ratcliffe, no contact w doj jbc]

...

Did you ever have discussions with Mr. Gohmert, nonprivileged discussions 5 with Mr. Goh me rt, about whether there's some action that could be taken to spur the FBI 6 or DOJ to action on these election fraud issues? 7 8 9 A Q A I don't remember talking to Louie about that. Okay. Or any other Member of Congress? I mean, I could've in general said that to any or all of them, that, you know, 10 you need to do something to get the FBI to investigate this. I mean, I was very public in 11 my criticism of Wray from the time he was named Director and I realized he had 12 supervised Andrew Weissman when he was at the Justice Department, and Weissman 13 was running roughshod on the Enron Task Force, screwing everybody in Houston, naming 14 a hundred people as unindicted co-conspirators and forcing them to lawyer-up, making 15 our Merrill Lynch counsel unable to even discuss with us, our own Merrill Lynch guys, 16 what happened in the Merrill Lynch transaction, in the Nigerian barge case. I mean, I'll 17 send you a copy of my book. 18

Q Okay. How about, I'm going to throw another couple of names for you, 19 with respect to DOJ. Have you ever had any interactions with someone named Ken 20 Klukowski? 21 22 A Q I've heard that name, but I don't remember him either. Okay. All right. Maybe we'll just leave it at that. 23 I want to circle -- the issue I want to circle back to, and, again, respecting the 24 attorney-client issues, I'm not trying to invade your privileged communications with these 25 folks, but when I had asked you earlier about the Members of Congress who you had 167 1 attorney-client communications with, I asked a compound question, and you said yes or 2 no, and then I don't know that I ever came back to ask about all of them. 3

:{:{}:

So, with respect toMr. Biggs, Congressman Biggs, did you have a attorney-client 4 relationship with him that related to election fraud issues? A I think so. Q And Ms. Taylor Greene? Same question. A Yes. Q And Mr. Gaetz? A Yes. Q Okay. And, if I'm overstepping, you'll tell me or Mr. Tobin will tell me. 11 Were your discussions with the possibility that they might become plaintiffs in some 12 action? 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 A Yes. Q Okay. - Anything else on that? Not on that specifically. - Okay. I think that's all I have. W

...

Q Okay. Do you have any knowledge or awareness of any of the protests that 2 were slated to take place in Washington, D.C. on January 5th or 6th? 3 4 A Q No. Did you have any sense before that day that there was a possibility that 5 there could be violence on January 6th? 6 7 8 A Q A Yes. And how did you have that sense? Because any time a group of Trump people get together, there are always 9 infiltrators and people that target them for infiltration and causing violence, ever since 10 the Democrats paid the people to go into the Trump rallies when he was first running and 11 cause problems. 12 Q Do you have any, you know, specific sources of information or any indication 13 specifically in the lead-up to January 6th that made you think there was going to be 14 violence on that day, or is this more just related to the general sense that you just 15 described? 16 Mr. Tobin. Objection. Asked and answered. Go ahead. 17 The Witness. I think somebody circulated a map that antifa had put out, and 18 there was talk of them closing roads exiting D.C., and I think I'd heard that the mayor 19 wasn't going to have any portapotties put anywhere, and the restaurants were being 20 closed, and, you know, people needed to bring their own stuff with them. 21 I mean, all of that to me sounded like a recipe for a nightmare for just Americans 22 that were coming to express their concern for this President and their disdain for what 23 happened in the election. And I didn't want to see innocent people set up. 24

All right. Well, that's all I have on that topic. -do 25 you have anything else? 170 1 BY 2 Q Do you think that's what happened on the 6th -- ultimately happened, that 3 people were set up? 4 A I think that's a lot of what happened on January 6th. I don't think that's all 5 of it. I think there are definitely some people that did some things wrong, that they 6 should not have done, but, yes, I think there was a huge set-up factor contributed to by 7 the FBI and others. Q Can you tell me what you base that on? A Well, the police opening doors to invite people in, canisters of tear gas being 10 shot off behind the crowd that ultimately pushed them toward the building. 11

I still don't understand why the building was closed down to begin with. I mean, 12 I've walked in and out of the Capitol for years all my life. I know I used to be able to do 13 it with, you know, just my driver's license. 14 I don't want to date myself there, I mean, you know, you got to remember, I 15 started doing everything when I was only 5 years old. But, you know, I don't like the 16 turn any of our politics and activities have taken generally in the last two decades in 17 particular. 18 Q Okay. Is there anything else that we haven't asked about that you think is 19 important for us to know, anything else you'd like to sort of share on these issues that we've been talking about? 21 A Yeah. I think you need to take seriously the fact this is a longstanding 22 problem. People have been given information on it. There were whistleblowers from 23 Sequoia. There were whistleblowers from Diebold.You need to watch "Kill Chain"if 24 you haven't. You need to watch "Hacking Democracy" if you haven't. 25 Our -- any computerized electoral system is subject to being hacked and/or

...[paper ballot, CIA DOD]

---

no show ga grand jury

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/sidney-powell/

---

an 12 22

The final report released by the Jan. 6 committee this week says that Donald Trump – who has spewed election fraud claims for two years now – was even stunned by an election fraud claim from one of his former allies, Sidney Powell, the New York Times reports.

Just weeks after the 2020 election, Powell, who's also a former Trump lawyer, said on a conference call that “communistmoney had flowed through countries like Venezuela, Cuba and perhaps China to interfere with the election.” According to Insider, Powell also believed technology company Dominion Voting Systems was in conspiracy with Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013.

Former Trump aide Hope Hicks said in response to Powell, the former president “muted his speakerphone and laughed at Powell, telling the others in the room, ‘This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’”

NYT noted that, however, Trump proceeded to instigate the rioters by saying he “likes the crazies.”

Last month, Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said, "Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

And the Daily Beast reports that Powell finds herself now on Trump’s “no-go list” and he no longer takes calls from the lawyer.

Dominion Voting Systems has since sued Powell and Giuliani for spouting “baseless voter fraud claims that hurt its business.”

The Jan. 6 committee wrote in its final report that, “Donald Trump was no passive consumer of these lies. He actively propagated them. Time and again President Trump was informed that his election fraud claims were not true. He chose to spread them anyway. He did so even after they were legally tested and rejected in dozens of lawsuits.”

---

tpm 9 22

one of the sham Trump electors brought tech operatives hired by MAGA lawyer Sidney Powell to a Georgia county’s elections office on the day there was a breach in the office’s voting system, surveillance video footage reported by CNN, the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

The footage reportedly shows the fake elector, then-Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham, escorting four technicians for SullivanStrickler — a data forensics company Powell hired in her bid to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump — to the elections office on Jan. 7 last year.

That was the day the office’s elections system was breached. Two of the technicians seen in the video with Latham, Scott Hall and Paul Maggio, have admitted to accessing a voting machine in Coffee County, per CNN. The Washington Post reported last month on how SullivanStrickler operatives copied data from a Dominion voting machine in Coffee County on Jan. 7.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into the breach. Latham herself is a target in the Fulton County district attorney’s criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election in Georgia.

One of Latham’s attorneys told CNN on Tuesday that his client “would not and has not knowingly been involved in any impropriety in any election” and “did not authorize or participate in any ballot scanning efforts, computer imaging, or any similar activity in Coffee County in January 2021.”

Surveillance video also reportedly reveals that infamous Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and fellow election-denying tech consultant Jeffrey Lenberg visited the Coffee County elections office several times after the breach. Both operatives are being investigated in Michigan over alleged attempted breaches of voting equipment in that state.

---

daily siegheil

Here Are 8 Lawyers in the Thick of Trump’s Election Fight

Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / November 18, 2020

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, one of the Trump campaign's lawyers, talks to reporters Nov. 5 alongside Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski, right, outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. (Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)

As postelection litigation rages in multiple battleground states, lawyers representing President Donald Trump include big and small names.

Several lawyers withdrew after reporting pressure from anti-Trump activists that included posting the lawyers’ names and contact information on social media. Twitter removed such information posted on its platform.

Of the lawyers who remain, some are litigating in court while others largely play a media role. Here are eight of them:

Justin R. Clark

Interestingly enough, Justin Clark began a career in politics working for one of the last two candidates—a Democrat—caught up in a contested presidential election, then-Vice President Al Gore.

Clark did accounting work for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, NPR reported, on his path to taking the role of deputy campaign manager and senior counsel on the Trump 2020 reelection campaign.

Clark, 45, grew up as a centrist Democrat in Connecticut. Another centrist, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., was Gore’s vice presidential pick in 2000.

Clark later evolved into a Republican, and in 2010 and 2014 he managed the unsuccessful Connecticut gubernatorial campaigns of GOP nominee Tom Foley.

He was also political director of pro-wrestling executive Linda McMahon’s failed U.S. Senate race in Connecticut in 2012.

In 2018, Politico put Clark on its “Power List.”

Clark was deputy national political director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, then became director of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House after the New York developer was elected president.

He worked with presidential adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner on criminal justice reform and with presidential adviser and first daughter Ivanka Trump on apprenticeships and workforce development. Clark transitioned to the reelection campaign in late 2018.

Marc A. Scaringi

Marc Scaringi, a lawyer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is leading the Trump campaign’s legal effort in that state. Scaringi, 51, focuses his practice on business and corporate law and has about 20 years of experience.

Scaringi worked on then-Rep. Rick Santorum’s campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. After Santorum won in 1994, Scaringi became his legislative correspondent in Washington.

Scaringi returned to Pennsylvania to work for Mike Fisher’s campaign for state attorney general, and served as an executive assistant to Fisher as attorney general from 1997 to 2001.

While still working for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, he attended Widener University Delaware Law School in 2001.

In 2016, Scaringi was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He writes a biweekly column for The Patriot-News/PennLive and was a talk radio host in Harrisburg.

According to his law firm’s website, Scaringi’s specialties include contracts, commercial lease agreements, employer/employee relations, employment law, administrative law, federal and state employment and business regulatory matters, and human resources. He also is involved in real estate issues.

Scaringi is a member of the American Bar Association, Section of Business Law. He graduated Georgetown University in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in history. He received his law degree from Widener University Delaware Law School in 2001.

Jesse R. Binnall

“Donald Trump won … after you account for the fraud and irregularities that occurred,” Jesse Binnall, who is representing the Trump campaign in Nevada, said Tuesday.

Binnall, 41, normally practices law in Alexandria, Virginia,outside Washington, and is experienced in political cases. But he also handles business and commercial litigation, First Amendment and civil rights disputes, white-collar criminal defense, and defamation suits.

He is a partner at Harvey & Binnall PLLC and president of Parliamentary Strategies, which the law firm owns. The company provides clients such as professional associations, political parties, candidates, with procedures for meetings, bylaw drafting, and interpretation.

Binnall is president of the Alumni Association for the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, according to his bio at the Republican National Lawyers Association.

:{:{}:

4. Sidney Powell

Sidney Powell made news recently by calling out potential problems with voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and suggesting that enough evidence will emerge to overturn election results in several states.

Powell, 65, became a public figure by representing Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Powell was a federal prosecutor from 1978 through 1988, serving as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas. In the Western District, she helped win the conviction of organized crime leader Jimmy Chagra for continuing criminal enterprises.

Powell became chief of the appellate sections for both court districts and represented the federal government in about 350 appeals cases. She went on to serve as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Powell is now a defense attorney who practices federal appeals cases in the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th, and 11th Circuits, as well as before the Supreme Court, according to her website. She represented Merrill Lynch executives in the Enron Corp. litigation.

Powell was president of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers in 2001 and 2002.

She received her law degree from University of North Carolina School of Law after attending UNC as an undergraduate.

Powell became an outspoken critic of the Justice Department, writing the book “License to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice,” published in 2014.

5. William S. Consovoy

William Consovoy, who has experience arguing before the Supreme Court, represented Trump in recent New York state court cases.

Consovoy, 46, works primarily on appellate cases. He has been involved in cases on constitutional issues, interpretation and enforcement of federal statutes, administrative law, civil rights disputes, among others.

Two recent cases he argued before the Supreme Court were Spokeo Inc. v. Robins and Evenwel v. Abbott.

Consovoy, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, also clerked for Judge Edith H. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and for the 17th Judicial Circuit of Virginia.

In 2013, the legal news service Law360 named Consovoy a “rising star” in appellate law.

In 2011, he became co-director of the Supreme Court Clinic at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he also is co-director of the school’s Administrative Law Clinic.

Consovoy received his bachelor’s degree from Monmouth University and hislaw degree from George Mason University School of Law.

6. Pam Bondi

Pam Bondi is a former two-term Florida attorney general, elected in 2010 and again in 2014.

Bondi, 55, already familiar to viewers of Fox News Channel, became a familiar figure early in 2020 as one of Trump’s lawyers during his Senate impeachment trial.

She made strong arguments for the president on the Senate floor, but is largely a spokesperson for legal arguments, according to The Washington Post.

Bondi gained national prominence while Florida’s attorney general as one of the key Republican state attorneys general who sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2012.

Also as Florida attorney general, Bondi filed litigation as part of the national opioid crisis. She led a legal fight in the national mortgage settlement case, and sued BP over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, settling for more than $2 billion in economic relief for Florida.

Bondi is a member of the firm Ballard Partners, where she heads its corporate regulatory compliance practice, according to the Federalist Society. In this position, she helps Fortune 500 companies implement policies to address matters such as human trafficking, opioid abuse, and personal data privacy.

7. Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani has become a controversial figure as Trump’s personal lawyer and a central player in the impeachment controversy because of his investigations in Ukraine.

That’s a significant change from Giuliani’s status as national hero as New York mayor during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, adding to a reputation as a tough-on-crime executive and prosecutor.

Giuliani, 76, primarily serves the president as a media spokesman rather than a litigator, according to The Washington Post. Before serving as mayor, though, he had a distinguished legal career as a federal prosecutor.

Giuliani, a native of New York, went to work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington in 1973; he was appointed the attorney in charge of police corruption cases resulting from the high-profile Knapp Commission.

He returned to New York in 1977 to go into private practice, but in 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed him as associate attorney general, the No. 3 position in the Justice Department.

In 1983, Reagan appointed Giuliani as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. In this role, he gained national prominence for taking on drug dealers and the Mafia. He scored 4,152 convictions, of which only 25 were reversed on appeal.

8.Jay Sekulow

Jay Sekulow became a prominent public face in defending Trump as his personal lawyer during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and during the Senate impeachment trial.

Sekulow, 64, is chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal group. He has argued 12 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, many of them religious liberty cases.

One case was about allowing public school students to voluntarily belong to Bible clubs at school.

More recently, in the case Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, he won a unanimous ruling from the high court to allow governments to accept permanent monuments, such as Ten Commandments monuments, in public parks.

Sekulow founded the European Centre for Law and Justice based in Strasbourg, France, the seat of the European Court of Human Rights. He opened ECLJ offices in France, Russia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Israel.

Legal Times named Sekulow to a list called “The 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years.” Time magazine put him on its list of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals.”

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

---

kraken spec ops rescue haspel? 11 21 trms

---

7 22

Following the 2020 presidential election, Virginia-based attorney Jesse Binnall was an aggressive promotor of Donald Trump’s Big Lie — falsely claiming, along with fellow Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, that the election was stolen from the then-president when in fact, now-President Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive victory. Binnall’s favorite cable news outlet after the election was Fox News, as CNN and MSNBC were quick to debunk the Big Lie.

Binnall’s post-election activities raise serious ethics concerns. But long before the Big Lie, Binnall had another problem, according to Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger: a six-figure tax debt.

“Former President Donald Trump and his top election-fraud lawyer, Jesse Binnall, have a number of things in common — they both falsely believe the election was stolen, they hobnob with some of the right’s most unhinged conspiracy theorists, and they routinely complain that they’re the focus of a witch hunt,” Sollenberger reports in an article published on May 6. “But another similarity has flown under the radar: Both men avoid paying taxes.”

Sollenberger continues, “According to IRS records, Binnall owes the U.S. government for unpaid taxes dating back to 2010. The IRS filed a $139,242 lien against Binnall almost four years ago — in August 2018 — and it covers unpaid amounts every tax year from 2010 to 2015. Records on file with the City of Alexandria, VA show that, as of May 5, Binnall has not paid off the lien.”

The Beast discussed Binnall’s tax case with Leslie Levin of the University of Connecticut Law School in Hartford.

Levin told the Beast, “It depends on why the lien was levied and why he hasn’t paid. If he refused to file, that raises ethical issues. The deliberate failure to file constitutes a crime. If he has a good faith basis for contesting whether he owes the money, however, there is no ethical violation there.”

---

an 7 22

Never before in U.S. history had a president who lost an election and falsely claimed that he didn’t have so many attorneys who were willing to be a mouthpiece for his conspiracy theories.

From Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell to Lin Wood to Jenna Ellis to John C. Eastman, Trump’s election lies received a great deal of promotion in the dark corners of the legal profession.

But journalist Heidi Przybyla, in a report for Politico published on July 5, stresses that for some “Stop the Steal” lawyers, business is good.

Giuliani’s license to practice law has been suspended in New York State as well as Washington, D.C. But Przybyla notes that Michigan-based “Stop the Steal” lawyer Judi Haller is thriving.

“Juli Haller was part of Donald Trump’s legal brigade in Michigan, filing a lawsuit alongside the ubiquitous Sidney Powell that claimed absentee vote counts were likely manipulated by a computer algorithm developed by allies of deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez,” Przybyla explains. “The lawsuit was quickly deemed baseless, and she was among nine attorneys ordered by a federal judge to pay the city of Detroit and state of Michigan’s legal fees and referred for possible disbarment. In a blistering rebuke, Judge Linda V. Parker called it a ‘historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.’”

Przybyla continues, “But unlike Rudy Giuliani, whose law license was suspended in New York and Washington, D.C., for championing similar cases — or Haller’s own co-counsel, Powell, whose law license is at risk in Texas — Haller is going strong. She has gained a robust client roster that includes two alleged members of the far-right vigilante group the Oath Keepers who are accused of fueling the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

Przybyla stresses that Haller is hardly the only “Stop the Steal” lawyer who has become a “go-to attorney for MAGA extremists.”

“In total, at least 16 lawyers who represented plaintiffs in five federal lawsuits promoting Trump’s baseless election fraud claims in the key battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona remain in good standing or have no record of disciplinary action with their respective bar associations or licensing authorities, according to a Politico review,” Przybyla reports. “Fourteen of them have since engaged in additional work in support of the election fraud conspiracies or conspiracists behind Trump’s attempt to remain in power despite losing the election to President Joe Biden. These include defending accused January 6 rioters, consulting for partisan election ‘audits’ or partaking in advocacy or legal cases sowing doubts about the integrity of the nation’s elections, Politico found.”

One attorney who refused to promote the Big Lie was, ironically, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr. As much of a Trump enabler as Barr was during most of his time as attorney general, promoting Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him was a line that he was unwilling to cross. Barr bluntly described the Big Lie as “bullshit,” maintaining that there was zero evidence that now-President Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election fairly.

But many other pro-Trump attorneys were more than happy to cross a line that even Barr wouldn’t cross.

Attorney David Fink, according to Przybyla, is “leading the charge” to get “Stop the Steal” attorneys disbarred in Michigan.

Fink told Politico, “These lawyers have to be stopped from practicing law. It’s that simple. They disregarded their oath, they told lies to the court, and they spread the ‘Big Lie.’”

Another person pushing for accountability for “Stop the Steal” attorneys is David Levine, who is part of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Levine told Politico, “If these folks aren’t held accountable, they’ll feel emboldened to continue to engage in actions that not only erode trust in the legal profession and integrity of elections, but endanger lives of the American people…. We saw, in 2020, how false election information could not only fuel an insurrection, but cause bodily harm and loss of lives. After Watergate, we saw the legal profession be at the forefront of ethics reform. It’s dramatically different from what we’re seeing here.”

---

willard world soc

...After Trump announced on November 14 that he would be challenging the election results in court, Giuliani was tasked with creating a team of lawyers. In a November 19 press conference, Giuliani announced theteam, which included Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Joseph diGenova. Less than three weeks after joining Giuliani’s team, diGenova appeared on a far-right Newsmax podcast and called for the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, to be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot” for stating that the 2020 election was free of manipulation.

In the meantime, Giuliani and Ellis were pressuring Republican state lawmakers to unilaterally overturn the results in their states. Previous reporting has established that they met with the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee on November 25, during which Ellis urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to fix a “corrupted, irredeemably compromised election,” either by arranging for a new, “special election” or directing “the manner of your electors.”

Similar appeals were made by Ellis and Giuliani toArizona lawmakers on November 30, Michigan lawmakerson December 2 and Georgiarepresentatives on December 4.

The Post report states that on January 2, 2021 Trump, Giuliani and Eastman spoke to 300 state legislators on a conference call to provide “evidence of fraud” and galvanize the lawmakers to “decertify” the election results. “You have the real power,” Trump told the lawmakers, according to a report in the Washington Examiner. “You’re the ones that are going to make the decision.”

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/maga/

raw story

Patrick Bergy rode his Harley-Davidson to Austin, Texas, and was waiting for an interview with conspiracy-theory honcho Alex Jones in mid-August of 2020 when he learned about thearrest of Millie Weaver, who also happened to be a correspondent for Jones’ outfit InfoWars.'

The details were vague, but Weaver and her partner and producer Gavin Wince, along with her brother, had been arrested at their home in Ohio while Weaver was uploading the final cut of a documentary called ShadowGate, in which Bergy was featured as a “whistleblower” who spoke about his experience as a military contractor following his discharge from the Army in 2007. Given the urgency of the moment, Bergy looked up the address for InfoWars and walked into the studio without an appointment. Jones quickly recorded an interview for a breaking-news segment about the arrest of one of his contributors.

“I’m the pioneer of [Interactive Internet Activities], basically social media/fake news,” Bergy said,remarking on the irony that he was sitting in the guest chair at InfoWars. “The last place that I’m going to go is an organization called ‘Information Warfare,’ right?”

Following Weaver’s arrest and while he was still in Texas, Bergy said he also spoke to a man named Robert Caron, a shadowy figure who claimed to have a background in intelligence. Bergy had met him before when Caron convened a meeting of his group Joint Task Force MAGA, or JTF MAGA — aself-described “MAGA counterstrike supergroup of American patriots to help expose illegal government surveillance and support President Donald Trump in Making America Great Again” — at a restaurant in the Tampa, Fla. area two years earlier, according to Bergy’s recollection. Bergy turned down an offer to join JTF MAGA, concluding that it wasn’t geared to his specific interest. But he had stayed in touch with Caron.

Caron then offered Bergy a $5,000 retainer to stay in Texas and work on a project, according to Bergy. As much as Bergy could discern based on the details offered by Caron, the job entailed setting up a website to promote JTF MAGA’s content. Bergy said he declined the offer, telling Caron he needed to get to Ohio to help Weaver and Wince.

Shortly after Weaver’s arrest, according to Bergy, he was contacted by Lara Logan — a former correspondent for CBS’ "60 Minutes" who had been widely praised for her coverage of Iraq and other conflict zones in the Middle East. At the time she was working for the Fox Nation streaming service. The claim was first outlined in an affidavit that Bergy executed in early December 2020 and that he provided to attorney Sidney Powell for use in her lawsuits seeking to overturn the presidential election.

Bergy did not disclose the identity of the “person that arranged the conversation,” but has since said that it was Caron. During a conference call with Weaver, Wince, Bergy, Caron, Logan and Logan’s husband, Joseph W. Burkett, Bergy wrote in his affidavit that “we were asked if we would meet them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to discuss further; I declined and so did Millie and Gavin.”

Upon its release, the ShadowGatedocumentary took hits from all sides, withlegacy media assailing it as being “filled with false claims and insinuations,” and others on the far right questioning Weaver’s credibility because she was charged with domestic violence. The chargesreportedly stemmed from an incident in April when Weaver, her brother and Wince attempted to wrest a phone away from Weaver’s mother, prompting her to flee to a neighbor’s house and called 911. Shortly after the documentary’s release, Alex Jones — never shy about making outlandish claims himself — fired Weaver from InfoWars.

But Logan came to Weaver’s defense,tweeting on Aug. 22: “By now this is a familiar pattern — another tactic of information warfare that has proved so effective. I know many Americans are looking forward to getting the whole truth on this. It’s on all of our interests given the significance of what was done just to hold onto power.”

Logan’s endorsement carried some weight. On one hand, her credibility had sustained damage from a story about the 2012 Benghazi attack that “60 Minutes” was forced toretract (and much later would bepushed out of Fox Nation for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele). On the other hand, unlike Jones who built a career around promoting conspiracy theories,Logan had worked at the highest levels in journalism and was widely admired for her courageous reporting in Iraq and decades of experience.

Later, Bergy said Wince told him that Logan had Burkett reach "out to them with information that exposed the arrest of Millie Weaver was orchestrated” by military contractors in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, Ohio.

Bergy noted that Burkett had previously worked as a military contractor himselfemployed by the public relations firm Lincoln Group, which was hired by the Defense Department toplant positive stories geared towards Iraqi audiences during the Iraq war. Bergy faulted Logan in his affidavit for not investigating information that she privately shared with Weaver and Wince, especially considering her track record as an investigative journalist.

“It is extremely concerning to all involved the claims made by the Logans [sic] and warrant further investigation,” Bergy wrote in his affidavit. “The arrest of a US journalist, orchestrated on a US military base, cannot be dismissed without a thorough investigation into the Logan’s [sic] claims.”

While Logan has not reported on the mysterious connection between Weaver’s arrest and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, her journalistic instincts would prove to be attuned to the behind-the-scenesefforts to overturn the election. On Jan. 5, 2021, one day before the assault on the US Capitol, Logantweeted out a link to a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” The document had been used in presentations byPhil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in information warfare, as hebriefed members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5. The PowerPoint called on Trump to order the National Guard, with support from the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, to conduct a recount of the 2020 election. On Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to meet to accept the presidential elections, the PowerPoint proposed three options for Vice President Mike Pence, all of which would have either delayed or prevented Joe Biden from becoming the next president.

“This is what is being briefed on the Hill today re election fraud — for those of you who want to go to the source rather than get it second-hand,” Logan wrote.

Logan and Burkett could not be reached for comment for this story.

The charges against Weaver and Wince were eventuallydropped. Whether there is any truth to the explosive claim that Weaver’s arrest was secretly orchestrated from a military base remains unclear. Regardless, it reinforced Weaver’s paranoid view of a Deep State intent on silencing Trump supporters.

“From what I hear, we’re in the jurisdiction for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,” Weaver told her followers during a Periscopelivestream in late 2020. “And apparently it would have been really easy to have us at this jail here and then transferred to an espionage jail. What’s going on right now is insane, guys. It’s very creepy.”

‘They were setting all these scams up’

The ShadowGate documentary had been quickly debunked byUSA Today andPolitiFact, and although it reportedly drew millions of views, it receded from public discussion as just one more QAnon-inspired conspiracy vehicle, as violence inKenosha, Wis. andPortland, Ore. set the stage for the final tumultuous months of the 2020 presidential election campaign. While the documentary might have seemed obscure even for the far-right audience to which it was geared, its four principals would find roles in the network of conspiracy theorists and operatives that sprung into action to delegitimize the 2020 election and aid Donald Trump in his quest to hold onto power.

In addition to Weaver, the producer and writer of ShadowGate, Wince, credited as its director, and thedocumentary’s two featured “whistleblowers” — Bergy and pro-Trump podcaster Terpsehore “Tore” Maras — all wound up in Washington, DC in mid-November 2020.

The ShadowGatedocumentary had a particular utility in the effort to delegitimize the 2020 election, as Bergy himself would come to recognize. More than three months before attorney Sidney Powelltold radio host Glenn Beck on Nov. 20 that “our forces” confiscated servers held by an election technology company named Scytl in Germany, Weaver had narrated a similar scenario in ShadowGate.

“Scytl is one of the most notorious outsource companies for elections, with regular electronic voting machine problems, who also tabulate our election results and cloud services in Europe, aka servers outside the United States,” Weaver said. The claim was false.

Weaver could not be reached for this story.

Spurned by Alex Jones —who heavily promoted the Jan. 6 rally in DC and took to a bullhorn to address rioters at the Capitol that day — Weaver found a new patron in Patrick Byrne. After Jan. 6, Weaver collected and analyzed video for Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, in support of his effort to cast the attack as the work of “antifa” agent provocateurs.

Bergy told Raw Story that he also later learned that Logan was responsible for arranging for Weaver and Wince to come to Washington, DC after the 2020 election. Bergy said he was asked to come to DC by Weaver and Wince, and they were already there when he arrived around Nov. 15, 2020. Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and significant financier for the election denial efforts, confirmed in a text message to Raw Story that he covered the cost of hotel rooms for Weaver, Wince, Bergy and Maras at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel in late 2020. But Byrne said he had no knowledge of Logan encouraging Weaver and Wince to come to DC and did not make any arrangements with her.

Byrne also footed the bill for a reporting trip to California by Weaver and Wince in late November 2020, according to Bergy. In a text provided by Bergy, Wince warned that alienating Byrne “could cost us our trip to CA.” Byrne did not dispute the claim that he covered the cost of the trip.

“No, I don’t have a specific recollection of this, it sounds plausible,” Byrne told Raw Story. “I’ll go farther: vaguely rings a bell. That is to say, I’m vaguely remembering that I did pay for a trip or two for them. Along with many dozens of others, incidentally.”

The catalyst for Maras to show up in DC in November 2020 is somewhat murkier. In a conversation on the Stereo app in July 2021, Maras told Bergy that she had known Byrne “before everyone else.” Byrne gave a different account, telling Raw Story that he had “never met or heard of her until” he met her around Nov. 16, 2020. But Joshua Merritt, an IT consultant who provided a declaration to support Powell’s lawsuits attempting to overturn the election, has made statements in the past that predate the relationship between Byrne and Maras long before November 2020. In a reply to an April 30 Twitter thread, Merrittsaid Maras had been “brought in with Byrne” to work on investigating alleged election fraud after the 2019 election in Kentucky.

In retrospect, Bergy said he has come to see that the claims put forward in ShadowGate performed a valuable service in preparing the ground for the broad election denial narrative that Trump’s supporters worked to build in November.

“That was two or three months before the election,” Bergy said. “That was right after ShadowGatewas released. What else was in ShadowGate? Scytl. They knew November 3rd was going to happen, let alone January 6th. They were setting all these scams up. It sure seems like they were putting these things in place at least three months ahead of time to be able to prepare for Trump’s loss.

“It was useful,” Bergy added. “If they didn’t plan it, they should have.”

Bergy said he learned later that Waldron, the retired Army colonel, praised ShadowGateto Weaver and Wince at a party at Trump International Hotel on Nov. 14, 2020.

“Phil Waldron approached Millie and Gavin, and said he was the biggest fan of ShadowGate,” Bergy told Raw Story. “He identified himself as Phil Waldron and said he believed everything in ShadowGatebecause he replaced the IIA chief after I left. He said he knew who I was, and he understood my background in ShadowGate.”

Waldron could not be reached for comment for this story, while Byrne denied that the content of ShadowGateplayed any role in shaping his initial impressions of Weaver, Wince, Maras and Bergy.

“No, never heard of them or that movie until mid-November 2020,” he told Raw Story. “They were on their own path when I met them, and they have continued so. None of them have ever taken any direction from me.”

‘Calling out too many people… will backfire’

Lara Logan’s behind-the-scenes role would prove to be a source of ongoing tension among the principals in the ShadowGatefilm during the period they were working out of the Westin hotel to aid the effort to overturn the election.

“Calling out too many people (Logan, Burns [sic]) will backfire,” Wince told Bergy in November 2020, according to a text obtained by Raw Story. “It could compromise things we have in the works.

“Pissing off Burns [sic] could cost us our trip to CA we have planned that are important, and pissing off Logan while mentioning Millie could piss off Millie and/or cost her ability to use that channel,” he added.

Wince could not be reached for this story.

In Bergy’s view, his duty as a whistleblower obligated him to tell the whole truth, no matter whose sensibilities might be offended.

“When you say we need to be putting this s*** out because nothing’s getting done,” he told Wince, “I didn’t link to Millie, and I’m posting my affidavit tomorrow online which literally includes Lara’s/Joe’s involvement.”

The central focus of Bergy’s 70-page affidavit was the development of “social media psychological warfare weapons and techniques'' that he had observed as a military contractor, and his position that they were being applied on domestic targets in the United States. The affidavit traced a history from a complaint filed by Bergy to the Department of Defense Inspector General in 2015, and then name-dropped a wide array of prominent figures with whom he interacted in his quest to bring the information to light, including Logan and her husband, Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, InfoWars host Alex Jones, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander and Trump confidant Roger Stone.

Bergy has said his sole objective during his time in DC was to get his information to Trump.

In August 2021, Bergy asked Byrne to explain what happened to his affidavit once he submitted it to the legal team led bySidney Powellso that he could include his response in a book. Byrne obliged.

“Your affidavit was read and absorbed,” Byrne confirmed. “The whistleblowers were met with and debriefed. Everything they and you had to say got put into a larger picture we were forming. The information from the whistleblowers in Arizona could immediately inform what we were doing; your bigger picture information, while accepted as truthful, did not have a precise application, though it was valuable for our situational awareness.”

In contrast to Bergy’s affidavit, Powell filed a 37-page anonymized declaration submitted by his fellow ShadowGate“whistleblower”Terpsehore “Tore” Maras in support of her lawsuits in Wisconsin and Arizona.

Maras’ declaration mentioned Scytl, the Spain-based election technology company, a total of23 times, echoing the claim made by Weaver three and a half months earlier in ShadowGate. In her declaration, Maras claimed that votes cast in the 2020 election were put through a “mixing phase” while an “algorithm redistributes votes.” Her declaration also claimed that “Scytl re-encrypts ballot data” and has the ability to access the vote through “backdoors” that could “alter the range of the algorithm deployed to satisfy the outcome sought in the case of algorithm failure.”

Maras’ claims represented a fundamental misunderstanding of Scytl’s role in US elections. The company provides election-night reporting services that offer a visual representation of votes tabulated by local election officials, but as it noted in a fact-checkingstatement issued more than two weeks before Maras executed her declaration, Scytl does not tabulate votes.

“On election night, each election office tabulates the vote using their tabulation vendor’s physical machines and uploads those results to Scytl’s [election-night reporting program],” the company explained. All ENR servers being used for the US elections are physically located in the United States. Scytl does NOT tabulate, tally or count votes.” Scytl’s statement was cited by a fact-check published byReuters, which rated as “false” a claim by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) that the US Army had seized Scytl’s servers in Germany.

Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who assisted Powell’s team in preparing the lawsuits, cautioned another election denier in a private Telegram message in August 2021 that Maras’ claims shouldn’t be taken at face value.

“Tore is not credible,”Keshel wrote. “I was on the initial teams drafting lawsuits over the states withSidneyand Flynn. Our teams researched her heavily and found many problems.” He added that “unfortunately she wound up as a key witness in one of our cases.”

Byrne told Raw Story in an email that he “had no hand” in preparing the lawsuits, “and was not aware until much later that Tore had provided the affidavit.”

But Byrne was sufficiently concerned about Maras’ credibility that he tasked a team with interviewing her a couple of weeks after the declaration was filed in federal court.

“Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know in the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side,” Byrne told Bergy in his August 2021 email. “They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subjects rapidly trying to throw people off, and we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations over three hours (precisely as I warned her they would do if she did not heed a little coaching from me).”

Maras defended her qualifications in an email to Raw Story.

"If you read my affidavit, you would know that I am an amateur cryptographer," she said. "Therefore, I am very familiar with cryptography, ethics and research surrounding it. I participate in attending such conferences and seminars when I can."

Robert Caron, who had initially put Bergy, Weaver and Wince in touch with Lara Logan, was in and around DC from November 2020 through January 2021, according to Bergy.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Maras perceived him as a threat. Speaking with Bergy on the Stereo app in July 2021, Maras fumed about a host of obscure operators vying for Powell and Flynn’s attention in late 2020.

“And you have this motherf***er standing there, bidding to help you?” she said. “They’re there to destroy you. And they are seeing everything we are giving you. And they are dismantling it. Like, that other guy, f***ing, you know, Caron, right, popped out of nowhere.”

While Maras distrusted Caron, she felt differently about Lara Logan.

“You know who hooked me up to Logan?” Bergy asked. “Because I introduced Logan to Millie and Gavin. You know who hooked me up with Logan? Our friend, Robert. She’s got interesting friends. If known contractors and CIA assets are arranging your introductions to journalists that are married to military-industrial complex psy-op contractors, am I wrong in thinking possibly a lot of people that are passed along or networked through Lara are basically…?”

Maras interrupted Bergy.

“Well, you and me are going to disagree on Lara,” she said. “I like Lara…. If it came down to it, and I had to trust someone with something, I would actually trust her.”

A plan to order the National Guard to shut down Congress

Caron’s background remains murky. In one of the few publi $_{interviews}_$ with him that is available, Caron was identified in a March 2018 story that aired on the far-right network One America News as “the spokesman for JTF MAGA, the collection of veteran members of the intelligence, law enforcement and military communities dedicated to exposing the dark secrets of the Deep State.” The “team” page for awebsite that houses reports by JTF MAGA, including one proclaiming retired Lt. General Michael Flynn’s innocence and another that disputes claims about collusion between the Trump campaign — has at various times included photos of Caron and Veterans for America First co-founders Joshua Macias and Vlad Lemets.

When Caron arrived in DC, Wince and Bergy viewed him as a replacement for Dennis Nathan Cain, a cybersecurity expert brought in to analyze the results of the 2020 election.

Cain told Raw Story that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon recommended him to White House trade advisorPeter Navarro, who published a series of reports claiming without evidence that the election had been stolen. Cain said he worked on a three-man team that included another man named Harry Haury and a third person whom he declined to identify. Cain said he primarily worked with Phill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general whoreportedly promoted a scheme to submit pro-Trump electors in the six swing states carried by Joe Biden.

Cain filed an expert report in a civil suit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona to challenge the election results. Cain opined that based on his assessment that the election error rate in Arizona during the 2020 election failed to meet the standard set under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, the election result should not have been certified.

“I was specifically looking at the certification and accreditation of the system,” Cain told Raw Story. “I had no interest in looking at any of the technical aspects from the standpoint of whether they were hacked, because you can’t do that unless you have access to the machines.”

Cain told Raw Story that he and Caron met in DC at Caron’s request, and that Caron wanted to join his team. Cain said he declined Caron’s request because he had been working without compensation in DC for two months. Cain had set up a GoFundMe page, but it only covered about half the cost of their hotel bill at the Westin. By the time Caron approached him, Cain said he considered his work to be complete. He disbanded the team, and went home after Christmas.

Cain said he came to regret his meeting with Caron.

“He went out and wrote some emails; some of the people that were associated with me didn’t like that,” Cain said. “It kind of did some damage with some people that I was working with that didn’t care for him.”

After Cain left DC, his name appeared on a document arguing, among other things, that the states were not in compliance with the Help America Vote Act and concluding bizarrely that Trump had a “mandatory duty to immediately declare the 2020 election in violation” of the Constitution and declare Congress “illegitimate” as a prelude to ordering the National Guard to shut down Congress.

“President Donald J. Trump, to preserve our sovereign form of government, has the mandatory duty to immediately declare the 2020 election in violation of our United States Constitution and declare the 117th Congress illegitimate, then access and direct the National Guard already sent by the mayor, to prevent entry into their offices and the Capitol,” the document declared.

Entitled “Invincible Argument, the document was dated Jan. 4 and featured a dozen names, beginning with Caron and also including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers general counsel Kellye SoRelle, Veterans forAmerica First co-founder Joshua Maciasand Latinos for Trump President Bianca Gracia. Eleven members of the Oath Keepers, including Rhodes, have been indicted for seditious conspiracy. Macias wasarrested on weapons charges outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, where votes were being tabulated, on Nov. 5, 2020, and was present at the US Capitol on Jan. 6.

Jerome Corsi, who heavily promoted thefalse claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore was not qualified to serve as president, was also named on the document, and Corsipublished it on his website on Jan. 5, the eve of the assault on the US Capitol.

Cain said he did not authorize his name to be used on the document.

“I am familiar with my name being on there,” he told Raw Story. “It was done without my permission. I don’t have any comment to give on what the legal ramifications of the system not being compliant with HAVA might be.”

Caron’s name also appeared at the bottom of the document’s Forward, and another section was credited to Caron and SoRelle.

On the same day Corsi published the “Invincible Argument” document, Caron was quoted in astory published by Vision Times News headlined, “Over 400 ex-intelligence officers have started investigating election fraud.” The story quoted Caron as saying, “The fraud was so massive and so blatant, despite what the mainstream media said, that we need to get this information out to the public.”

Caron could not be reached for this story, but he has toldCNN that he was approached by two FBI agents at a hotel in Toronto last December. According to CNN, Caron said the agents told him they were investigating events that led up to the violence on Jan. 6 and that he sat down to speak with them about “key people” involved in the effort to overturn the election.

Rhodes, SoRelle, Macias and Gracia were all filmed in a meeting in ahotel parking garage with Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio on Jan. 5, 2021. Tarrio has beencharged with conspiracy, along with five other Proud Boys leaders, for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

The “Invincible Argument” document” wouldform the basis of another lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, this one filed not byPowell and her team, but by SoRelle, the Oath Keepers’ general counsel.

A transcript of an Oath Keepers teleconference that took place on Nov. 9, 2020, shows that the militia group was working on a legal track even as they prepared to mobilize a tactical force at the US Capitol. Asked by Rhodes to update members on the “legal fight,” SoRellementioned Giuliani as heading up one of several legal teams working to overturn the election.

“And then you have the Giuliani pals, I guess, previewing the Campaign pod that’s trying to solve the mystery of the ballots,” SoRelle said. “So, I’ve been in communication. I obviously work the RNC version of it, and then I’m in — I like the Q crowd, they’re kind of fun, and then I’ve been meeting with the Campaign crowd.”

The lawsuit sputtered almost immediately when friction arose between SoRelle and her co-counsel, Paul M. Davis, over Caron’s involvement in the litigation.

In a February 2021 filing, Davis reported that he had “expressed concern to SoRelle that Bob seemed to have some sort of undue influence over the plaintiffs and was poisoning their thinking about the case strategy with suggestions of inclusion of what the whole team had previously agreed were frivolous legal claims (this has always been a case strictly about violations of election law and NOT a case about election fraud).”

Davis went on to suggest SoRelle was disclosing confidential attorney-client communications to Caron, who was not a plaintiff.

SoRelle responded, Davis reported with incredulity, that Caron had been “listening in on our comms.”

---

disbar update

also foto proud boy

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/investigative-journalist-explains-how-sydney-powell-could-face-disbarment-for-lying-in-court-to-protect-trump/

---

…and then they teamed up with an OAN reporter?

Giuliani told attorneys that the Trump legal team effectively deputized a reporter for OAN, the pro-Trump news network, to work for the Big Lie.

:{:{}:

That, Giuliani said, involved Christina Bobb working for Trump’s “personal lawyers,” referring to her as “part of the legal team.” In that capacity, Giuliani claimed, she focused on searching for anything that would support the myth that the election had been fraudulent in the key states of Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia.

:{:{}:

“My staff said she was terrific, she was very trustworthy and if we could work out an agreement with One America News, it would be very helpful,” Giuliani said. “She was a very good investigator.”

:{:{}:

Bobb has used her TV perch at OAN to both promote the Big Lie and fundraise for elements of it. As the reality of Trump’s loss became clearer after the 2020 election, Bobb became increasingly detached from reality in her rhetoric.

Giuliani claimed that over that time period, she agreed to give the Trump legal team veto power over stories.

“The rules that we made with [OAN editor] Charles [Herring] were that he would defer to us to whatever our needs were,that he couldn’t give it to us permanently but he could loosen up her assignments for the next couple of months, therefore she wouldn’t be working all that much for OAN,” Giuliani said.

Herring, in his deposition, denied that he was aware of the arrangement.

Giuliani added that Bobb agreed that “if she did develop a discrete, good story, she would have to run it past us so it didn’t violate any of our rules or whatever.”

“And I was pretty comfortable they would live by it because they had before,” Giuliani remarked.

OAN has produced a string of documentaries that take ideas floating in the Trumpworld ether and give them form.

---

no lnx newsweek

attorney Sidney Powell said the January 6 riot at the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election victory—but that chance was lost when Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress to complete the process.

Powell, an attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits in a failed bid to overturn former President Donald Trump's 2020 election loss, made the comments during an appearance on the conservative Stew Peters Show on Friday.

She said that as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol that day, her team was seeking an emergency injunction to prevent the certification of Biden's win.

"We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use under the Electoral Act provisions that simply don't jive with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution," she said. "And Justice Alito was our circuit justice for that."

She added: "Louie Gohmert was the plaintiff in our lawsuit,and we were suing the vice president to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral College Act."...

---

az sen fann spoked by krak-down disbar

an 921

the team of Arizona Republican state senators, legislative staff, and advisers finalizing the Cyber Ninjas' report on the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County are preparing to say that Joe Biden legitimately won the election, according to thelargest funder of the Senate's mostly privatized election review, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.

"The way some of these political RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] are doing this is they're trying to argue that the [election] report should only be allowed to go and address the original construct of the report, the original assignment of the audit, and leave out other things that have been found," Byrne told Creative Destruction Media's L. Todd Wood.

"The political class is going to try to come in and water this down," Byrne said. "The Republican political class, the RINOs, the nobodies… They are going to try to water this down. I am sure they all have been promised federal judgeships or sacks of cash under a streetlight if they can get this killed at this late date or watered down. And I think the public of Arizona should go ballistic."

Byrne's comments were made on August 29 but have been reposted on pro-Trump media in recent days as Arizona's Republican Senate leadership is finalizing its report on the election. Trump has also revived his attacks on "RINOs" in recent days on Telegram, a social media site favored by his base.

The Arizona Senate's review team includes Doug Logan, the CEO of the Cyber Ninjas, its lead contractor—which is writing the report and has been paid $3.2 million from Byrne's organizations.

Byrne's comments underscore what observers of the Arizona Senate's review have anticipated for months—that any credible review would conclude there were no major problems with Maricopa County's conduct of the presidential elections, although, as in any election, some procedures could be improved to make the vote-counting process more transparent.

Cyber Ninjas was hired to oversee a manual recount of Maricopa County's presidential and U.S. Senate votes and to examine whether the county's ballots were authentic or possibly forged. Logan and his team had little or no prior election audit experience, and their methods were criticized as secretive and deeply flawed. Nonetheless, for months the Arizona "audit" has been a driving force perpetuating the "big lie," or the false claim that the election was rigged by Democrats and establishment actors who orchestrated a massive vote-stealing operation.

The Arizona review has generated endless conspiracy theories and became a rallying cry, if not a litmus test, for Trump-centered Republicans. It has inspired loyalists in other presidential swing states to launch similar reviews long after the 2020 election results were certified.

The stolen election claims, however, have not produced any evidence that has been accepted by any state or federal court. Instead, Trump's campaign legal team has been sanctioned by a U.S. District Court judge in Michigan for lying in court, and some of his lawyers face fines and disbarment. In Arizona, a team of retired election auditors with decades of experience has published analyses using official 2020 election records to document how nearly 60,000 ballots had a majority of votes for Republican candidates but not for Trump. Trump lost the state by nearly 11,000 votes.

Sources in Arizona have said that the state Senate review team was spooked by the possible losses of law licenses looming over Trump's attorneys, as well as stern warnings from the U.S. Department of Justice for possibly using investigative methods that could violate voter intimidation laws. As a result, they have been editing the report drafted by the Senate's lead contractor, Cyber Ninjas, and excising claims and narratives that are speculative rather than factual. This has delayed the report's release until the week of September 20, sources indicated.

The review team consists of Arizona Senate President Karen Fann; Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen; Senate legal counsel Greg Jernigan; contract Senate attorneys Kory Langhofer and Thomas Basile of Statecraft; Garth Kamp, the Senate's senior policy adviser; audit liaison and former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett; audit spokesman Randy Pullen; and Logan, the Cyber Ninjas CEO, according to the Arizona Republic.

Byrne's apparent frustration with the Senate stems from the decision not to include claims made in early September by Arizona Trump activist Liz Harris that there were 173,104 "lost votes" and 96,389 "ghost votes" in the Maricopa County election. That claim was quickly debunked by the county's Republican election director—and was the subject of the Justice Department's May 5 warning letter. During his interview with Creative Destruction Media, Byrne also cited sloppily marked ballots that were adjudicated—or set aside for review of the voter's intent—as another instance of when votes were allegedly changed.

Byrne's suggestion that the Arizona Senate is rejecting the conspiratorial narratives put forth by Logan—as well as Logan's subcontractors and partisan allies like Harris—could set the stage for one of the most stunning reversals in contemporary politics. Trump's endless claims of a stolen election led to an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. A rally defending those subsequently arrested and prosecuted is planned in Washington for September 18.

Meanwhile, across the country, pro-Trump Republicans have called for copycat audits in their states, and many candidates seeking office in 2022—including most of the Republicans running for governor in Arizona—have said they believe a second term was stolen from Trump.Those responses have been fueled to a large degree by Byrne's organizations and media projects, which include a book, a conspiracy-laden documentary film, and extensive fundraising efforts.

In short, Byrne is signaling, presumably based on what Logan and other allies have told him, that the Arizona Senate's review of the 2020 election will conclude that Biden beat Trump.

"The people of Arizona should make it very clear that they will not accept any political interference in this report," Byrne complained. "It's the kiss of death. If politicians get involved… The whole point was that we don't trust the politicians. We wanted some technologists to look at stuff and tell us what they find. To have them spend all these millions of dollars and all these months and this effort to do that… and then to have some weenie politicians get involved."

"I hope that it's made really clear in social media that the citizens of Arizona and this country do not want any political interference in this report from the political class in Arizona," he said. "[Within t]he Republican political class, believe it or not, there are some weak sisters. There are some RINOs… It's all corrupt."

---

jenna attacked for saying trump can't be re-install in aug b/c you know lAW/REALITY?

621 MAGA heads go berserk over 'incompetent failure' Jenna Ellis after ... ›

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-reinstated/

NO LNX TWT

On June 1, the New York Times' Maggie Haberman reported, on Twitter, that former President Donald Trump still believes that the 2020 election results will be overturned and that he will be "reinstated" to the White House by August. Haberman discussed her reporting during a June 2 appearance on CNN's "New Day," stressing to hosts John Berman and Brianna Keilar that Trump is "echoing" the false claims he is hearing from attorney Sidney Powell and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

"There is no mechanism by which this can happen," Haberman said of Trump's delusional claim that he will be returning to the Oval Office by August. But Trump's delusions, Haberman added, are being encouraged by Powell and Lindell — and he is "regurgitating" their bogus claims.

Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no… https://t.co/0gUGozPQQR

— Maggie Haberman (@Maggie Haberman) 1622551318.0

Haberman told Berman and Keilar, "What he's doing is echoing things that are being said by Sidney Powell, who was his lawyer — although he distanced himself from her at certain points over the final months of the administration. But she was helping advise him on these efforts to overturn the election last year. This is being said my Michael Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow — who has been pushing this for some time. (Trump) is echoing what they're saying. The difference between them saying it and Donald Trump saying it is that one is the former president — one is a possible future (Republican) Party nominee…. There are people telling him things are possible that are not possible."

Powell and Lindell have been relentless far-right promoters of the Big Lie, falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump — who, Haberman said, has been "so laser-focused" on the recent election "audits" taking place in Arizona and other states because he "thinks they are going to overturn" the 2020 election results.

JUST NOW: "“There is a dangerous component about this conversation that's going on.” @maggieNYT on her reporting t… https://t.co/u3fuzgsHhr

— John Berman (@John Berman) 1622632941.0

Trump, Haberman warned, is trying to use the "conservative media ecosystem" to promote his fantasies of being "reinstated" to the White House this summer.

"People are in their own media ecosystems," Haberman observed.

Berman pointed out that some Trump opponents are upset with Haberman for tweeting about the former president's delusions, and the Times reporter responded that "ignoring" Trump will not make him go away in 2021 any more than it did in 2015 and 2016.

Haberman told Berman and Keilar that Trump "is in control of the Republican Party, to a big extent…. Ignoring him was not the answer in 2015."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

MAGA heads go berserk over 'incompetent failure' Jenna Ellis after ... ›

'A new inauguration date is set': Inside the latest QAnon conspiracy ... ›

Trump tells followers he 'expects to be reinstated' in August as ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Trump's Facebook account should never be reinstated because we ... ›

Today Is The Day QAnon Believes Donald Trump Will Be Reinstated ... ›

QAnon Believes Donald Trump Will Be Reinstated As President ... ›

---

421

smartmatic ~ dobbs, pirro and bartir

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/sidney-powell-fox-newx/

no lnx twt

How Sidney Powell 'clowned' right-wing media and led them down a dark rabbit hole — ending in legal peril

Alex Henderson March 26, 2021

This week, Fox News' legal department learned that Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the right-wing cable news outlet — and this comes in addition to the $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion competitor Smartmatic that Fox News was already facing. A far-right attorney who helped to pave the way for Fox News' legal woes is Sidney Powell, who repeatedly made the false claim that Dominion's voting technology helped now-President Joe Biden steal the 2020 presidential election from former President Donald Trump.

Media Matters and conservative pundit David French are among those who have pointed out the problems that right-wing media outlets have caused themselves by taking Powell's claims seriously.

Washington Post reporters Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi, reporting on Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News, note, "In the suit, filed in a Delaware court, Dominion argued that the Fox and several of its on-air personalities elevated conspiracy theories about the voting company rigging the 2020 election and allowed falsehoods by their guests to go unchecked, including a wild claim that the company's machines were manufactured in 'Venezuela to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chávez' and that Dominion's algorithm manipulated votes so that then-President Trump would lose."

After Powell, in late 2020, accused Dominion of having been helpful to the late Chávez, the company corrected her claim by responding that its technology had never even used in Venezuela — at all. Powell herself is the target of a separate defamation lawsuit from Dominion, and Never Trumper French lays out some of the problems with her defense in a Twitter thread posted this week.

As she has sought to defend herself from the legal peril she has opened up, Powell is effectively pulling the rug out from any media organization or public figure who took her seriously.

French, a former National Review staff writer with a legal background, explains, "If you're Powell's lawyers, you've got a huge challenge. You have a client who spent weeks stating provable falsehoods that were amplified and spread to millions of Americans through some of America's most popular outlets for news and commentary. Not great. You can't admit to the lie. That would essentially admit 'actual malice.'"

In a defamation lawsuit, the plaintiff must prove actual malice. French notes that there are "different kinds of false factual assertions," and they range from "truly potentially damaging lies" to "obviously wild and insane accusations." Powell, according to French, is now trying to defend herself against Dominion by saying that her statements about the voting technology company fall into the latter category.

"In other words," French writes, "the argument isn't that Powell's lying. It's that she was OBVIOUSLY making wild claims. They're saying, 'C'mon man. She might believe it, but no reasonable person does.' But that's implicitly tossing a ton of right-wing media figures under the bus…. For weeks, they were broadcasting the claims of a person who her own lawyers say was making claims that 'no reasonable person would conclude' were 'truly statements of fact.'''

The fear that right-wing media outlets now have of being sued for defamation by Dominion or Smartmatic is evident in a recent broadcast by Fox News competitor Newsmax TV. When the stridently pro-Trump MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared on Newsmax in early February, he tried to promote the false claim that Dominion helped Biden steal the election — and host Bob Sellers quickly shut Lindell down, obviously fearful of a lawsuit, and stressed, "We at Newsmax have not been able to verify any of those allegations."

Dominion has filed a lawsuit against Lindell in addition to its lawsuits against Powell and Fox News.

According to Ariane de Vogue, Supreme Court reporter for CNN, Powell may be facing "real legal jeopardy" because her defense in the Dominion lawsuit is at odds with her defense in a motion for sanctions against her in Michigan — one of the states where Powell fought to overturn the presidential election results.

"In the two cases, both still pending, her lawyers appear to contradict each other," de Vogue writes. "In the defamation case filed by Dominion, her lawyers claim, in a motion to dismiss, that what Powell said about voting issues could not reasonably be established as fact at the time she said it. In the Michigan case, her lawyer calls allegations that she lied 'outrageous' and 'entirely unacceptable.'"

Ted Boutrous, a constitutional law expert, told CNN, "The 1st Amendment provides strong protections for statements of opinion, but what Dominion is pointing to is the fact that Ms. Powell was declaring that she had evidence of this fraud and this election malfeasance and she was declaring that as a matter of fact. The 1st Amendment doesn't protect knowingly false statements of fact."

Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University law School, told CNN, "Even opinions can be defamatory if they imply facts that are false and Powell knew it or recklessly disregarded the truth or falsity of the implied facts. Her problem is that her defense in the defamation case is going to sink her in the Michigan case."

Media Matters has reported extensively on how quick Fox News and Fox Business were to promote debunked claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election — including Powell's. This week, Media Matters updated an article that was originally published on January 21 by noting, "Update (3/26/21): Dominion Voting Systems has reportedly filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News."

The lengthy article offered a wealth of details on opinion hosts at Fox News or Fox Business who were quick to promote false claims about Dominion from Powell and other Trump allies and reported them as fact. The piece, written by a team of Media Matters reporters, shows that former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs repeatedly accused Dominion's technology of promoting election fraud — and that Fox News' Sean Hannity "pushed the narrative that Dominion machines had suspiciously switched votes in Pennsylvania." No serious evidence of these claims has ever been put forward — as Powell is all but confirming as her lawyers argue no one should have even believed them in the first place.

The Media Matters piece shows Dobbs, Hannity, Jeannine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and others at Fox painting Dominion in a sinister light and not even bothering to vet the claims of pro-Trump attorneys.

CNN and MSNBC, in contrast, were consistently aggressive in debunking Powell's election fraud claims.

In its lawsuit against Fox News, Dominion argues, "Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process."

Dominion's lawsuit also says, "Fox recklessly disregarded the truth. Indeed, Fox knew these statements about Dominion were lies."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Sidney Powell suffers another setback as Georgia GOP county chair ... ›

Legal experts shocked by incoherence of Michael Flynn's lawyer ... ›

'Kraken' attorney's message for Trump fans: Make checks payable to ... ›

We've imaged a black hole's magnetic field for the first time — here's what it reveals - Alternet.org ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

The wild ride that made Rudy Giuliani, 'Kraken' lawyer Sidney ... ›

Fox News, Sidney Powell, Giuliani Face Billion-Dollar Defamation ... ›

Smartmatic sues Fox News, Giuliani, Sidney Powell for election claims ›

Honig: Sidney Powell's 'Fox News defense' won't work legally - CNN ... ›

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/oval-office-meeting/

President Donald Trump, weeks after losing the November 2020 election by more than 7 million votes and more than 70 electoral votes, discussed declaring national security emergency powers his White House attorneys told him he did not have.

That's according to a stunning report that details a December 18 meeting in the Oval Office and the White House Residence from Axios, "Inside the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency."

The meeting included White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and White House staff secretary Derek Lyons, on the one side, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, former Trump administration official Emily Newman, and attorney Sidney Powell, who is now being sued for $1.3 billion by Dominion voting machines.

Powell "proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion's voting machines."

At one point Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani joined by phone,and was forced to tell everyone in the "heated" meeting to calm down. Axios reports at one point the "meeting had come entirely off the rails," and says "people were yelling and cursing" inside the Oval Office.

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, "wearing jeans, a hoodie and a neck gaiter, piped up with his own conspiracy: 'I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation,' he said, according to Axios."

Herschmann stared at the eccentric millionaire. "What the hell are you talking about? Why would you say something like that?" Byrne brought up the bizarre Clinton bribery claim several more times during the meeting to the astonishment of White House lawyers.

Trump, for his part, also seemed perplexed by Byrne. But he was not entirely convinced the ideas Powell was presenting were insane.

He asked: You guys are offering me nothing. These guys are at least offering me a chance. They're saying they have the evidence. Why not try this? The president seemed truly to believe the election was stolen, and his overriding sentiment was, let's give this a shot.

The words "martial law" were never spoken during the meeting, despite Flynn having raised the idea in an appearance the previous day on Newsmax, a right-wing hive for election conspiracies.

But this was a distinction without much of a difference. What Flynn and Powell were proposing amounted to suspending normal laws and mobilizing the U.S. government to seize Dominion voting machines around the country.

Both Lyons and Morgan "expressed skepticism" about Flynn and Powell's idea of "invoking national security emergency powers."

"Trump expressed skepticism at various points about Powell's theories, but he said, 'At least she's out there fighting.'"

Axios adds the "handful of White House lawyers and advisers" were "determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy."

Read the entire report here.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

121 an

dominion plans to sue pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell for defamation — 'imminently'

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/qanon-2649643344/

alexh

reporter Ben Collins, in an article published by NBC News' website on December 22, takes a disturbing look at QAnon supporters who are yearning for President Donald Trump to impose a fascist military dictatorship and end liberal democracy in the United States.

President-elect Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive victory in the 2020 presidential election, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating Trump by over 7 million in the popular vote. But QAnon supporters view Democrats as their enemy and have been promoting the hashtag @CrossTheRubicon — which, in QAnon terminology, means imposing a military dictatorship. And QAnon supporters, Collins reports, are urging Trump to "cross the Rubicon" and become a full-fledged dictator.

"With Trump's days in office dwindling," Collins explains, "QAnon influencers have become increasingly restless and militant — urging him to #CrossTheRubicon, a reference to Julius Caesar's crossing the Rubicon River after the Roman Senate explicitly told him not to, effectively kickstarting the Roman Civil War and Caesar's dictatorship."

To understand why QAnon believes that Trump deserves to be a full-fledged dictator, one needs to know about their bizarre and outlandish conspiracy theories. QAnon believes that the United States' federal government, especially the Democratic Party, has been infiltrated by an international cabal of Satanists, child sex traffickers, pedophiles and cannibals and that Trump has been put in the White House to fight the cabal. "Q," according to QAnon, is an anonymous figure who is providing updates about Trump's battle.

Claiming, without evidence, that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud, some far-right Trump supporters have been urging the president to declare martial law in order to prevent Biden from being inaugurated on January 20, 2021 —including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

"Flynn, a hero in the mythology of the QAnon conspiracy theory who once took a QAnon 'oath' on video, has said in appearances on the conservative media channel Newsmax that Trump should use the military to'rerun' the election," Collins observes.

QAnon terminology, Collins points out, is being used by some prominent Republicans. For example, Kelli Ward, who chairs the Arizona Republican Party, has used the #CrossTheRubicon hashtag. And attorney Sidney Powell, who has been working with Wood on election-related lawsuits, has used the QAnon hashtag #TheStormIsComing, which, Collins notes, is "a QAnon phrase that refers to the extrajudicial roundup of Democrats at the heart of the theory."

Mr. President @realDonaldTrump - we are with you in #Arizona. We are working every avenue to stop this coup & to st… https://t.co/CP7RNETBdk

— Dr. Kelli Ward (@Dr. Kelli Ward )1608429214.0

Michael Flynn's new attorney, Sidney Powell, has repeatedly retweeted major QAnon accounts, including one of the 3… https://t.co/0DGjSw3Wf0

— Alex Kaplan (@Alex Kaplan)1560371762.0

Sidney Powell was probably the most powerful person to have ever believed in deep, mystic, devout QAnonism. Her Twi… https://t.co/9KWYwHGxt1

— Ben Collins (@Ben Collins)1606090386.0

According to Collins, "Some QAnon followers believe Trump is left with no choice but to declare martial law — a belief based in part on a series of wildly false news articles that have claimed that Trump is in a secret, ongoing land war with China in parts of the U.S. A series of fake news articles, YouTube videos and tweets that went viral among QAnon acolytes last week led followers to believe Trump was conducting clandestine military operations on U.S. soil."

Ron Watkins, who formerly ran the QAnon hub 8kun, recently tweeted:

Will @realDonaldTrump #CrossTheRubicon? Spread the hashtag and show POTUS how you feel about it.

— Ron (@Ron)1608307687.0

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican with libertarian leanings, has been warning about how dangerous QAnon is. The outgoing Virginia congressman, who will be replaced by far-right wingnut Rep.-elect Bob Goodin January, told NBC News, "I'm losing friends and family over a straight-up cult based on anti-Semitism, fantasy and just bizarre made-up tripe. It's an idiocracy based on a digital prophet."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

fox silent

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/martial-law-2649638050/

---

appt special counsel = burrow?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-white-house-2649585320/

no lnx twt

Trump allies floating increasingly 'anti-democratic' ideas as their ‘desperation’ grows — and officials are 'scared'

Alex Henderson December 21, 2020

President Donald Trump can't stand rejection, and his campaign has had a lot of it since the 2020 presidential election — from judge after judge dismissing his legal team's election lawsuits to the Electoral College certifying President-elect Joe Biden's victory. Following all that rejection, journalist Charlotte Klein stresses in an article published by Vanity Fair on December 20, Trump and his supporters are resorting to increasingly extreme ideas in the hope of preventing Biden from being inaugurated less than a month from now.

"Having effectively exhausted his legal options — at least 86 judges, including dozens appointed by Republicans, have shut down the president's unprecedented attempt to overturn his defeat through the courts — Donald Trump is apparently now entertaining even more anti-democratic paths to preserving his power," Klein explains. "During a White House meeting on Friday, nearly a week after the Electoral College certified Joe Biden's victory, Trump reportedly discussed invoking martial law to overturn his losing election result — a strategy one of the meeting's attendees, former national security adviser and recent pardon recipient Michael Flynn, had recently proposed on cable television."

According to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, far-right Republican attorney Sidney Powell was also present in the White House during that Friday, December 18 meeting with the president — who floated the idea of choosing her as a special counsel to oversee an investigation of voter fraud. Powell, in her lawsuits, has been alleging that Trump was the victim of widespread voter fraud during the election but has offered no proof of it.

Others who were present during that meeting included attorney Rudy Giuliani, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Klein writes, "As others in the room pointed out Powell's failure thus far to support her fraud claims with verifiable evidence, (Powell) 'accused other Trump advisers of being quitters,' according to the Times. Another reported an idea weighed during Friday's meeting was an executive order to seize voting machines to examine them for alleged fraud, after Giuliani separately asked the Department of Homeland Security to do so earlier in the week — apparently to no avail."

Flynn isn't the only Trump supporter who has been urging Trump to declare martial law. Far-right Georgia-based attorney Lin Wood, who has been working closely with Powell on election-related lawsuits, has also made that frightening recommendation:

Haberman and Axios' Jonathan Swan have both posted tweets noting how worried some people in Trump's circle have been about the increasingly extreme ideas they are hearing:

Klein points out that "concern about the president's increasingly desperate quest to remain in power has intensified among those in Trump's circle," noting that a senior administration official, quoted anonymously, told Axios, "People who are concerned and nervous aren't the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe. These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history."

an 1220 no lnx twt

How a post-election GOP 'civil war' could 'tear the party apart': reporter

Photo via Gage Skidmore.

Alex Henderson December 21, 2020

President Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s, famously said that he considered someone who agreed with him 70% of the time to be a 70% ally rather than a 30% enemy. But among President Donald Trump's diehard devotees, anything less than 100% agreement with the president is a sacrilege. And journalist Sasha Abramsky, in an article published by The Nation on December 18, examines post-election tensions between Republicans who are acknowledging Joe Biden as president-elect and Republicans who are encouraging Trump to keep fighting the election results.

With the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the election results having been rejected by one court after another and the Electoral College having certified Biden's victory, even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and outgoing Attorney General William Barr have said that they consider Biden president-elect. Some Trump devotees are now slamming McConnell and Barr as RINOs: Republicans in Name Only, which is ironic in light of how aggressive a defender of Trump Barr and McConnell have been. Now, even McConnell and Barr aren't MAGA enough.

"A civil war is now percolating within the Republican Party," Abramsky explains. "The Electoral College has met and confirmed Joe Biden's victory, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has finally agreed to call Biden the president-elect, Russian President Vladimir Putin has congratulated Biden on his victory — and yet, stateside, the Trump cultists continue to scheme and foment ever-more-fantastical assaults on democracy."

McConnell, journalist Jonathan Easley notes in an article for The Hill, is hoping to avoid a battle on the Senate floor on January 3, when Congress will vote to certify the Electoral College votes of December 14. The Senate majority leader has asked GOP senators not to join Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama in resisting the election results, but Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville is siding with Brooks rather than McConnell.

The "Trump cultists" Abramsky cites as especially unhinged include attorney Sidney Powell and long-time Trump loyalist Stephen Miller, who has declared that the campaign must keep fighting the election results right up until January 20, 2021.

"Not to be outdone in the crazy sweepstakes, Sidney Powell, the Trump campaign's recently departed attorney, retweeted a racist diatribe against McConnell's Taiwanese American wife," Abramsky notes.

According to Abramsky, "It's tempting to dismiss all of this as simply the noisy, irrational coda to a brutal election season. But it's more complex than that. Trump is desperately fighting for his personal survival, but McConnell has abandoned him; ergo, Trump must now turn his rhetorical guns against the Senate leader. For his part, McConnell has clearly concluded that it's in his political interest to cut his losses now and endure Trump's rants and his supporters' threats for the next few weeks, in order to maintain his political power into the Biden presidency."

Abramsky concludes the article by stressing that a post-election "civil war" among Republicans could inflict major damage on the GOP.

"Given Trump's despotic ambitions and his clear intent to maintain an iron grip on the GOP and its base in the coming years — and given the moral black hole so many GOP elected officials have managed to sink themselves into over the past four years — it's hard to see how this confrontation doesn't end up tearing the party apart," Abramsky writes. "I had hoped Trump's candidacy in 2016 would perform that vital role — that it would break a rotten party wide open for all to see the vacuum at its core. It didn't happen then. In these final weeks of 2020 and of Trump's rancid regime, it seems to be happening now."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Longtime GOP consultant: This election 'is the most dangerous ... ›

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the GOP's soft Civil War ... ›

The Mason-Dixon line is psychological this time in the GOP's new ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

A GOP civil war rattles Georgia Republicans at inconvenient time ›

Teri Kanefield: Trump and Giuliani's Georgia election fraud farce ... ›

Lindsey Graham Blames Governor Kemp for GOP 'Civil War Brewing ... ›

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/kraken-2649557832/

Legal experts and law observers were left flabbergasted by Sidney Powell and her "Kraken" legal team's latest attempt to invalidate the results of the presidential election. Although the Electoral College has affirmed President-elect Joe Biden's win, Powell and her associates are still arguing that the results in four battleground states were "unconstitutional," according to Law & Crime.

Earlier this week, Powell filed a motion requesting lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin be consolidated. However, the U.S. Supreme Court only has cases relative to Georgia and Michigan on its docket because the Arizona and Wisconsin cases have already been tossed out.

"The Arizona and Wisconsin Petitions were electronically filed and hand-delivered to the Court on December 12. Nonetheless, on December 17, the Clerk's office marked both 'Rejected' on the Court's ECF database," the motion stated. "When inquiry was made about this notation, undersigned counsel was informed that a Clerk's Office analyst had disallowed them, for reasons unspecified, without participation by any Justice of the Court. Counsel was informed that an explanation would be provided via U.S. Mail."

However, the glaring "errors, procedural mistakes, and falsehoods" quickly caught the attention of legal experts who wasted no time chiming in. Attorney Akiva Cohen took to Twitter with a string of more than 10 tweets highlighting various errors within the court documents.

Cohen also highlighted the most conspicuous mistakes tweeting that "cases have to *exist* in order to be consolidated, and the cases don't exist until they're docketed," adding, "They didn't bother submitting copies of the Petitions, so the court couldn't review them and say "hey, let's consider these together" even if it wanted to."

Two problems: 1) Cases have to *exist* in order to be consolidated, and the cases don't exist until they're dockete… https://t.co/8tw1kLLssT

— Akiva Cohen (@Akiva Cohen)1608319422.0

To make matters worse, Powell continued with an attempt to blame the U.S. Supreme Court clerk for their rejected cases.

"We find this (presumably innocent) lapse atypical of the proud traditions in the Office of the Supreme Court Clerk. More important, we are confident that deficiencies in the Arizona and Wisconsin Petitions, if there be any, are curable," Powell said. "We respectfully request that the Court deem those submissions filed nunc pro tunc and consolidate them, once filed, with the Michigan and Georgia Petitions."

The attempt quickly drew disdain from more legal experts. In fact, federal civil and criminal appellate attorney Matthew Stiegler was shocked by what he read saying, "I cannot express how relieved I am that such evil is presented with such stupidity."

I cannot express how relieved I am that such evil is presented with such stupidity.

— Matthew Stiegler (@Matthew Stiegler)1608320742.0

Brad Heath, a crime and justice reporter for Reuters, flatly disapproved of the brief as he argued that it simply "doesn't make sense."

"The brief doesn't argue implied consent - it just says legislators endorsed Trump slates. It doesn't make sense," Heath tweeted. "The legislature was out of session in Georgia. How does its failing to stop somebody from doing something when it is not even in session constitute consent?"

In response to Powell's false claim about the "competing slate of electors" arguing: "There are electors who cast real electoral votes, and there are self-appointed a**clowns who played 'grown-up person dress-up' on the same day."

With each failed attempt at overturning the election results, Trump's campaign legal team is taken less seriously.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

trump considering Sidney Powell as very special counsel to investigate 'election fraud'

Mark Sumner Daily Kos

December 20, 2020

Back on November 23, Donald Trump disowned lawyer Sidney Powell after she went into a prolonged rant about how machines built by Dominion Voting Systems were designed to help ensure that long dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez never lost an...

---

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-sordid-record-of-john-eastman-the-latest-right-wing-lawyer-on-trumps-legal-team/

this week, President Donald Trump sought to join—in his personal capacity as a presidential candidate—a request made by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in an effort to overturn the results of the presidential election by disenfranchising those states’ voters. Many legal observers consider the Texas filing to be, in the words of election law expert Richard Hasen, “utter garbage.” But that hasn’t stopped more than a dozen Republican attorneys general from seeking to join the effort.

The lawyer representing Trump in his request to join the Texas effort is John Eastman, a law professor who has long advanced positions on the far-right fringe of the legal community on issues ranging from immigration to LGBTQ equality to separation of church and state. Eastman appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show this week to talk about the Supreme Court’s “original and exclusive” jurisdiction over disputes between states. He noted that the Court has asked defendant states to respond to Texas’s motion asking for Supreme Court permission to sue the four states. “My gut’s they’re going to take it and look at it on the merits,” he said.

Eastman, a former law clerk for the hard-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, directs the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute, which former Right Wing Watch investigative reporter Jared Holt called “an increasingly white nationalist think tank” in 2019. That year, Claremont made “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec a Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Lincoln Fellow.

In August, Eastman published a column in Newsweek questioning whether Sen. Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, to immigrant parents, was qualified to be vice president. Eastman’s Birtherism 2.0 was widely mocked, and Newsweek eventually apologized after an outcry from staff, but it got Trump’s attention. As the Daily Beast noted, Trump called Eastman “brilliant” after his bogus attack on Harris’ eligibility.

As RWW noted in August:

Eastman has been one of the most vocal advocates for eliminating the 14th Amendment’s protection of birthright citizenship. He has argued that it would not take a constitutional amendment, just a court decision or act of Congress to change what he believes to be an erroneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment. These ideas put him on the fringes of the right-wing legal movement.

Eastman is also a zealous opponent of legal equality for LGBTQ people. In 2000, Eastman called homosexuality an indicator of “barbarism.” A longtime chairman of the anti-LGBTQ National Organization for Marriage, he called the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling overturning state laws that criminalized consensual gay sex “despotic” and warned that marriage equality for same-sex couples would have “catastrophic consequences for civil society.”

In a speech to the Family Research Council in 2015, Eastman defended Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act and said he hoped the country’s supreme court would reconsider its decision to throw out the law on a technicality. Eastman was one of the signers of the “Cape Town Declaration,” a global declaration of war on marriage equality issued as part of NOM’s launch of its International Organization for the Family, and he has participated inWorld Congress of Families gatherings of anti-LGBTQ activists.

In 2016, Eastman was a vocal supporter of Republican senators’ refusal to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy created by the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Tea Party activist Sharron Angle, who unsuccessfully challenged then-Sen. Harry Reid in 2010, said at the time that Eastman would make the “perfect” Supreme Court justice.

As Right Wing Watch has noted:

Eastman’s support for the Supreme Court’s infamous 1905 Lochner decision—which ushered in an era in which the court rejected economic and labor regulations—puts him in opposition to the late Antonin Scalia, who opposed the Lochner ruling.

Eastman has also taken a fringe position—one taken by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Eastman clerked—that the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion does not apply to the states, and has argued that a state taxing people to support an official church, as some states did early in the nation’s history, was not all that coercive.

You can find more detail about Eastman’s record in a 2016 Right Wing Watch profile.

Eastman has tried his hand at electoral politics a couple of times. In 1990, he was the Republican nominee for Congress from the 34th District in California. And in 2010, he ran for California Attorney General. While Eastman was defeated in the Republican primary, the ultimate winner of that race was Kamala Harris.

Tags: Donald Trump John Eastman Anti-Gay Anti-LGBT Anti-LGBTQ Disinformation Election 2020 Immigration Supreme Court Claremont Institute

---

repped enron execs

see stop the steal, rudy

TWO bak = kraken / elite strike force

---

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-kraken-lawyer-how-veteran-litigator-sidney-powell-became-a-qanon-heroine/

there are few sea monsters as terrifying as the kraken.

According to Norse legends, the gigantic creature dwelled off the coasts of Norway and Greenland, where it stalked and terrorized sailors with its octopus-like appearance. The kraken was believed to be over a mile across in early Norse sagas and was sometimes mistaken for an island due to its sheer size. When ships crossed its path, it would plunge beneath the vessel and wrap its many arms around the hull before capsizing the ship, resigning the crew to their fates: to drown or be eaten alive.

The legendary creature has haunted sailors’ imaginations for centuries. The Carta marina, the first detailed map of the Nordic countries from 1539, showed several monstrous sea creatures in the waters between Norway and Iceland. In 1735, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus even included the kraken in the first edition of Systema Naturae, his systematic natural catalog, while Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen and author of “The first Attempt at a Natural History of Norway,” described the kraken as “incontestably the largest Sea monster in the world.”

While the kraken likely originated from sightings of real-life giant squids, the awe-inspiring creature continues to make cameo appearances in pop culture. Its most recent appearance has been in the conspiracy-fueled aftermath of the 2020 United States presidential election. And while the kraken has historically been a monster to be feared, it has now been rebranded as the anointed savior of the United States.

Sidney Powell—a veteran litigator turned QAnon heroine—helped resurface the legendary sea monster by repeatedly threatening to “release the kraken” in statements that referenced her ongoing efforts to challenge the election results. Powell, who also authored the book “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice,” filed several lawsuits alleging that widespread voter fraud was responsible for Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.

Powell’s efforts earned her praise from President Donald Trump and elevated her to superstar status within the conspiratorial underbelly of the internet.

Release the Kraken

:{:{}:

“President Trump won this election in a landslide,” Powell during an interview with Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs on Nov. 13. “It’s going to be irrefutable. Patriots are coming forward every day, all day, faster than we can collect their information.”

Dressed in a white cardigan and leopard-print scarf, Powell went on to claim that her team had “statistical evidence” of widespread voter fraud that they planned to release to overturn results in several states—evidence that she believed would lead to a “massive criminal investigation that is going to affect millions of voters and elections.”

“I’m going to release the kraken,” Powell concluded.

The aforementioned phrase—taken from the 1981 movie “The Clash of the Titans”—has since flooded social media platforms including Twitter, where it trended shortly after the interview with more than 100,000 tweets, most of which were propagated by far-right personalities and QAnon adherents. One video of Powell’s appearance garnered more than 1.5 million views within a matter of days. [vid dobbs]

it should be noted that the Department of Homeland Security’s Elections Infrastructure Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees released a joint statement confirming that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history” and that there is “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

However, the statement did not dissuade Powell. A few days following her infamous Fox Business interview, she appeared alongside Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and members of the president’s legal team at a press conference. During the televised conference, she made several unsubstantiated claims about voting machines and electoral fraud, including that the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia and Michigan were created in Venezuela for the sole purpose of manipulating election results in favor of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. She also vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a court filing she deemed “biblical.”

By Nov. 22, the Trump campaign’s legal team had distanced itself from Powell —Powell’s conspiracies seemingly too outlandish for even them. “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement.

Powell’s conspiratorial comments were also too much for Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said that when his team reached out to Powell and requested some evidence, she refused to provide any information to support her claims. “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” Carlson.

“Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous—we’re with her there—but she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another,” Carlson concluded. “Not one.”

Despite this, Powell doubled down on her claims. On Nov. 25, she announced that she had filed lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan, which she posted on her legal defense fund website under the title “The Kraken is released.” The site also bore a picture of Powell smiling with the caption “Kraken Releaser.”

Powell’s initial filing in Georgia was riddled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and nonsensical claims such as “computerized ballot-stuffing and vote manipulation” enacted by “foreign oligarchs and dictators.”[ct doc]

powell made no attempt to offer evidence for her sensational claims, instead repeating many of her previous statements on voter fraud and the Dominion voting machines, many of which have already been disproven. One such example is Powell’s claim that the “design and features of the Dominion software do not permit a simple audit to reveal its misallocation, redistribution, or deletion of votes,” making it impossible to discover fraudulent activity. In response to Powell’s allegation, Dominion released a statement that “every vote from a Dominion device in Georgia is documented on an auditable paper trail and creates a verifiable paper ballot available for hand-counting.”

Georgia conducted a hand recount of ballots, which confirmed Joe Biden as the winner.

Powell’s bid to overturn the election results in Georgia did not stop there. The attorney filed an affidavit Monday citing **Ron Watkins, the former administrator of the 8kun message board (home of Q’s infamous drops) and a prominent QAnon figure, as evidence. Watkins, who has no experience with electronic voting systems, is quoted saying he wants to “alert the public and let the world know the truth about actual voting tabulation software design” but never actually says that there was any fraud in the Georgia election.

Ron Watkins, along with his father Jim, are among the handful of people who can verify Q’s drops on 8kun. Some have even suggested that the Watkins family might be behind the Q account entirely, though both Ron and Jim have denied the allegations. Regardless, Powell’s decision to include an affidavit citing a central QAnon figure emphasizes her ties to the virtual cult—a cult that now deems her a heroine to their cause.

The QAnon Queen

Amid chants of “USA,” “Kraken,” and “We Love You,” Sidney Powell took to the stage Wednesday afternoon for a in Atlanta, Georgia.

Flanked by American flags and a cast of far-right personalities like Ali Alexander and Kyle Rittenhouse’s attorney Lin Wood, Powell recited her conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems, widespread voter fraud, and so-called globalist dictators.

“There is no kind of voter fraud that hasn’t been experienced this year across the country,” Powell said, before adding that she plans to submit her evidence to the Department of Justice in the near future. “We already traced a lot of the money that did this back to China. People in Iran, China, Hong Kong, and Serbia … having influence in our election system.”

“Now is the time for every patriot in this country to stand up, make their voices heard, and be counted,” Powell added. “Your children and your grandchildren deserve the very best that America has to offer.”

For the entire duration of her speech, Powell was showered with affection and gratitude from the crowd in attendance. The spectacle demonstrated that Powell has reached a near God-like status among her fans due to her affinity with several key QAnon figures and her positioning as an influential figure in the battle to secure a second term for Trump.

Despite the unfounded assertions made in Powell’s so-called Kraken lawsuits, Powell’s popularity seems to be growing at an exponential pace. Much of that lies in her longstanding allegiance to QAnon. She has been featured on popular QAnon YouTube shows as far back as November 2019 and has been known to use QAnon slogans and hashtags in her social media posts. Even her electoral fraud claims are rooted in conspiracy theories that were propagated, in part, on QAnon forums and spaces.

Powell’s popularity within the virtual cult likely began when she represented Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was later investigated in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry. Flynn, an important QAnon figure who posted a video of himself reciting the QAnon slogan “Where we go one we go all” with his family on Independence Day, is viewed as a victim of the “deep state"[pix vid ]

in December 2017, Flynn reached a deal to plead guilty to a felony count of making false statements to the FBI. Then, after appointing Powell to his legal team, Flynn attempted to withdraw his guilty plea in January 2020. The Department of Justice later announced that it planned to drop all charges against Flynn, but the matter was placed on hold by a federal district judge. In the end, Flynn was issued a presidential pardon by Trump on Nov. 25, 2020.

Deemed a hero for helping Flynn, Powell already had a strong reputation as a QAnon ally prior to getting involved in the election fraud case. However, her kraken comments made her an overnight celebrity among conspiracy theorists and saw the emergence of songs, memes, and further theories about the kraken and its role in the ongoing fight to salvage Trump’s presidency.

Powell’s growing popularity has only helped embolden her unfounded claims. On Dec. 1, the attorney started a new website with Lin Wood called “Kraken Wood,” where she published a reply to Dominion Voting Systems’ statement in which she claimed that the company was “lying.”

“Know this: Any effort to hide the truth or suppress our investigation by these means will only invigorate our efforts exponentially,” Powell concluded. “The Truth will come out.”

Powell also filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin’s Eastern District, alleging “massive election fraud” in the state’s election process. The lawsuit was riddled with problems, not least of which was the fact that one of the named plaintiffs revealed that his name was used without permission.

“I learned through social media today that my name was included in a lawsuit without my permission,” Derrick Van Orden, who lost his congressional race in Wisconsin’s 3rd District, said on Twitter. “To be clear, I am not involved in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the election in Wisconsin.”

According to Law and Crime, Chief U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper laid out an embarrassing number of basic errors littering the complaint, while attorneys took to social media to mock Powell’s filing.[twt]

beyond the countless blunders in her court filings, Powell has also helped to fuel conservative infighting by telling Republicans to boycott the upcoming Georgia Senate runoffs during the Stop the Steal rally on Wednesday. “I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure,” Powell said before advocating the use of voter ID and paper ballots verified by thumbprint.

Powell’s comments emphasize the growing schism between establishment Republicans and Stop the Steal activists—a schism that could cost Republicans the Senate. Even Trump, who has amplified countless conspiracy theories during his time in office, reportedly found Powell “too conspiratorial” for his taste.

Having achieved near-mythical status among QAnon adherents and far-right conspiracy theorists, Powell’s sudden rise to fame is the latest example of the blurred lines between real-world politics and unrestrained imagination.

And yet, the kraken lawyer continues to spread her tentacles far and wide.

Tags: Ali Alexander Donald Trump Joe Biden Lin Wood Sidney Powell conspiracy theories election fraud far-right Kraken QAnon Stop the Steal

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/kraken/

fail

---

rt richter

QAnon movement gets assertive

Star MAGA attorney Lin Wood strutted across a stage in Georgia on Wednesday, riling up the crowd with a southern revival energy and, at one point, waving around a coonskin cap he had found in the crowd. He was in his element. And at one point, he inspired a “lock him up” chant aimed at the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.

But within the pomp, Wood had a serious message for the audience: don’t vote for Republican Senate candidates in the state’s upcoming runoffs, unless they meet our demands.

"They have not earned your vote,” Wood said. “Don't you give it to them.”

Until then, most Republican officials were happy to ignore Wood’s hapless attempts to save the election for Donald Trump, which involved wild allegations of a deep, corrupt scheme to shift thousands of votes to Joe Biden. Telling his fans not to vote for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, however, appeared to be a step too far. Within hours, Breitbart denounced Wood as a former Democratic donor in an attack that was picked up by the Trump campaign. Soon after, other conservatives were piling on too, with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) accusing Wood of being a plant and Rush Limbaugh and Roger Stone distancing themselves from him.

The fault lines made clear just how contentious the post-election political environment has become for the Republican Party. And it underscored a new problem that it faces, mainly the rise of an aggressive, increasingly assertive QAnon wing. The GOP is now divided between conspiracy theorists and those who want to keep at least a toehold in reality.

Both Wood and former Trump lawyer turned professional conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who joined him on the stage, have built up their ties with QAnon believers. Wood includes a reference to the QAnon motto “Where we go one, we go all” in his Twitter bio, and recently endorsed a call for exactly the kind of military rule QAnon believers eagerly hope for.

Wood’s demand is also the quintessential QAnon demand: endless investigations until what he wants to come true finally happens. Wood and his supporters claim to want Perdue and Loeffler to back a special session of the Georgia legislature to investigate the 2020 election. But, since Georgia recounts have proven the race wasn’t affected by fraud, this demand really equates to the kind of endless investigations QAnon supporters crave.

At the end of the investigation, the thinking goes, there’ll be some kind of catharsis — in QAnon’s case, a violent “Storm” that features mass-arrests of Trump’s enemies, or, in Wood’s case, Georgia’s legislators assuring that the state’s electors be handed to Trump.

In the meantime, as long as the investigations are ongoing, QAnon believers won’t have to face reality: that no such arrests are coming and that Biden will be sworn into office.

That puts Republican officials in a bind: keep up the farce and order endless probes into the 2020 election, or face the wrath of QAnon believers and other Trump supporters living in their individual fantasy lands.

Wood’s intra-Republican fight has drawn in a number of other fringe groups. Interestingly, the influential “The Gateway Pundit” blog sided with him and accused Breitbart—the bane of the pre-Trump GOP establishment's existence—of carrying water for the Republican establishment. Columnist Michelle Malkin, who’s now palling around with racist college students in the “groyper” movement, slammed Crenshaw for attacking Wood.

At his rally, Wood even raised the prospect of pulling support more broadly from Republicans.

“Maybe it’s time to look beyond the Democrats and the Republicans,” Wood said, to cheers. “Maybe it’s time for the party of the people.”

Wood’s ambitions to shake up the GOP — or at least pressure it into meeting his demands — could extend for years. At one point in the rally, Wood donned a “FLYNN” cap, a reference to former Trump national security adviser and central QAnon protagonist Michael Flynn.

“How about Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn in 2024?” Wood said, floating the QAnon dream ticket.

Sidney Powell falls for The Voice parody

Speaking of Powell…

The one-time Trump legal team member has become the star of the Trump deadender movement, starring in memes that pose her with dual-wielded Desert Eagles or summoning her mythical “kraken.” Along the way, she’s attracted a wave of donations to fund her legal fight for Trump’s election — checks for which, her website tactfully points out, should be made out directly to Powell’s law firm.

Alternate text

Powell’s MAGA crusade has been plagued by amateur errors, from egregious typos to a decision to rely on expert witnesses who blame ex-Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez for election fraud seven years after he died.

To really get a sense of how Powell will throw out even the most obvious lies to muddy the waters for Trump, though, you can’t do better than her recent decision to boost a story about missing Trump ballots discovered in Lake Erie.

On Friday, Powell retweeted a claim that thousands of dumped Trump ballots had been discovered in a Great Lake. The tweet, from a previously little-known account called @tpgwlm, has racked up more than 19,000 retweets as of this writing.

[twt]

even a surface investigation into this claim, though, shows that it’s obviously fake. The source of the story is a set of fake news sites with names like “Patriot Hat” and “The New York Evening.” Notably, the picture used to illustrate the story is marked “SATIRE.”

If the satire notice wasn’t enough, the story itself claims that the votes themselves were just discarded ballots from NBC singing competition The Voice.

“The bag is full of ballots, sure, but they’re ballots for last season’s finale of The Voice,” the article reads.

At best, Powell doesn’t appear to have noticed the story is a fake. Not great news for the ongoing pro-Trump legal effort!

---

1220 an me

Pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell has touted a challenge to the 2020 election in Georgia as her "Kraken," comparing the lawsuit to the mythical beast. But this supposedly epic legal challenge has a surprisingly gigantic error. While arguing for the Eleventh Circuit, she pushed her ridiculous and unfounded claim that Dominion Voting Systems switch votes during the election.

But she seems to have gotten her words mixed up, or forgotten which candidate she was supposed to be arguing for mid-sentence. Because the lawsuit claims that the machines switched the votes from Biden and to Trump — which would indicate a fraudulent conspiracy on the president's behalf, and one that failed anyway.

The glaring claim is located within the in background arguments for the case filed by Powell and her colleague Lin Wood, as Law & Crime pointed out.

"[T]here were all imaginable varieties of voting fraud," appellants said, "including machine-controlled algorithms deliberately run by Dominion Voting Systems that generally took more than 2.5% of the votes from Mr. Biden and flipped them to Mr. Trump for a more than 5% fraudulent increase for Mr. Biden."...

---

an 1220

here's why Georgia officials are warning that pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell is a 'security risk'

Alex Henderson December 03, 2020

Right-wing attorney Sidney Powell's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have been so outrageous and over-the-top that even President Donald Trump's legal team has distanced itself from her. And according to Law & Crime reporter Aaron Keller, Georgia officials believed that her proposal for inspecting voting machines in that state posed a "security risk."

Georgia is among the battleground states that President-elect Joe Biden won in the 2020 election, but Powell — like other pro-Trump attorneys — has been claiming, without credible evidence, that Trump was the real winner in the Peach State and that the election was fraudulent. In a lawsuit that she filed with Lin Wood, another far-right pro-Trump attorney, Powell wanted her team to conduct forensic inspections of Georgia's voting machines. But during a federal court hearing held on Sunday in the Northern District of Georgia, Russell David Willard — an attorney representing Georgia officials — warned that what Powell, Wood and their team were proposing was downright dangerous.

Powell, during the hearing, told Batten that she wanted to inspect voting machines in ten Georgia counties. "The important part is, it's not just the data that comes out of the machines that is crucial to the fraud case that is so rampant across the country — it is the fact that an algorithm we believe was uploaded to the Dominion machines that weighted the votes for Mr. Biden over the votes for President Trump at approximately 1.22 over .78."

But Willard told Judge Timothy C. Batten, Sr., "You cannot allow, during the midst of an election cycle, a third party to come in and get the proverbial keys to the software kingdom." According to William, "Powell's minions" could "go in and image everything, download the software, and figure out for future elections a way to hack in so that their preferred candidate can win."

"That is, in effect, what they are seeking here," Willard told Batten. "They want to image, as they just said, not only the data on the machines, but also, the entire software package and the security protocols that are set up. That is something no federal court can possibly countenance."

Keller notes that Powell told Batten the Dominion Voting Systems program used in Georgia was also used in Venezuela to help leftist Huge Chavez steal elections in that South American country. But Dominion, in response to Powell's claims, has countered that its software has never been used Venezuela.

In a press release, Dominion stated, "Dominion has no ties to the Venezuelan government, nor any other foreign government, including China and Iran. Dominion has never participated in any elections in Venezuela and has no connection or relationship with the now deceased former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Other companies have serviced elections in Venezuela, but Dominion is not one of them."

Keller also notes that Batten "ordered several machines to remain untouched (in Georgia). The judge chiseled out a decision after much back-and-forth and pleading by Wood). Future briefs and hearings were also set."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Trump team now says attorney who lied with Giuliani for 2 hours at ... ›

Dominion Voting Systems employees face 'death threats' and ... ›

Sidney Powell suffers another setback as Georgia GOP county chair ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

For Trump advocate Sidney Powell, a playbook steeped in ... ›

Trump Team Disavows Lawyer Sidney Powell - The New York Times ›

Trump advocate Sidney Powell cites Ron Watkins, a central QAnon ... ›

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-dictator/

flynn dobbs oann

no lnx twt

Here's why Republicans who are calling for a Trump dictatorship should not be taken lightly — and aren’t going away

Trump condemned for White House 'dictator' statement to cast doubt on election results

The Conversation

Alex Henderson December 04, 2020

The United States dodged an authoritarian bullet when former Vice President Joe Biden, a centrist Democrat, became president-elect, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating defeated President Donald Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote. But when Republican Lin Wood, a pro-Trump attorney who has been fighting the election results in Georgia, implores Trump to impose martial law and elections officials are receiving death threats for acknowledging Biden as president-elect, it is painfully obvious that there is a strong appetite for fascism in parts of the United States. And journalist Sasha Abramsky, in an article published by The Nation on December 4, warns that Republicans who are openly calling for fascism should not be taken lightly.

"We are less than seven weeks away from the inauguration, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't counting down the seconds," Abramsky writes. "For the last spasms of Trumpist rule are truly a sight and sound to behold. Trumpism is, at this point, nothing more than a blend of cultism and fascism — a violent, nihilistic howl against the pillars of American democracy unparalleled in presidential history."

Abramsky adds, however, that when "people surrounding Trump are calling for dictatorship," it "ought to send a chill up all Americans' spines." And Abramsky cites some specific examples of Trumpistas who haven't been shy about showing their authoritarianism.

"Trump campaign attorney Joe DiGenova said that Chris Krebs, the election security official whom Trump fired by tweet last month after he defended the integrity of the election, should be 'drawn and quartered' and 'taken out at dawn and shot,'" Abramsky observes. "Stalin couldn't have said it better himself when talking about his perceived enemies in the Soviet bureaucracy.

Former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell…. retweeted a call to invoke the Insurrection Act, suspend the meeting of the Electoral College and set up military tribunals to deal with Trump's enemies. The following day, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, coming off a recent presidential pardon from Trump, urged his erstwhile boss to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, and order new presidential elections under the supervision of the military."

Abramsky adds, "Far-right media personalities have joined the fascist clamor. Lou Dobbs of Fox Business recently called for Trump to take unspecified 'drastic action' against his enemies. The One America News Network has also suggested that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act as a way to remain in office."

The journalist stresses that "when a fanatical movement's hold on power starts to diminish, the extremists have a tendency to eat their own." And Abramsky points to the recent attacks on Attorney General William Barr from the far right as a disturbing example.

Barr has been one of Trump's most aggressive defenders, often inspiring unflattering comparisons to the late Republican attorney Roy Cohn (who was an ally of Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s and represented Trump during the 1970s). But Barr, during an interview with the Associated Press, essentially acknowledged Biden as president-elect and said there was no evidence that widespread voter fraud swung the election in Biden's favor — and Trumpistas like Dobbs are furious with Barr for it.

It should be noted that far-right fascists don't necessarily come to power through a violent coup d'état or golpe de estado; sometimes, they are voted into office and try to gradually undermine a democracy's system of checks and balances. That has happened in Turkey with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and in Hungary with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and hopefully, Brazil's checks and balances will withstand the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, in France, far-right white nationalist Marine Le Pen (leader of the National Front) lost the country's 2017 presidential race but is likely to run for president again.

Most Americans rejected fascism in the United States' 2020 presidential election. But Abramsky warns that the appetite for fascism in the U.S. hasn't gone away.

"Trump's fascist yammering and the GOP Senate's collaborationist behavior isn't just a footnote to the 2020 election campaign," Abramsky warns. "Rather, it's a prologue to what could come next…. The GOP as an institution has entirely abandoned its commitment to the democratic process…. It's a hell of a warning shot as to how the Grand Old Party intends to conduct itself in the months and years ahead."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Professor of History Explains How Trump Becomes a Dictator ... ›

Conservative explains why Trump's love for dictators is only getting ›

10 Ways Trump's Taste in Interior Decor Would Fit Right into a Third ... ›

Republicans who screamed about 'dictator' Obama nervously stand ... ›

Trump condemned for White House 'dictator' statement to cast doubt ... ›

Trump's re-election plan is straight out of the dictator's playbook ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Trump's Post-Election Tactics Put Him in Unsavory Company - The ... ›

Donald Trump Goes Full Dictator, Vows to Stay in Office Regardless ... ›

10 Ways Trump Is Becoming a Dictator, Election Edition ›

Donald Trump's administration acting 'more akin to a dictatorship ... ›

---

an alexh 1120

alhough President Donald Trump's efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election results have suffered defeat after defeat in the lower federal courts, that hasn't stopped Republican attorneys like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell from continuing to pursue election-related lawsuits and claiming, without evidence, that the president has been the victim of widespread voter fraud. Attorney Mike Dunford offers legal analysis of some of those lawsuits in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, arguing that the lawsuits aren't as "dumb" as you think — they're worse.

"Every time you think you have a grasp of how preposterous the Trump team's election lawsuits are, another one comes out, dumber and more conspiracy-filled than the last," Dunford explains. "The Pennsylvania monstrosity that was submitted by Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and the Four Seasons Total Litigation supporting cast was terrible. It made, according to a federal appeals court ruling, 'vague and conclusory' allegations about alleged misconduct, tried to get the court to do things that would violate the U.S. Constitution, and had, in the court's words, 'no merit.' Their case was such complete nonsense that two courts and four judges decided it was too dumb to fix.

powell, in one of her lawsuits, claims that the software used by Dominion Voting Systems was used to help President-elect Joe Biden steal the election in key battleground states — and Dunford notes that one of Powell's witnesses is a QAnon conspiracy theorist.

"As specious as the legal arguments are and as incomprehensible as the copy is, the craziest thing about the case is the substance," Dunford observes. "This complaint reads like it was drafted at the afterparty for a three-day QAnon convention. And it might have been, given that one of Powell's more absurd 'witnesses' is Ronald Watkins, who, alongside his father, runs the imageboard where 'Q' drops his messages. Hmmmm. The reason Watkins is part of this case is unclear. Powell is claiming him as an expert in Dominion's voting software, but you would hope that she could find someone better — like, I don't know, someone who has worked with it maybe?"

The QAnon cult claims that that United States' federal government has been infiltrated by an international cabal of pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals and that Trump was put in the White House to fight the cabal. "Q," according to the group, is an anonymous figure who is providing updates about Trump's battle. And QAnon also claims that R&B superstar Beyoncé is really an Italian woman named Ann Marie Lastrassi and is only pretending to be Black — and that Beyoncé is acting on orders from billionaire Democrat George Soros....

---

death threats dominion

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/sidney-powell-2649062448/

---

an 1120

today we learned why mobster Don Donald Trump wanted the wildest of his wild-eyed attorneys ejected unceremoniously from his so-called legal team: She was trying to cut into his action.

Yes, TV attorney Sidney Powell can grift with the best of them.

Now that Powell has "unleashed the Kraken" with the help of a copy editor who was smoking the Kraken, it's time to resolve one of the burning questions of the QAnon universe: "How can we ever show our appreciation to Sidney Powell?"

It turns out you can send her a check as part of a ruse so shameless that Powell isn't bothering to have your payment made out to the 501 C-4 political "organization" she formed. Just pay the woman directly.

You can goose step your way to www.sidneypowell.com and press the "Donate Now" button to support the "Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic." First thing you'll see is a nice photo of Sidney Powell captioned "KRAKEN RELEASER." Scroll down and you'll see some small links to the lawsuits followed by a much larger "DONATE BELOW" button.

That's where you get chumped, as they say in the world of scams.

Look no further than https://defendingtherepublic.org. Would you like to "support our mission and the welfare of the American Republic?"

Just write out your check to "Sidney Powell, PC." She's not even bothering to have her pigeons use the name of her "organization."

As the UK's DailyMail.com reported, Powell's "Legal Defense Fund" website was apparently set up November 11, a day after she appeared on Lou Dobbs show on Fox. The DailyMail.com had this to say: "Powell, whose outlandish theory earned a rebuke from the President, has founded a legal defense fund under the Internal Revenue Service category 501(c)(4). The IRS says that 501(c)(4) should normally apply to social welfare organizations and community groups like homeowners associations. It can be used for lobbying activities, but the deductions are not tax deductible like those for nonprofits.

"The website for The Legal Defense fund says that "millions of dollars must be raised to defend the Republic as these lawsuits continue to be filed to ensure victory" for Trump, even though he has now essentially admitted defeat to Joe Biden by allowing the transition to go ahead."

The good news is that Powell's lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan presumably will wind up shortly on the trash heap of legal history. Not that the judges of the U.S. "Districct Court Northern Distrcoict" aren't going to give her case the seriousness it deserves.

The Daily Mail summed up the case pretty well in its headline today: "Fired Trump lawyer Sidney Powell claims Iran and China used Venezuelan voting machine software to rig election in favor of Biden and says 96,000 absentee ballots in Georgia were NOT recorded – in typo-ridden lawsuits with flimsy expert evidence."

Powell promised the faithful she'd be "releasing the kraken" which we all then learned is some sort of legendary sea monster. That had to sound perfect to the Trump base, which surely will be happy to make do with the couple of little sea urchins that Powell actually unleashed.

Everyone gets what they want: Trump world can talk for years about how the stealing of the 2020 election from Dear Leader was all laid out in 104 pages of judicial scholarship that the Deep State judges were paid off not to consider. As for Powell, she is guaranteed a life of permanent stardom in the right-wing stratosphere.

Sidney Powell may have released the Kraken. But apparently, she gets to hold onto the cash.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Michael Flynn's wacky new attorney has a colorful of way of ... ›

Letter sent in 'utmost confidentiality' to Bill Barr set in motion ... ›

Trump team now says attorney who lied with Giuliani for 2 hours at ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

The #MAGA Lawyer Behind Michael Flynn's Scorched-Earth Legal ... ›

What We Know About Sidney Powell - The New York Times ›

Sidney Powell: Trump team cuts ties with lawyer who peddled ... ›

---

who? ;)

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/sidney-powell/

kos

The Trump Administration's attempts to overthrow the government and sow confusion around the elections have been going so badly that it has been difficult to take what is a very serious attack on our democracy seriously. On Thursday the Trump legal squad of cartoon-keystone-kops, Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held an almost two-hour press conference that can only be called bizarre. The three legal minds all share a detachment from reality and factual information that is prized within the Trump world.

Needless to say, the whole thing was a disaster like every hot garbage thing Donald Trump and friends have ever done. Well, now, Axios and Yahoo news' White House correspondent Hunter Walker report that the Trump administration says that Sidney Powell isn't on Trump's legal team. Excuse me? I guess she just got to speak for 45 minutes and hit up Fox News and OANN to spew fact free conspiracy theories on his behalf, for free?

According to the statement: "Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity." However, the other two lawyers, Giuliani and Ellis, are on his legal team. I guess Sidney was just hanging out?

I look forward to Mayor Giuliani spearheading the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS! Rudy… https://t.co/4DhUVlMELh

— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump)1605409912.0

There's always a tweet.

A public disavowal is generally not a sign that things are going well. https://t.co/dK75Ix4RxP

— Hunter Walker (@Hunter Walker)1606083953.0

But here's the real take away.

Maybe Hugo Chavez (d. 2013) took down Sidney Powell?

— Kyle Griffin (@Kyle Griffin)1606086620.0

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'She got angry': Tucker Carlson just exposed a Trump lawyer's ... ›

Michael Flynn's wacky new attorney has a colorful of way of ... ›

Legal experts shocked by incoherence of Michael Flynn's lawyer ... ›

Letter sent in 'utmost confidentiality' to Bill Barr set in motion ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

The #MAGA Lawyer Behind Michael Flynn's Scorched-Earth Legal ... ›

Tucker Carlson criticizes Sidney Powell for lack of evidence in ... ›

---

someone said rudy not in ctroom for 30 years, so just did TV fox news schtick

https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/fox-news-figures-lavish-praise-rudy-giuliani-and-sidney-powells-unhinged-press

no twt

Fox News figures lavish praise on Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s unhinged press conference about their plan to subvert the election

WRITTEN BY BRENDAN KARET

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ

PUBLISHED 11/19/20

Fox figures are attempting to defend the conspiratorial press conference from President Donald Trump’s legal team, during which his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell pushed a bunch of conspiracy theories and generally laid out how they are trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.

This post will be updated throughout November 19.

CNN Politics: “At no point did Trump’s legal team offer any proof for their allegations of widespread fraud.” Following Giuliani and Powell’s stunt, CNN’s Tara Subramaniam and Holmes Lybrand offered a fact check noting that the “briefing was overflowing with falsehoods and conspiracy theories” for which they provided no proof. ” [CNN Politics, 11/19/20]

Politico: “Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyers crank out conspiracies as legal challenges implode.” Politico's Quint Forget and Alex Isenstadt examined how “the former New York mayor and his colleagues spun a web of mistruths that made mention of the Clinton Foundation, liberal megadonor George Soros and the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.” [Politico, 11/19/20]

Fox figures lauded Giuliani and Powell

Fox host Lou Dobbs talked up Giuliani and Powell's unhinged press conference [Media Matters, 11/19/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight

LOU DOBBS (HOST): President Trump's attorneys say they can prove illegal ballots were used to inflate Biden's vote tally in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. The legal team also expects to file new lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, perhaps even Virginia and New Mexico. That's in addition to the 20 lawsuits that are now being litigated by the campaign or Republican Party attorneys.

Another issue at the center of today's news conference, the use of Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software. Defense attorney Sidney Powell cited a whistleblower's stunning affidavit. It says Smartmatic's technology was used to rig elections in Venezuela, it is now in the, quote, DNA of every vote-tabulating company's software and system. Smartmatic and Dominion deny those charges. But Sidney Powell argues that algorithms in the Smartmatic software were used to change results in the presidential election.

Co-hosts of Fox’s The Five defended Giuliani and Powell. [Fox News, The Five, 11/19/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Five

On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Fox contributor Ken Starr compared Powell to John Adams. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 11/19/20]

On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Fox contributor Ken Starr compares Sidney Powell to John Adams

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Audio file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show

Media outlets have debunked Rudy Giuliani's conspiracy theories. Ignoring that, Tucker Carlson now demands new investigations. [Media Matters, 11/19/20]

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Fox News legal analyst: “The unabashed arrogance of the media was on full display today, as they were demanding to see the evidence. They’re not entitled to see the evidence.” [Fox News, Hannity, 11/19/20]

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rudy-giuliani-press-conference-2648986338/

kos

high noon on Thursday, Donald Trump's crack legal team sauntered out for a showdown with destiny. They were there to demonstrate for America that Trump's refusal to concede the election wasn't a demonstration of infantile refusal to accept reality, but was really real. Really real. Oh, so real.

And in their presentation on why the press should never again say they were lacking evidence, what emerged before their own tech team appeared to pull the plug was a claim that Democrats engaged in a vast conspiracy to "inject" hundreds of thousands of Biden votes by using voting machines built by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, with the help of wealthy Jew George Soros, that sent American votes overseas to servers in Germany where they could be altered according to orders from antifa. And then, when even that proved inadequate to defeat Trump, Democrats brought in "garbage cans" full of votes that were marked for Biden. Then counted them three times each. That may sound like an exaggeration. It's not. It's only a subset of the claims that were made during this peek into an alternative reality. Also Rudy Giuliani's hair dye began pouring off his head at a rate that made it look as if his brain might be leaking from his skull. Which seemed entirely possible.

Giuliani took the stage first to begin the general theme of the day, which was to berate the press for saying that there was no evidence of voter fraud when he had a fistful of affidavits. Affidavits, people! For example, Giuliani claimed to have "60 witnesses" to an incident in which a truck pulled up in the wee hours of the morning "and people rushed to it thinking it had food" but instead it was "full of ballots, thousands of ballots" that were in garbage cans and paper bags. And then these votes were brought in "when they thought all the Republican observers had gone home" and run through the voting machines three times. This was not a single event, declared Giuliani, but a product of Joe Biden's "election fraud team" that worked in "Democrat led cities" to plant the votes needed to put Biden ahead of Trump.

Giuliani then gave way to Sidney Powell, who demonstrated that when it comes to being disconnected from reality, this conference went to 12. Powell immediately veered away from trash can votes and right into how the election was really rigged by voting software written for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Chavez, rather unexpectedly, is apparently very anti-Trump. (That's really unexpected since he died in 2013.) But Powell launched into an emotional explanation of how "Our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro," and these companies are, of course, run by "the number two associate of George Soros." As Powell went on, she also expressed how Cuba was involved, and how there was an "algorithm" that allowed this Venezuela-Jewish-Cuban cabal to define the values of votes. That algorithm that "probably flipped votes all over the country" because, according to Powell, "Donald Trump won in a landslide."

Yes, she said that. This came right before the part where she explained that she also has an affidavit from someone who chatted about all this with Chavez (I am still not making this up) and that it was all approved by antifa. It was a Biden-Venezuelan-Jewish-Cuban-antifa conspiracy. And if you think she didn't mention the Clinton Foundation in this … oh yes she did. All of these groups "had the election rigged for Mr. Biden," said Powell. She went on to explain: "They can say a Biden vote counts 1.25 and a Trump vote counts 0.75, and that may be the numbers that were used here." All of this was explained to her by the Chavez chat man. Also, there is a server in Germany that is definitely connected. Though we don't know how. So … just assume everyone not standing on the stage was a part of the conspiracy.

Powell then gave way to Jenna Ellis, who explained that, lord help everyone, all that had gone before was only the "opening statement" to the full trial they wanted to have. Ellis then explained that this would not be a trial of the public opinion before complaining that there wasn't time to do it in court. But definitely, definitely, 99% of the press wasn't worthy to even report on the story. Because they're part of the conspiracy.

The whole thing finished off with some Q&A time in which Giuliani stepped forward to embrace everything that Powell had claimed about Chavez, Soros, antifa … the works. That included complaining about states being "stupid enough to send our votes out of the country ... to be counted by people who are allies of Chavez and Meduro ... run by an ally of George Soros." He knows this is a fact, said Giuliani. "When I first heard it, I didn't believe it, until Sydney showed me the documents ... you can Google it, well, unless they took it down." This was accompanied by more complaints about antifa's role in fixing the election.

And you know all of this has to be true, because Giuliani gestured around the stage to proclaim, "There is nobody here who engages in fantasies." This was followed by a claim that Trump won Michigan by 50,000 votes, and that the campaign was looking into challenges in both Virginia and New Mexico. By that point, Giuliani's hair dye was largely on his shirt.

All this happened. And I didn't even touch on the most ridiculous moments.

[TWT

FOX NEWS AIRED GIULIANI'S PRESSER IN ITS ENTIRETY -- HERE'S WHAT THEIR CORRESPONDENT HAD TO SAY ABOUT IT AFTERWARDS

FISHER: "CERTAINLY A COLORFUL NEWS CONFERENCE, BUT IT WAS LIGHT ON FACTS. SO MUCH OF WHAT HE SAID WAS SIMPLY NOT TRUE, OR HAS ALREADY BEEN THROWN OUT IN COURT."]

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election-2648992261/

digby

Back in September, Politico's Anita Kumar reported that for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare "prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots." The effort was led by "a 20-person team of lawyers" from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in "key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan." It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having "his" judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don't think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump's crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit or threw in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn't stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described "elite strike force" led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy's performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon's Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as "America's mayor" fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn't been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the "elite strike force": Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn's Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don't have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and "save democracy" from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It's a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on "faithless electors" last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the "strike force" held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and "communistic" countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn't work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the "strike force" to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani's face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

You'll notice that she just blithely uses the term "overturn," as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn't work, the "strike force" are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can't send Biden's required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state's delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It's unlikely, but it's possible. It's tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

---

sidney powell blamed hugo chavez for steal election

She got angry': Tucker Carlson just exposed a Trump lawyer's sketchy charade in the most bizarre way

Cody Fenwick November 20, 2020

On Thursday night, Fox News' Tucker Carlson got an impressive scoop. Unfortunately for him, it didn't fit with his ideological agenda. So instead of presenting it in the most straightforward and direct way possible, he skewed the news in such a warped fashion that an...

---

Thursday night, Fox News' Tucker Carlson got an impressive scoop. Unfortunately for him, it didn't fit with his ideological agenda. So instead of presenting it in the most straightforward and direct way possible, he skewed the news in such a warped fashion that an observer who wasn't paying close attention might not realize what the real bombshell was.

Here's what happened: Sidney Powell, an extreme right-wing lawyer, has joined the Trump campaign's efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. She appeared Thursday afternoon alongside Rudy Giuliani to deliver a litany of wacky talking points and absurd conspiracy theories, all aimed at supporting that idea that President Donald Trump won a second term (he didn't). For her part, Powell alleged a massive conspiracy involving vote-counting software that manufactured votes for Joe Biden to prevent a Trump win.

To be clear, there's no reason to believe this is true, and it's hard to believe it could even possibly be true. States use different systems for their elections, and they typically use paper ballots as backups. Recounts and audits can check electronic counts by hand and verify their accuracy. And trying to mess with the voter tallies in a plausible way would be incredibly challenging to pull off, given the complexity of the system and the amount of scrutiny the process gets from all sides. (And apparently Democrats who were rigging the election, in her delusional account, apparently forgot to rig several key Senate elections that they lost.)

But conservatives, of course, are inclined believe it's true because Trump has told them the election was stolen. So on Thursday, Carlson revealed on his nightly show that his team looked into her claims. And she is completely unwilling to back them up.

"We took Sidney Powell seriously," he said. "We've no intention of fighting with her. We've always respected her work. We simply wanted to see the details. How could you not want to see them? So we invited Sidney Powell on this show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually! And listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention. That's a big story!"

He continued: "But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests. Polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either. Nor did she provide any today, at the press conference. Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous, and she's right — we're with her there. But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another."

Like Carlson said — this is a big story! But clearly, it's not the one he wanted to tell. It's not the story he wanted to be true.

He refused to tell his viewers the straightforward take: One of the president's lead attorneys is positing an absolutely gargantuan conspiracy theory but refusing to show even a friendly news outlet any evidence for it. She won't even provide evidence to her own allies on the Trump campaign. The only reasonable inference is that she has little or no basis for her claims at all, which is what we should have assumed in the first place, because the theory itself is so absurd.

This is a massive scandal. The president's lawyer is in all likelihood completely fabricating a fanciful story about electoral fraud as he tries to cling to power.

But what Carlson wants viewers to take away from the story is nothing about presidential scandal at all. He even strained to avoid even mentioning Trump in the discussion. (Carlson often does this when covering topics that reflect badly on Trump.) Instead, Carlson focused on the fact that he took the story very seriously, even though Powell was unable to support it.

"So why are we telling you this?" he said. "We're telling you this because it's true. And in the end, that's all that matters: The truth. It's our only hope. It's our best defense. And it's how we're different from them. We care what's true, and we know you care too. That's why we told you. Maybe Sidney Powell will come through with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it. Maybe she will. We are certainly hopeful that she will. What happened with the vote-counting this month, and at the polling places in Detroit, and at the polling places in Philadelphia, and so much else, actually matters. It matters no matter who you voted for, it matters whether or not you think this election is already over. Until we can answer those questions conclusively, and we can agree on them, this country will not be united."

It may strike some as odd that Carlson said he is "certainly hopeful" that Powell can prove that a massive, world-historical fraud took place to steal the presidential election. Why would he be hopeful for that? But the point of the whole segment is that Carlson is delivering a bitter pill to his audience: It certainly looks like Powell is lying.

To make that pill go down easier, and to avoid turning off his fans who love the president, Carlson carefully reassures them that he's on their side. He does this by saying he wanted Powell to be true, because that would mean Trump could remain president, as both he and most of his viewers surely want. And he also tries to show he's on his viewers' side by trying to claim the mantle of righteousness — "We care what's true." He doesn't, actually. He lies to and misleads his audience all the time. But when someone goes so far over the line, as Powell has with her absurd statements, Carlson can use countering them to shore up his own credibility with viewers.

But he doesn't dwell on the fact that her claims don't add up — he focused on who the real enemy should be, in his eyes and the eye of his viewers. "It's how we're different from them," he says. "Them," of course, is Democrats and all non-conservative media. He wants viewers to remember that he hates the same people they hate, so they'll believe him when he says something they're inclined to believe may be false. "They" don't take Powell's claims seriously at all because, unlike me, he's essentially saying, they hate Trump.

And Carlson also gestures towards other vague, unsupported, and irrelevant claims that the Trump campaign and its supporters have put forward to undermine the election. That reminds viewers that, even if Powell's claim is false, they can be comforted that there are many more reasons doubt the election of Biden, which is of course what people tune in to Fox to hear.

The last sentence in the segment, too, is key. Carlson says the country cannot be "united" unless all "questions" he and others have raised about the election have been answered. Of course, many of the claims put forward by the Trump campaign have been tested in court, and they've been promptly thrown out or dismissed as irrelevant. Other insinuations are so unclear and unsupported that they'll never even make it to court. But Carlson wants viewers to believe they're important anyway, even though he knows these kinds of questions will never be fully answered, and he's happy to raise them and spread doubt about the election regardless. It's all fine with him, though, because he's doesn't want the country to be united. He wants it to be about us and them.

Watch the clip below:

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Powell

sidney Katherine Powell (born 1955)[1] is an American attorney and former federal prosecutor.

After graduating from law school in 1978, Powell began her career as an Assistant District Attorney in the Western District of Texas, among other jurisdictions. She prosecuted Jimmy Chagra in 1979.[2] In 1988, she ceased working as a prosecutor and, in 1993, she established her own firm. She has represented numerous clients, especially in appellate matters.[2] She represented executives in the Enron scandal,[3] and in 2019, defended General Michael Flynn in United States v. Flynn.[4] Powell has made claims of a "deep state" plot to frame Flynn,[4][5] and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

In the weeks after the 2020 United States presidential election, Powell joined President Donald Trump's legal team[6] to challenge president-elect Joe Biden's victory, by the use of lawsuits in several states over unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud. In her capacity as a member of the legal team, Powell claimed there was a conspiracy to rig the election in favor of Joe Biden involving international Communists, “globalists," George Soros, Hugo Chávez, the Clinton Foundation, and thousands of Democratic and Republican officials, including Trump ally and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. [7][8][9][10]

Several sources, including Politico and The New York Times, have described Powell's unsubstantiated claims about election interference as promulgation of conspiracy theories.[4][10][11][12][13] After several interviews in which Powell continued to promote conspiracy theories, on November 22 the president's legal team distanced itself, stating she was "practicing law on her own" and would be no longer on the team.[14][15] According to The Washington Post, the campaign cut ties with Powell partially because Trump disliked the coverage she was receiving from Fox News.[16] [TUCK DEFEND, SHE GOT MAD THEM 180?]

Early life

2 Legal career

2.1 Notable cases

2.1.1 Assassination of Judge John H. Wood

2.1.2 Enron scandal

2.1.3 Michael Flynn

2.1.4 2020 presidential election

3 Writing

4 Film and media career

5 QAnon

6 Personal life

7 References

8 External links

Early life

Sidney Katherine Powell was born into a working-class family in Durham, North Carolina, grew up in the city of Raleigh,[17] and knew from an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer. She graduated from Needham Broughton High School and went on to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, funding her education with student loans.[4] At the age of 19, she was accepted into the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she graduated in 1978 with a Juris Doctor degree.[18] She began her legal career as the youngest Assistant United States Attorney in the US.[19]

Legal career

From 1978 through 1988, Powell served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas and the Eastern District of Virginia, where she handled civil and criminal trial work. She was appointed Appellate Section Chief for the Western District of Texas and then the Northern District of Texas.[2]

In 1993, Powell established her own law firm in Dallas, Texas, aimed mostly at federal appellate practice, including in the United States Supreme Court.[2] Her firm has also handled a number of high-profile class action suits. She has served as lead counsel in more than 500 appeals in the Fifth Circuit courts, resulting in more than 18 published opinions and a reversal rate of approximately 70%.[2]

Powell also writes and teaches in the area of federal appellate law practice, including work for the Attorney General’s Advocacy Institute of the United States Department of Justice.[19] She is a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, where she served as president from 2001 to 2002.[2]

Notable cases

Assassination of Judge John H. Wood

In 1979, Powell was one of the prosecutors in the trial of Jimmy Chagra, in which he was convicted of continuing criminal violations.[2] Chagra was an American drug trafficker implicated in the May 1979 assassination of United States District Judge John H. Wood Jr. in San Antonio, Texas. In the 1970s, Chagra was one of the biggest drug traffickers operating out of Las Vegas and El Paso, and according to one observer, Chagra was "the undisputed marijuana kingpin of the Western world."[20] Carl Pierce, a co-worker who headed up the drug trafficking unit, described it as a period when drug traffickers were "trying to kill our witnesses, assassinate our prosecutors." According to Pierce, there were times when the government attorneys had to wear bulletproof vests and be escorted by federal marshals.[4] Chagra was released from prison in Atlanta, Georgia for health reasons on December 9, 2003, and reportedly placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. He died of cancer on July 25, 2008.[21]

Enron scandal

Powell spent nearly a decade in the 2000s representing firms and executives involved in the Enron scandal, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and former Merrill Lynch executive Jim Brown.[3] Enron's financial misconduct was exposed in October 2001, leading to the bankruptcy of Enron and the de facto dissolution of Arthur Andersen, one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world, because of audit failures.[22] Chief executives of Enron were indicted for a variety of charges and some were later convicted and sentenced to prison.

Arthur Andersen was found guilty of illegally destroying relevant documents, which voided its license to audit public companies and effectively closed the firm. The ruling was overturned at the U.S. Supreme Court, but Arthur Andersen had already ceased operating. As a result of the scandal, new regulations and legislation were enacted to expand the accuracy of financial reporting for public companies.[23] Some of the convictions were overturned on appeal due to legal reasons including prosecutorial misconduct. After this experience, Powell went on to write extensively about prosecutorial abuses.[4]

Michael Flynn

In 2019, Powell publicly called on General Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty pleas for making false statements to the FBI, and in June 2019 Flynn released his law firm of Covington & Burling and retained Powell to serve as his lead attorney.[24] Powell's appearances on Fox News to discuss the Flynn case were noticed by President Donald Trump, and the two spoke on several occasions. On the same day it was disclosed Flynn had fired his attorneys, Powell sent a letter[25] to Attorney General William Barr requesting the "utmost confidentiality" and argued that Flynn's prosecution was due to "corruption of our beloved government institutions for what appears to be political purposes." Among other things, she requested that Barr appoint an outsider to investigate. Six months later, Barr appointed Jeffrey Jensen to conduct such an investigation.[26]

In May 2020, the Justice Department filed a motion with presiding federal judge Emmett Sullivan to drop Flynn's prosecution.[27] Sullivan did not immediately grant the motion, and Powell later requested a writ of mandamus from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to compel Sullivan to drop the case. After an initial ruling in favor of Powell by a three-judge panel of the Court, the case was appealed to the full Court, which denied the mandamus request in an 8–2 ruling, returning the case to Sullivan's court.[28]

Powell had argued to the full Court that Sullivan's role was "ministerial," giving him no discretion but to comply with the Justice Department motion, to which judge Thomas Griffith replied, "It's not ministerial and you know it's not. So it's not ministerial, so that means that the judge has to do some thinking about it, right?"[29] Other judges on the Court also pushed back on Powell's characterization of a federal judge's role.[30] Soon after taking the Flynn case, Powell had accused the Justice Department of prosecutorial misconduct against Flynn; in a footnote to a June 2020 court brief, the department described Powell's allegations as "unfounded and provide no basis for impugning the prosecutors from the D.C. United States Attorney's Office."[4][31]

Powell has been described as a proponent of conspiracy theories about Flynn, namely that he had been framed by members of the "deep state" who were trying to eject President Donald Trump from office.[4][5]

2020 presidential election

Main articles: Lawsuits related to the 2020 United States presidential election and 2020 United States presidential election § Controversies

Days before the 2020 presidential election, Dennis Montgomery, a software designer with a history of making dubious claims, asserted that a government supercomputer program would be used to switch votes from Trump to Biden on voting machines. Powell promoted the conspiracy theory on Lou Dobbs Tonight on November 6,[32][33] and again two days later on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business program, claiming to have "evidence that that is exactly what happened."[34]

She also asserted that the CIA ignored warnings about the software, and urged Trump to fire director Gina Haspel.[35] Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), characterized the supercomputer claim as "nonsense" and a "hoax."[36][37] CISA described the 2020 election as "the most secure in American history," with "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised."[36][37] A few days later Trump claimed Krebs's analysis was "highly inaccurate" and Krebs was fired by tweet.[38]

In the wake of the election, President Donald Trump established a legal team to challenge the legitimacy of the results.[39] On November 14, Trump named Rudy Giuliani to lead the team, with Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, Jenna Ellis and Powell as members of this team.[6] The team proceeded to file numerous lawsuits in several states over alleged vote harvesting, illegal votes, machine errors, vote dumps, and late-counted votes.

Holding a press conference on November 19, Giuliani and Powell alleged multiple instances of voter fraud in key states.[40] They cited an affidavit - filed by Russell Ramsland and L. Lin Wood, on behalf of the Trump campaign[41] - as evidence of manipulated results. In its comparison of votes cast in Michigan, against total voters registered, Giuliani quoted that they found over-voting of up to "300 percent".[40] However, the affidavit's conclusion was erroneous; it had compared the Michigan vote tallies against population data from Minnesota (whose respective abbreviations are MI and MN, a possible source of the error).[41][42] When the The Washington Post independently checked the numbers, no voter discrepancies were found.[40] When questioned the next day, Wood described this as "a simple mistake" and said the affidavit "will be corrected if it hasn’t been already".[41]

After Giuliani's segment ended, Powell took the lectern and alleged without evidence that an international Communist plot had been engineered by Venezuela, Cuba, China, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), George Soros, and the Clinton Foundation, to rig the 2020 election.[9][43] She also alleged that Dominion Voting Systems "can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden."[44]

The source for many of these claims appeared to be far right news organization One America News Network (OANN).[9] She also repeated a conspiracy theory[45] spread by Congressman Louis Gohmert, OANN and others:[46] that accurate voting results had been transmitted to the German office of the Spanish electronic voting firm Scytl, where they were tabulated to reveal a landslide victory for Trump, after which a company server was supposedly seized in a raid by the United States Army.[9] The US Army and Scytl refuted these claims:[47] Scytl has not had any offices in Germany since September 2019, and they do not tabulate US votes.[48][49]

Later that evening on the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said he had invited Powell onto the show to provide proof of her allegations. According to Carlson, after repeated requests, Powell became angry and said to "stop contacting her". Carlson's team contacted other figures in the Trump campaign, who said that Powell had given them no evidence for her allegations.[50]

In a subsequent interview with Newsmax on November 21,[51] Powell accused Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, of being “in on the Dominion scam” and suggested financial impropriety.[52] She also claimed the Democratic Party had used rigged Dominion machines to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, and that Sanders learned of this but “sold out.”[53] Powell suggested that candidates "paid to have the system rigged to work for them."[54] On the basis of these claims, Powell called for Republican-controlled state legislatures in swing states to disregard the election results and appoint a slate of loyal electors who would vote to re-elect President Trump,[55] based on authority supposedly resting in Article Two of the Constitution.[56]

On November 22, 2020, Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis issued a statement that Powell is "practicing law on her own" and is not (or is no longer) a part of the Trump legal team.[57][58][59][60][61] According to The Washington Post, the Trump campaign cut ties with Powell because she was seen as harming Trump's broader legal efforts, and that President Trump disliked the coverage she received from Tucker Carlson Tonight.[16]

Writing

Powell has written opinion pieces for The New York Observer, The Daily Caller, The Hill, Fox News, and other news outlets.[62][63] She has published two books:

Powell, Sidney K. (May 1, 2014). Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. Brown Books. ISBN 978-1-61254-149-5. OCLC 870288205.[64]

Powell, Sidney K.; Silverglate, Harvey A. (February 18, 2020). Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse. Encounter Books. ISBN 978-1-59403-803-7. OCLC 1104857327.

In addition, Powell has published several journal articles on law practice. Examples include:

Powell, Sidney (1988). "Federal Jurisdiction in Criminal Appeals—Appealable Orders in the Fifth Circuit". Texas Tech Law Review. 19 (3): 1003–1028.

Powell, Sidney (1990). "Federal Appeals in the Fifth Circuit: Tips for the Texas Practitioner". Baylor Law Review. 42 (1): 97–140.

Gabriel, Henry D; Powell, Sidney (1994). Federal Appellate Practice Guide: Fifth Circuit. Rochester, New York: Lawyers Cooperative Publishing. OCLC 30772185.

Film and media career

Powell has made numerous media appearances both as a political and legal commentator and as a published writer on the subject of law. She has appeared on television shows including Lou Dobbs Tonight, Hannity, Shannon Bream's show, Newsmax TV, and One America News, as well as on various radio shows.[65]

Powell served as producer on the drama Decoding Annie Parker (2013), providing guidance to help bring the film to a commercial release. The film tells the story of Annie Parker[66] and the discovery of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene. The film went on to raise millions of dollars for cancer charities.[67]

Powell appeared in the cast of The Plot Against the President (2020), a documentary film directed by Amanda Milius and based on the book of the same title by journalist Lee Smith.[68] The film examines circumstances leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election, the subsequent transition of power, and events that transpired after President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

QAnon

Powell has been described by some sources as a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory,[11][69] a far-right conspiracy theory which alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal.[70] Despite having retweeted major QAnon accounts and catchphrases and appearing on QAnon shows on YouTube,[69] Powell has denied knowledge of QAnon.[4]

Personal life

Powell has a son from a former marriage. She has participated in volunteer work for women's shelters and other charities.[4]

References

....

---

angling for pardon? // stone?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mike-flynns-lawyer-just-admitted-to-a-federal-judge-shes-discussed-his-case-with-trump/

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-flynn/fox-news-laid-groundwork-department-justices-decision-drop-charges-against-michael

The Department of Justice dropped its charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn on Thursday, following a prime-time campaign by Fox News to lay the groundwork for Flynn’s exoneration. According to court documents filed in D.C. District Court, the Justice Department did not consider the continued prosecution of Flynn to “serve the interests of justice.”

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and then withdrew his guilty plea in January 2020. The motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn claimed that recently uncovered documents from the FBI indicated Flynn’s interview was never “material” to the Mueller investigation. The filing “was signed only by the politically appointed U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea” and not by any career prosecutors. Moments before the motion was filed, the top prosecutor in the Flynn case abruptly withdrew from it without explanation.

Flynn’s legal team claimed that the new documents turned over to them from the Department of Justice demonstrated that the FBI was trying to trap Flynn in the 2017 interview. Fox News has been echoing this talking point from Flynn’s legal team throughout the past month and showcasing his lawyer Sidney Powell regularly on the network.

In reality, as Marcy Wheeler reviews at length, none of this evidence was new. She concludes that “by making a claim there’s new information when DOJ had the information all the time but Mike Flynn did not” that “DOJ has become the defense attorney for a sworn felon.” That would make Fox News co-counsel.

Indeed, Flynn lawyer Powell has been a regular on the network, often lambasting the Mueller probe. She appeared on Sean Hannity’s prime-time show on May 5 to argue her client’s case. During that interview, Hannity called for Flynn and all others arrested during Mueller’s investigation to be set “free” and demanded to know if the judge in Flynn’s case would “vacate what is obviously a verdict with exculpatory information withheld.”

In fact, prior to the DOJ’s May 7 announcement, Hannity has hosted Powell on either his Fox News show or his radio program every day since April 27. She's also been on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show frequently, including today.

...no lnx vid]

---

For several years, Fox figures have been clamoring for Michael Flynn to drop his guilty plea for lying to the FBI and stop cooperating with the government, in the hopes that he receives a presidential pardon. They may now be one step closer to that wish. This week, Michael Flynn fired his legal team and replaced them with Sidney Powell.

A former federal prosecutor, Powell has become a Fox News pundit who regularly dabbles in conspiracy theories. She has helped Fox News push thealternate narrative that the Mueller investigation was the result of an illegal anti-Trump conspiracy by the "deep state." Powell has made more than two dozen appearances on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show, and at least nine additional weekday appearances on Fox News since January 2018.

In addition to promoting conspiracy theories about government investigations on Fox, Powell has also promoted a number of conspiracy theories on Twitter. Powell has tweeted posts from Infowars and also retweeted major accounts that promote the QAnon conspiracy theory. She accused the Federal Reserve of deliberately trying to "#crash the market" in a ploy to destroy Trump "and enrich #Soros & themselves. #Soros has done it before."

Powell's own website sells T-shirts describing Mueller and six other key law enforcement figures in the case as “Creeps on a Mission.” The shirt is billed as “a great gift for those who know the Mueller investigation of the President is its own crime.” Naturally, Trump enthusiastically applauded Flynn's decision to hire the Fox commentator.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ted_Stevens

Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens, a Republican, who previously represented the state of Alaska in the United States Senate between 1968 and his loss of the seat following his criminal conviction for corruption in 2008, was killed in a plane crash on August 10, 2010. Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Anchorage is named after him. In December 1978, Stevens survived the crash of a Lear jet at the airport, which killed five people, including his first wife, Ann.

He was the longest-serving Republican member of the Senate. Stevens was the President pro tempore of the Senate, the third in the line of succession for the Presidency, following the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, until 2007 when the Democratic Party took back the majority in Congress, and he then served as the "ranking member" of the Senate.

dallas vanity press brown bros //crypto mirror ntbcw little brown

fedsoc bs

Powell has been lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals resulting in more than 180 published decisions. She represents clients in complex federal appeals and consults in complex federal litigation in civil and selective criminal cases. Her representative cases traverse the following areas of substantive law: real estate, employment law, asbestos injuries (the $3 billion class action against Fiberboard), health care and medical malpractice, environmental issues, oil and gas, contract claims, patent, trademark, copyright, and other civil actions. She has also represented judges and lawyers on ethical issues and sanctions. For most of the last decade, she has represented one of the Merrill Lynch executives in the Enron “Nigerian Barge” litigation, in which she uncovered evidence that the Enron Task Force Prosecutors “plainly suppressed” exculpatory evidence that was favorable to the defense.

Ms. Powell is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers for which she served in 2001-2002 as President. She has long been a member of the Board of Governors of the Fifth Circuit Bar Association for which she also served as President and as Editor of the Fifth Circuit Reporter for 20 years.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina, where she also attended law school, Ms. Powell was the youngest Assistant United States Attorney in the country when she began with the United States Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Texas in 1978. She later chaired its Appellate Section. Thereafter, she began an Appellate Section for the Northern District of Texas. She also served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where she obtained the conviction of a local attorney for bankruptcy fraud.

Ms. Powell has written and taught extensively in the area of federal appellate practice, including for the Attorney General’s Advocacy Institute of the United States Department of Justice. Her most recent publication is the Chapter Evaluating an Appeal–Strategic Thinking Before and During The Appeal in the book Appellate Practice in Federal and State Courts (Law Journal Press, September 2011).

She is currently working on a book entitled Licensed To Lie, which will reveal to the layman and the broader Bar the insidious prosecutorial misconduct infecting the government’s cases against Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and the Merrill Lynch executives in the Enron litigation, including the dramatic distinctions in the responses to the two cases by both the judiciary and the Department of Justice.

https://www.amazon.com/Licensed-Lie-Exposing-Corruption-Department/dp/1612541496

a tragic suicide, a likely murder, wrongful imprisonment, and gripping courtroom scenes draw readers into this compelling story giving them a frightening perspective on justice corrupted and who should be accountable when evidence is withheld. Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is the true story of the strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power. Its scope reaches from the US Department of Justice to the US Senate, the FBI, and the White House. This true story is a scathing attack on corrupt prosecutors, the judges who turned a blind eye to these injustices, and the president who has promoted them to powerful political positions.

From the Foreword

This book should serve as the beginning of a serious conversation about whether our criminal justice system continues to live up to its vaunted reputation. As citizens of a free society, we all have an important stake in making sure that it does.

-- Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

...

Editorial Reviews

Review

''Licensed to Lie reads like a cross between investigative journalism and courtroom drama. The takeaway is that both Bushies and Obamaites should be very afraid: over the last few years, a coterie of vicious and unethical prosecutors who are unfit to practice law has been harbored within and enabled by the now ironically named Department of Justice.'' --William Hodes, Professor of Law Emeritus, Indiana University, and coauthor, The Law of Lawyering

''When you ve finished reading this fast-paced thriller, you will want to stand up and applaud Powell's courage in daring to shine light into the darkest recesses of America's justice system. The only ax Powell grinds here is Truth.'' --Patricia Falvey, author of The Yellow House and The Linen Queen, and former Managing Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP

''Last year four government officials demonstrably lied under oath, and nothing has been done to them--two IRS officials, the Attorney General, and James Clapper-which caused Ed Snowden to release the fact that the US is spying on its citizens and in violation of the 4th amendment. That our government is corrupt is the only conclusion. This book helps the people understand the nature of this corruption-and how it is possible for federal prosecutors to indict and convict the innocent rather than the guilty.'' --Victor Sperandeo, CEO and author, Trader Vic: Methods of a Wall Street Master

''This book is a testament to the human will to struggle against overwhelming odds to right a wrong and a cautionary tale to all-that true justice doesn't just exist as an abstraction apart from us. True justice is us, making it real through our own actions and our own vigilance against the powerful who cavalierly threaten to take it away.'' --Michael Adams, PhD, University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English Associate Director, James A. Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas--Austinor

''I have covered hundreds of court cases over the years and have witnessed far too often the kind of duplicity and governmental heavy-handedness Ms. Powell describes in her well-written book, Licensed to Lie.'' --Hugh Aynesworth, journalist, historian, four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, author, November 22, 1963: Witness to History

Review

KIRKUS REVIEW

A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.

Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs.

In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.

The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.