sidney powell e s q

repped enron execs

no merri

NOTE BACK IN CRM 7 25 ON TRAITOR BS

FULTON FUCKERY

see stop the steal, rudy

FUNDED CYBERNINJA FRAUDIT UNDER PRESSURE? TRUMP SAVE AM PAC BUT DENIED

see disbar pjt 65

TWO bak = kraken/ elite strike force

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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.

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MMA

John Solomon hyped Trump prosecutor Joe diGenova's work just days before diGenova resigned

Solomon a day before diGenova resigned: “Joe diGenova, the FBI, Kash Patel, Todd Blanche are getting their horses together now. For the first time, there is a buzzing accountability machine.”

Written by Sophie Lawton

Published 09/11/26

A day prior to Joe diGenova’s abrupt resignation from his position running Trump's “Grand Conspiracy” probe, diGenova ally and “special government employee” John Solomon — whose task force just declassified documents related to the probe, including notes from the FBI's interview of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — was seemingly caught flat-footed, boasting of diGenova's role as part of a “buzzing accountability machine.”

On September 10, diGenova resigned from his Justice Department appointment running Trump’s “Grand Conspiracy” probe into Democratic political figures, law enforcement officials, and other perceived enemies of the Trump administration.

During the September 9 episode of his program Just the News No Noise, Solomon interviewed Flynn, who also praised diGenova, calling him “absolutely the right person” for the probe and a “pit bull-type prosecutor.” Solomon also claimed that the latest documents release was “about providing evidence to Joe diGenova and the prosecutors of the U.S. attorney's office in Miami and Fort Pierce.”

Solomon also appeared on Steve Bannon's War Room on September 8 ahead of the documents’ release, claiming that “there are some major cooperating witnesses that have now flipped to the state to working with Joe diGenova,” which will “accelerate the ability to bring accountability.”

Following diGenova's resignation, Solomon took to social media to reassure followers that the “Grand Conspiracy” investigation is still ongoing and that prosecutors are “continuing the work Joe started with a roadmap that includes subpoenas and some cooperating witnesses.” Meanwhile, Ryan Reilly reported for NBC that “a person familiar with the investigation” said that “Justice Department leaders had lost confidence in diGenova because they believed he was unfocused, moving too slowly and pursuing a path unlikely to succeed.”

Here is Solomon and Flynn's exchange on September 9:

Video

Citation

From the September 9, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's Just the News No Noise

JOHN SOLOMON (HOST): It isn't just about clearing Mike Flynn's name, though that's very important. It's also about providing evidence to Joe diGenova and the prosecutors of the U.S. attorney's office in Miami and Fort Pierce. They are now beginning to bring grand jury witnesses to begin securing indictments against those who weaponized the government from the summer of 2016 to January of ’25. Everything from the FBI and Russia collusion all the way to Jack Smith.

In that process, they have secured cooperation for one or two really significant FBI personnel. That's a really important thing. When someone in the middle of the drama says, we lied, we made it up, we didn't do that, that wasn't the truth, we set it up, it changes the ability of prosecutors to make a case, particularly in a partisan divide like we are in America.

Joe diGenova, the FBI, Kash Patel, Todd Blanche are getting their horses together now. For the first time, there is a buzzing accountability machine. And this — these documents today are already in the hands of prosecutors. They have it down in Florida. It would be called an overt act. It happened eight, nine years ago, which means it can't charge it itself.

…

MICHAEL FLYNN (GUEST): I just want to say, I appreciate what the Government Transparency Task Force is doing. You are working to get to the bottom of it, and I think that there's going to be more to come. In fact, I know there's going to be more to come.

I think that Joe diGenova is absolutely the right person at Fort Pierce and with this grand jury. I mean, Joe — and for people to know, I mean, Joe was one of the lawyers that I was consulting after I had gotten rid of my original lawyers and working closely with Sidney [Powell] to help us out. So, Joe is the right man to take this on. He is a pit bull-type prosecutor anyway, and he has the big strategic picture that I think that the country needs to have in a prosecutor that's going to dig and expose the truth. And that's what you guys did with this Transparency Task Force breaking story that you broke.

...

We have to bring these people to account. We have to — and I do believe that Joe diGenova is the right guy to build these various conspiracy cases to show that these people were undermining, not only guys like me, but they were undermining a duly elected president of the United States. They were undermining the Constitution of our country, and they and they basically did it, you know, in a very, almost — I would just say a criminal fashion. I mean, it's beyond corruption. It's criminal. And people are going to have to be held accountable.

//

Bartiromo “got fired because she wanted to come forward the last couple of weeks and talk about John Solomon, ... the task force, Pulte, all of it”

09/04/26 12:38 PM EDT

Cleta Mitchell: “We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China.”

08/28/26 1:33 PM EDT

John Solomon is spreading another flimsy election fraud claim

08/07/26

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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

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OMG

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.

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AN 11 25

President Donald Trump went on a Sunday night pardon spree, granting full clemency to at least 77 individuals involved in promoting alternate electors in battleground states after the 2020 election, including former Trump attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to Axios.

Announced by U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, the pardons cover potential federal offenses but exclude Trump himself and do not affect ongoing state prosecutions in Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan.

Others who received pardons include attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, attorney and Acting Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Clark, and attorney and former Trump strategic advisor Boris Epshteyn.

Legal experts describe the action as largely symbolic, given the absence of federal charges against the recipients, but critics excoriated the pardons on social media.

One wrote on X that this move means the country is "waving goodbye to democracy again."

Chef Courtney Brown wrote that"AmeriKKKa has lost its way! This is an absolute disgrace!"

"The fact that NO ONE will be held to account for conspiring to illegally keep Trump in office is one of the most distressing and infuriating consequences of the 2024 election," posted another critic on X.

An x user by the name of America First Democrat posted, "So basically no one who participated in efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election can be held accountable? The lawlessness of this administration knows no bounds."

Retired Naval reservist and self-described "JFK Libertarian" David Rouse said, "This only reflects #Trump's total disdain for the #Constitution he swore to "protect, preserve, and defend". Pardoning his accomplices in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 fair election that he lost, makes a mockery of the #Rule_of_Law and endangers us all!"

Tech CEO Simon St-Onge wrote, "When people see injustices, criminals pardoned because they know the leader, they lose faith in the justice system, and take their own defence in to their own hands. That’s a premise for barbarism and violence, and war amongst citizens. We should never tolerate injustice, I pity America, the land of the free is no longer so. It will take years, to make it great again. The USA is alone now, with a few other countries lead by autocratic leaders, demented narcissistic men, like Trump and Putin, devoted to themselves, and themselves alone."

"It's about the political whims of Donald Trump," said MSNBC's justice and intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian.

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SEE TRAITOR BS 7 25

NY Times reported John Durham found the “Clinton Plan” emails were likely created by Russian spies. Right-wing media are running with them as legitimate.

Figures have suggested Clinton should be “behind bars,” argued the debunked scandal will “make Watergate look like a jaywalking ticket,” and likened it to a “soft coup attempt” and “treason”

Written by Noah Dowe, Pete Tsipis & Lis Power

:{Published 08/01/25

The right-wing media ecosystem has exploded with false claims about a newly-declassified annex to special counsel John Durham’s report on Russian collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign. Right-wing media are claiming that the annex provides evidence of a “plot” by the Clinton campaign to undermine then-candidate Donald Trump. However, the newly-declassified assessment found that the documents in question were “not credible” and “likely made by Russian spies.”

Conservative media figures have ignored this assessment, instead calling for Hillary Clinton to be put “behind bars” for coordinating a “soft coup attempt.” And although they previously heralded Durham’s efforts, some in right-wing media are now arguing he “failed the American people.”

• ## Despite right-wing media claims, the declassified Durham annex found that the “Clinton Plan” emails “were likely made by Russian spies”

• • On Thursday, the New York Post falsely claimed that newly declassified documents showed Clinton approved a plan to “smear” Trump with the Russia collusion narrative. The Post pointed to what it claimed are “explosive intelligence files declassified” this week, that purportedly show a “plot” in emails between Clinton’s campaign and allies to smear Trump with Russian collusion narratives. The evidence allegedly comes from Durham’s probe. New York Post, [7/31/25]

• • In reality, the declassified documents show the opposite: the report’s conclusion was that the supposedly scandalous emails “were likely made by Russian spies.” Reporting from the New York Times noted that Durham’s assessment was that “a key piece of supposed evidence for the claim that Mrs. Clinton approved a plan to tie Mr. Trump to Russia is not credible” and was “probably manufactured.” Furthermore, Durham’s assessment was that the purported emails “were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks.” New York Times, [7/31/25]

• • The disclosure — which the Times called “the latest in a series of disclosures about the Russia inquiry, as the Trump team seeks to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files” — follows weeks of outrage from some right-wing media over the administration’s handling of Epstein’s case. While some outlets have aided the administration’s attempt to deflect attention from Epstein, others, especially the hosts of online shows, have called the disclosures a “distraction” meant to make supporters “stop paying attention to Epstein.” Media Matters, [7/9/25, 7/23/25, 7/28/25, 7/30/25; New York Times, 7/31/25]

• ## Right-wing media are pushing debunked claims about the declassified annex

• • Right-wing podcast host Megyn Kelly argued “Hillary Clinton should be behind bars, and so should the people who work for her who did this.” Referring to the alleged bombshell news, Kelly continued, “She wanted to distract from her email scandal. She cooked up a plan to accuse Trump of being a Russian agent in order to distract from her own legitimate scandal.” SiriusXM, *The Megyn Kelly Show*, [7/31/25]

• • Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson suggested the annex “confirms Hillary Clinton personally approved the plot to frame Donald Trump with fake Russia collusion—despite intel proving it was false.” He added, “This was a coordinated criminal cover-up to protect Clinton and take down Trump. Christopher Wray must be investigated immediately.” Twitter/X, [7/31/25]

• • Johnson: “It would hurt the feelings of this audience if nobody did anything on this.”YouTube, *The Benny Show*, [8/1/25]

• • Fox contributor Byron York said the documents prove the “Clinton campaign played an important role in creating the whole Trump-Russia narrative” and suggested, “All those Republicans who think Soros is a big villain, well, they’ll be confirmed in this one.” Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [7/31/25]

• • Fox host Jesse Watters claimed “George Soros’ people worked with the DNC to roll out the hoax and the FBI was in on it the whole time.”Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/31/25]
• 

Citation

Fox News

• • Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo claimed that the documents point “right, straight to Hillary Clinton as she was the key voice signing off on the entire Russiagate scheme” and pushed for punishment, saying, “The statute of limitations does not apply when it comes to conspiracies.” Fox Business Network, *Mornings with Maria*, [8/1/25]
• 

Citation

Fox Business

• • New York Post: “Read the documents that prove Hillary Clinton OK’d plan to ‘smear’ Trump with Russia collusion.”New York Post, [7/31/25]

• • Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said the documents “further implicate Barack Obama as deeply embedded in the hoax.”Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/31/25]

• • OnThe Will Cain Show, OutKick’s Buck Sexton said the annex proved a “soft coup attempt.”Cain replied, “I don't think there's any words that would rise to the level of hyperbole. You couldn’t outdo yourself if you said soft coup or treason.” Fox News, *The Will Cain Show*, [7/31/25]

• • Fox host Sean Hannity: “I've been saying that this is going to make Watergate look like a jaywalking ticket in the end, and I believe this smoking gun out today proves that comment to be correct.” On his radio show, Hannity continued, “What I believe we are looking at is probably what Chuck Grassley classified as the biggest political scandal in American history.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [7/31/25]

• • National Review news writer James Lynch claimed Clinton “approved a plan devised by her campaign to falsely smear Donald Trump with claims of Russian collusion.” National Review, [7/31/25]

• • Gateway Pundit: “Declassified Durham Appendix Shows Hillary Clinton PERSONALLY Approved Trump-Russia Hoax.” The Gateway Pundit, [7/31/25]

• • The Federalist wrote, “Hillary Clinton approved the Russia collusion hoax but then lied to the FBI about her knowledge of the plot.”The Federalist, [7/31/25]

• • Washington Examiner: “Declassified Durham annex reveals FBI ignored evidence of a Clinton plan to create Russia hoax.”The Washington Examiner, [7/31/25]

• • Former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer claimed, “The Clinton campaign in coordination with Team Soros weaponized US government law and intel agencies to manufacture a lie and media was complicit.” Twitter/X, [8/1/25]

• • Fox & Friendsco-host Brian Kilmeade said the documents “appear to show that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Trump in that summer prior to the RNC with the Russia collusion documents and brought Vladimir Putin along with her.”Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/1/25]
• 

Citation

Fox News

• • Infowars author Sean Miller claimed the annex revealed “a conspiracy between the Democrat National Committee [DNC], Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Barack Obama administration to formulate a fraudulent claim that then-candidate Donald Trump was a Russian asset.” Infowars, [7/31/25]

• ## Some in right-wing media attacked Durham, arguing he “failed the American people” with his initial report

• • Blaze Media host Liz Wheeler: “How did John Durham miss all this evidence? Did he intentionally ‘miss’ it?” Twitter/X, [7/21/25]

• • Right-wing commentator Bill Mitchell called Durham “the most useless special prosecutor in the history of Earth” and argued he intended to “kick the can down the road until they could install Biden and run this beyond the SOL.” Twitter/X, [7/27/25]

• • Newsmax host Greg Kelly said Durham “failed the American people” because he was loyal to “the swamp.” Newsmax, *Greg Kelly Reports*, [7/31/25]

• • Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell said “Durham clearly did not do justice” to the case. Twitter/X, [7/31/25]

//

1. ### Fox News has mentioned Obama over 3 times more than Epstein since Tulsi Gabbard released her report

07/23/25 4:07 PM EDT

2. ### Fox News since Monday: 85 minutes talking about Sydney Sweeney, 3 minutes talking about Epstein

07/31/25 2:12 PM EDT

3. ### Fox News has aired 168 segments about Tulsi Gabbard's revisionist claims regarding Russia, Obama, and the 2016 election

07/30/25

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MMA

Eight damning new revelations about Fox’s 2020 election lies from the Smartmatic filings

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/21/25

Newly available filings in the election technology company Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News provide fresh insights into the network’s egregious and irresponsible promotion of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies — four and a half years after Fox’s propaganda helped trigger a violent insurrection in which enraged Trumpists sacked the U.S. Capitol.

The documents, which support Smartmatic’s motion for summary judgment and were originally filed in April, were first reported by The Washington Post after a judicial hearing officer removed many of the redactions.

The documents feature numerous previously unseen text messages and internal communications between Fox hosts, executives, producers, and other employees as Trump attempted to use false claims about the 2020 election to subvert the results of the election he lost and remain in power.

Fox’s internal machinations during this period were previously made public through the lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, another election technology company which accused the network of defamation over its post-election coverage. Fox ultimately settled that suit as it went to trial in 2023 for a record $787.5 million.

The contours of Smartmatic’s story are broadly similar to — if no less damning than — the one Dominion told: Fox hosts and executives knew that Trump lost the 2020 election and that the claims of widespread election fraud he and his supporters pushed were false, but they nonetheless pivoted in the days following the election to promote such conspiracy theories -– including falsehoods about the company — because they were taking heat from viewers overcalling Arizona for Joe Biden and feared losing market share to more aggressive competitors like Newsmax

But the Smartmatic filings provide new evidence that helps flesh out the tale of Fox’s cowardice and corruption.

Maria Bartiromo leveraged her status at Fox to try to overturn the election: “I am news”

Maria Bartiromo was once a respected business reporter, but reinvented herself as a hardcore MAGA propagandist during the first Trump administration. But even as she went further and further down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, Bartiromo has retained her position on Fox’s “news” side, anchoring Fox Business’ three-hour weekday program Mornings with Maria as well as the weekend show Sunday Morning Futures,which is simulcast on Fox News.

Smartmatic’s filings show Bartiromo leveraged that position as she tried to get Sidney Powell, the MAGA attorney notorious for her far-fetched election claims, to come on her Fox Business show in mid-November 2020. (Bartiromo hosted Powell on her Fox News show earlier that month to push election lies after Powell sent her an email featuring fraud hypotheses from someone who also claimed that “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”)

“Sidney we must keep you out there,” Bartiromo wrote in a November 17, 2020, Signal message.

She contrasted her own role at the network with that of then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, another avid promoter of election fraud lies, and suggested she could provide more helpful treatment, saying, “Dobbs is considered very opinionated. I am news. How about Friday?”

Bartiromo later suggested to Powell that her own goal was to reverse the election results and keep Trump in power. “I am very worried,” she wrote. “Please please please overturn this. Bring the evidence. I know you can.”

Bartiromo still has both of her “news” shows.

• ### Jeanine Pirro explicitly declared her loyalty to Trump and the GOP

The filings show then-Fox host Jeanine Pirro texted Ronna McDaniel, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, the following on September 21, 2020: “I work so hard for the party across the country… I’m the # 1 watched show on all news cable all weekend. I work so hard for the President and the party.”

It’s not precisely news that Pirro viewed her work at the network as an extension of Trump’s campaign — it would in fact have been difficult to come away with a different conclusion after watching her commentary over the years.

Nonetheless, it’s helpful to have that confirmed explicitly in writing.

• ### CEO Suzanne Scott ordered promotion of Fox prime-timers in “news” hours

In mid-November 2020, I reported that Fox appeared to be trying to stave off its competitors by heavily promoting its prime-time “opinion” stars during its purported “news” hours. This campaign included the “news” programs running ads hyping the hosts casting doubt on the election results, airing on-screen bugs promoting their shows, and playing lengthy clips from the “opinion” shows.

The Smartmatic filings reveal that Fox CEO Suzanne Scott apparently ordered this breach of the purported wall the network maintained existed between its “news” and opinion divisions. She emailed top Fox executives on November 9, 2020, demanding that the “news” hours increase its promotion of “opinion” talent like Pirro and the prime-time hosts. She wrote (emphasis added):

On the website – its 345p and I still dont see our opinion folks being promoted on .com – I’m seeing a ton of FOX nation – need that changed asap for the next few weeks. Same for FOX News channel – not seeing nearly enough promotion of primetime talent other than the little bug. And we should get a Pirro promo in as well. This is something I called around about first thing this morning. I’m traveling next four days and expect this to be handled well.

• ### Sean Hannity hosted Rudy Giuliani despite complaining he was “insane”: “I’m not redpill78”

Sean Hannity went from considering Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani an “insane” person he could not conceive of hosting to welcoming him back onto his program in 10 days.

The Fox host functioned as an extension of Trump’s White House and regularly hosted Giuliani to spin Ukraine conspiracy theories that Fox’s research team said were not credible. But the former New York City mayor turned Trump lawyer was apparently going too far for even Hannity in the early days of Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election results.

The filings show Hannity texted associates on November 10, 2020, to say of Giuliani: “He is going nuts. We canceled the guy. Read what’s wrong…. He’s insane.” He told producers the following day that Giuliani is “acting like an insane person. I’m not redpill78.” (According to the Smartmatic filing, “Hannity testified that his reference to ‘redpill78’” — a streaming program associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory — “indicated that he was skeptical” of Giuliani.)

On November 19, 2020, Hannity interviewed Giuliani about his election fraud claims.

Hannity subsequently testified that he had hosted Giuliani because he was a “top newsmaker.”

He retains his Fox prime-time show.

• ### Jeanine Pirro’s path back into the Murdoch network’s good graces

The Dominion filings show that a Fox executive took Pirro off the air the weekend after Election Day, preempting her November 7, 2020, broadcast because he did not “trust her to be responsible.” They also reveal that after Pirro’s show returned the following weekend, her executive producer struggled in vain to prevent her from promoting what he termed her election “conspiracy theories.”

Those filings, however, do not fully explain why Pirro returned to the air in the first place. Smartmatic’s filings fill in that gap: They show that Pirro’s removal sparked a backlash from the MAGA faithful that Fox’s CEO, at Fox prime-time star Sean Hannity’s urging, sought to quell by increasing Pirro’s profile and allowing her to comment without “being censored.”

According to the filings, Hannity told Pirro via text message on November 10, 2020, that he had already reached out to Scott to talk about issues including Pirro’s treatment by the network. When Pirro vented to her colleague, “I’M TIRED OF THE CENSORSHIP AND I’M EMBARRASSED BY HOW THEY CALLED THIS ELECTION,” he further explained that he was “looking for changes” including “to leave u alone.”

Hannity may have already been getting results: Scott’s email the previous day ordering more promotion of Fox’s opinion hosts included Pirro along with the prime-time hosts. A few days later, promos for Pirro’s upcoming show were running and being distributed through right-wing channels.

A flurry of communications about Pirro’s show followed between Scott and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch and between Scott and Fox executive vice president of primetime programming Meade Cooper the day before Pirro’s next broadcast.

“Has anyone spoken to Judge Jeanine before her show this weekend?” Murdoch asked Scott. “It would be good if she corrects the record and clears up the schedule change last week.”

Scott passed the request on to Cooper, who replied that they weren’t planning to make a statement about that and added, “David Clark is reviewing all scripts and working with her on her open. She is very into not being censored but he is working with her closely on it.”

“We don’t want to censor her,” Scott replied.

According to the filing, Scott “had a conversation with Pirro related to coverage of election fraud claims before Pirro’s November 14 show.” The same day, when Hannity texted her to crow about all the promos she was getting, Pirro replied, “I gave 3 demands. New producer. No censorship. 9 pretapes. Suzanne [Scott] promised me NOT overruled by Meade cooper.”

The newly unleashed Pirro used the opportunity the cowed Fox executive team gave her to promote election conspiracy theories that ultimately proved very expensive for Fox.

But it’s hard to get disciplined at Fox for being too supportive of Trump — she was subsequently promoted to the weekday panel show The Five and recently left Fox to become U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

• ### Fox exec: “It’s not the talents call” to cut away from White House press conference pushing election lies

Scott’s handling of Pirro shows how willing Fox was to bend over backward to provide editorial independence to its conspiratorial opinion hosts. But “news-side” personalities at the network who tried to shut down such claims weren’t so lucky.

The Smartmatic filings show top Fox executives expressing dismay after anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from a November 9, 2020, White House press conference featuring press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and told viewers, “She’s charging the other side is welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can't in good countenance continue showing you this."

Tom Lowell, Fox’s vice president and managing editor of news, subsequently told other top Fox executives that anchors like Cavuto should not have the authority to cut away from live events, writing: “Needs to be a chain of command here considering the environment we are in. It’s not the talents call and [t]he EP [Executive Producer] needs approval from you [Mitchell] or Jay [Wallace] in the handling of pressers.”

• ### Fox’s CEO on airing election fraud “witnesses” live: “This is BUSINESS”

When GOP state legislators put on a series of sham election fraud “hearings” in late November and early December 2020, which featured Trump’s legal team and discredited “witnesses” with unverified or debunked claims, Trump praised Fox’s right-wing competitors for airing the hearings live — and criticized Fox for failing to do so.

Scott responded to the pressure by urging her network to start taking such hearings live in a December 2, 2020, email to Lowell. She suggested that the “witness testimony” at the events constituted the “evidence that the news division has been saying doesn’t exist,” and concluded, “This is BUSINESS. RIGHT NOW BAD BUSINESS.” From her email:

The entire impeachment was about one anonymous hearsay whistleblower. We ran the Schiff Nadler show wall to wall. If we wanted to send a strong message to the audience, run the witness testimony. That’s called evidence that the news division has been saying doesn’t exist. Now will the results ever change. Odds are next to zero. This is BUSINESS. RIGHT NOW BAD BUSINESS.

Lowell admitted that the network had featured witness testimony in stories about the hearings without fact-checking them but warned Scott that airing the events live was not a good news practice.

“It is one thing for us to give a platform to the Presidents Attorneys and surrogates, or people like this guy on with Sean [Hannity] right now who signed an affidavit, but we need to be skeptical of some of these supporters who just wander in to make statements about things they think they saw,” he wrote in an email to Scott.

• ### Jesse Watters was told not to push election fraud lies, did it anyway

The Smartmatic filings provide new details about what Fox’s Jesse Watters was told and what he did during this period, while he was the host of the weekend evening program Watters’ World.

Watters was explicitly warned not to promote election fraud claims immediately after the 2020 election, according to the filings.

“On November 6, Watters texted Fox host Pete Hegseth, ‘By the way, did you get the memo about not saying fraud?’” the filing states.

Watters testified that this was a reference to instructions relayed by his producer, Megan Albano. In a text message the same day, Albano told Watters, “If we call the race, you cannot, under any circumstances, cast doubt on” the election because “the powers that be are not having any of it.”

This message did not stick, the filing shows: “On November 21, 2020, an original television broadcast of Watters’ World aired at 8:00 p.m. on Fox News. Dobbs appeared as a guest, discussing a ‘cyber-attack’ using voting machines to steal the 2020 election, and Watters presented an ‘investigation’ into Dominion and Smartmatic.”

The filing further states that in a text to The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld, Watters wrote: “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.”

Fox has since given Watters two promotions — he gained his own weekday evening show in January 2022, and that program took over the network’s “pivotal” 8 p.m. timeslot in June 2023.

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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."

READ MORE:'Unconstitutional!' Trump pitches social media fit after Jack Smith's latest filing

"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."

:{:{:{READ MORE:CNN host can’t contain laughter over ex-Trump lawyer's made-up phrase}:

"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 MORE:'They are not backing down': Expert reveals core of Jack Smith's now-unsealed Trump filing

*Read the full Politico article at this link.

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‘They could have killed me’: Trump's 2020 'Seattle whistleblower' finally revealed

Michael Flynn (center) leaves a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., with Geoffrey Flohr aka "Yoda" (front) on Dec. 12, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Jordan GreenandRaw Story June 23, 2024

The scene is straight from a discount bin spy novel.

A black SUV arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to collect Sabrina Keliikoa, a QAnon adherent and supervisor at the facility’s FedEx air freight terminal.

Keliikoa was scared out of her wits.

She did not want to go.

But late on this Friday night in early December 2020, Keliikoa felt as if she had no choice: A retired Michigan State Police officer nicknamed “Yoda” had just warned that her life was in danger.

Keliikoa called in another employee to finish her shift. She entered the vehicle driven by a Marine Corps veteran who had provided security for American diplomats in Iraq. They arrived at a hotel where the driver checked her in. There, Keliikoa stayed for the next two days. A rotating set of “guards” occupied the adjacent room in shifts.

What was possibly happening here?

As Keliikoa would later testify in legal deposition, a video of which Raw Story recently reviewed, a man entered her hotel room and asked her to write an affidavit about election ballots she’d seen — and considered suspicious — at the FedEx facility shortly after the 2020 election.

The man was part of a secretive team of Donald Trump supporters, operating without legal authority but under the leadership of former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that aimed to obtain information they believed could be used in lawsuits to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.

More generally, they hoped to undermine public confidence that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.

Keliikoa described the experience as being “detained” and complained she became a “pawn” of people determined to use her.

“So, I got a phone call that said somebody is coming in from another state with illegal ballots, and they were going to be looking for me, and they were going to try to kill me,” Keliikoa testified. “And I started crying because this turned into the biggest s---show when it shouldn’t have been.”

The escapade showcases the absurd lengths Flynn and his team went to concoct evidence that Trump had the 2020 presidential election “stolen” from him.

These and other baseless allegations of election fraud would instill fury in Trump’s supporters, who by the thousands attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election.

These new revelations about Keliikoa’s ordeal also come at a time when Trump, who is expected to again be the Republican nominee for president, relentlessly claims that the multiple criminal prosecutions against him constitute an effort “to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

Trump’s script is familiar and predictable: He similarly made repeated claims well in advance of the 2020 election that the vote would be rigged. It’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will exclaim, as he did then, that he actually won, and that Democrats, communists, the “deep state” and other perceived bogeymen stole it from him.

And if history is a guide, high-profile Trump surrogates can again be expected to again chase phantom evidence and spin wild tales in service of Trump’s I-can’t-lose approach to campaigning.

‘A plane full of ballots’

Until now, Keliikoa — the woman who held the information so feverishly sought by Trump’s supporters following the 2020 election — was known only as “the Seattle whistleblower.”

Keliikoa’s deposition, taken in March, fills in details about the “stop the steal” escapade and are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.

The seeds of Keliikoa's ordeal began germinating in November 2020. An array of high-profile Trump supporters had initiated a frenzied effort to collect affidavits that they hoped would bolster claims of election fraud, which pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell detailed in a series of lawsuits.

The goal: overturn the presidential election results in tightly contested states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, and more generally, to undermine confidence in the election.

With his charisma and the respect he commanded as a retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, quickly emerged as a de facto leader among the group of “stop the steal” operatives surrounding Powell.

The 2020 election was “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” Flynn told far-right broadcaster Brannon Howse during an interview aired on Nov. 28, 2020. “I’m right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”

Flynn had reason to feel emboldened. Three days earlier, then-President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, wiping away his guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn began to speak at rallies and make media appearances on Trump’s behalf.

Flynn’s interview with Howse was his first interview of any sort since receiving Trump’s pardon. The key to exposing the election fraud, Flynn told the podcaster, was channeling the perceived power of hundreds of Trump supporters who believed they witnessed voting fraud or election irregularities.

“I mean hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down in affidavits,” he said at the time.

Four days later, Powell addressed a “Stop the Steal” rally in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. There, she angrily told the crowd that there had been “flagrant election fraud,” and said her team had “evidence” of all manner of ballot fraud, including “a plane full of ballots that came in.”

Enter Staci Burk.

Burk was a former school board member and law school student in Arizona who suffers from a medical condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension.

A man in Burk’s lung condition support group told her about a woman in Seattle who allegedly had information about illegal ballots. That woman was Keliikoa, and Burk’s lung condition buddy arranged to put the two women in touch.

But Burk first attempted to report Keliikoa's information to the FBI and then relayed it to Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend, a leading figure in the pro-Trump stop-the-steal effort. The supposed intel eventually filtered up to Sidney Powell’s legal team.

Burk and Keliikoa kept in touch by phone for the next month, but Keliikoa would later say she wouldn’t characterize their relationship as a friendship. Keliikoa didn’t want to give up her anonymity. Burk felt caught in a bind; she didn’t want to associate her own name with information she didn’t know firsthand, but she was feeling pressure from Townsend and others to persuade Keliikoa to come forward.

“I’ve been working on her coming forward for over a month,” Burk told Carissa Keshel, Powell’s assistant, in a Dec. 1, 2020, text message reviewed by Raw Story. “I almost facilitated a call with you, but she just got to work. She will likely let me do a conference call with anyone. But she’s still afraid to come forward.”

“What can we do to make her feel more comfortable?” Keshel asked Burk. “We can facilitate security.”

Attempting to find a way to obtain the information while preserving Keliikoa’s desired anonymity, Keshel suggested that Keliikoa forward her ballot intel to Burk, who, in turn, could include it in her own legal declaration. (Burk never fulfilled the request to provide such a statement.)

“Ok I just spoke with General Flynn,” Keshel told Burk. “He says if nothing else, if she can get us as much evidence as possible: pictures, facts. If she can send that to us (or you) and if she can even just write an email. Then you can do another declaration to cover for that. I hope that makes sense.”

What happened next demonstrates the effort by Flynn, Powell and a gaggle of pro-Trump activists to obtain affidavits supporting claims of election fraud was carefully orchestrated. It stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Flynn — one of ordinary citizens organically and voluntarily coming forward to tell their stories out of a sense of patriotic duty.

Like Keliikoa, Burk found herself in the middle of conspiratorial talk surrounding supposed illegal ballots transported on planes and various security concerns.

Also — not insignificantly — if Powell's team was going to get access to Keliikoa, they would have to go through Burk, who was the only one who knew Keliikoa’s name or how to get in touch with her.

Flynn’s security team finds the ‘Seattle whistleblower’

On the morning of Dec. 4, 2020, Keshel texted Burk to tell her that she thought they had Burk’s “security issue all ironed out.”

Keshel then texted a photo of a man she identified as “Yoda” and a link to the website for 1st Amendment Praetorian, a volunteer security group linked to Flynn.

“Yoda” was Geoffrey Flohr, the retired Michigan State Police officer.

“Gen Flynn and his brother arranged the security for you, so I trust them,” Keshel told Burk in a text message.

“Yoda” arrived at Burk’s home in Florence, Ariz., later that day.

As previously reported by Raw Story, Burk has said that “Yoda” woke her up in the middle of the night. He told her that he had reliable information that the “Seattle whistleblower” was about to be kidnapped and taken to South Korea. “Yoda” even claimed that Burk’s friend in Seattle could potentially be killed if they didn’t send a security team to protect her, Burk recalled.

Burk called Keliikoa and put her on speaker phone so “Yoda” could speak to her.

Keliikoa would later testify that she was terrified by “Yoda” telling her about threats to her safety because bad actors were supposedly attempting to prevent her from exposing massive election fraud.

Indeed, she was so terrified that she called in another employee to cover for her and complete her work for the shift.

“And then what ended up happening is continuous phone calls back and forth,” Keliikoa testified. “‘Okay, well, somebody’s gonna send somebody to pick you up and take you to a safe place.’ But my name should have never been out there, and that makes me mad.”

At Burk’s insistence, late on that Friday night in early December 2020, “Yoda” provided Burk with a resume and photo of the driver who would pick up Keliikoa at the FedEx facility at the Seattle airport.

At 11:50 p.m., Burk texted the resume to Keliikoa.

Roland Hurrington — described on his resume as a Seattle-area Marine Corps veteran “responsible for the protection of classified material, equipment and U.S. mission personnel” — arrived at the FedEx facility in the black SUV to transport Keliikoa.

Keliikoa testified that Hurrington passed through a security checkpoint at the facility. How he was able to do that remains unclear, but Keliikoa speculated that the security personnel may have let him through based on the assumption that he was a chauffeur.

The pickup took place late at night — roughly 30 minutes after “Yoda” first spoke to her, according to Burk’s account.

“And then I get detained, taken,” Keliikoa recalled in her deposition. “And I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know where I was going. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go with this person, because they could have killed me and threw me on the side of the road, and nobody would have known.”

As it turned out, there never was a plot to kill Keliikoa.

In fact, while the pro-Trump stop-the-stealers involved didn’t know or admit it at the time, their entire ballot fraud enterprise was little more than a house of cards perched on pillars of sand.

And the ground beneath them was about to start quaking.

‘He fabricated everything’

Jim Penrose, a cyber-security expert who had previously worked at the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama, would later acknowledge to Burk that he was the man who showed up at Keliikoa’s hotel room and urged her to write an affidavit. After “Yoda” tracked Keliikoa down, Penrose went to her hotel room to meet her.

Penrose has been identified by the New York Times as being one of three men who joined Flynn and Powell at the South Carolina estate of defamation attorney Lin Wood to “gather and organize election information.” One of the others was Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who was married to Carissa Keshel.

“We had a security team dispatched in Seattle,” Penrose told Burk in a phone call that she recorded on Christmas Day of 2020.

“My worst fear was that the people were moving, you know, like a team of people that might want to, you know, even kidnap your friend in Seattle,” he said. “I didn’t want to let that happen, right, because I thought it was a situation that was dangerous. And we didn’t have enough info at the time to make a better decision.”

The reason why it was necessary for Flohr to wake up Burk involved grave concerns about an Arizona-based security company called Mayhem Solutions Group.

Why would Flohr care so much about this security firm?

Penrose had told Flohr a wild story about two Mayhem Solutions Group employees he believed were planning to fly an airplane to Phoenix to Seattle and potentially “kidnap” Keliikoa and take her to South Korea because of information she might have about election fraud.

The idea that Mayhem Solutions Group would be involved in a plot to harm Sabrina Keliikoa for the purpose of preventing her from exposing anti-Trump election fraud was not only bizarre. It was based on an utter fabrication.

Owner Shawn Wilson and his employee, Kenneth Scott Koch — both far-right operatives — were prone to conspiracy theories. Koch was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers and an anti-COVID lockdown crusader. Koch had presented himself to Burk as a shadowy agent for a rogue government operation involved in illegal ballot trafficking.

More than two weeks before the Flynn security team was dispatched to Seattle, Koch had come to Burk’s house in Arizona to advise her on home security. During a discussion about a similar theory concerning illegal ballots being unloaded from a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Koch told Burk that a group of men shown in a photo standing next to the plane were “my guys.”

Koch, who had organized an anti-lockdown group in Arizona in response to COVID-19 measures, went on to suggest to Burk that pro-Trump amateur sleuths attempting to uncover election fraud might learn about more than they bargained.

“A lot of these people want to be the center,” he said. “They wanna have the information. The problem is the information they don’t want.” For reasons that remain unclear, Penrose would hire an investigative team that included two former FBI agents to interview Koch about his claims, but not until after the madcap mission in Seattle to obtain the affidavit from Keliikoa.

“We interviewed Koch at length, and he said he fabricated everything,” Penrose told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call.

A one-time ‘hostile actor’ in Flynn’s camp

Patently ridiculous is the notion that a lie told by an anti-COVID lockdown advocate in Arizona, about illegal ballots on a plane, would trigger a weeks-long wild-goose that reached the highest levels of then-President Donald Trump’s inner sanctum, up to and including his former national security adviser.

In the end, the lead that sent Flynn’s associates to the Seattle airport under the pretext of a manufactured election crisis in December 2020 turned out to be little more than a photo of ballots and unexplained beeping from a package scanner that raised the suspicions of Keliikoa, a woman whose imagination was set alight by QAnon conspiracy theories.

One would not be faulted for thinking that nothing about this fake ballot-hunting story seems real.

Except for the fact that it is real.

It’s unclear whether Koch and his boss, Shawn Wilson, knew Flynn prior to the 2020 election. Regardless, Koch’s admitted deception hasn’t prevented Wilson from associating with the Flynn camp since that time.

The America Project, a nonprofit co-founded by Flynn, published a video in late 2023 that presented Wilson as someone who “knows more about what is going on at the border than probably anybody in America.” (Not mentioned in the interview was the fact that Wilson’s company had subcontracted with the state of Texas to operate buses transporting migrants to Democratic-run cities.)

As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, Wilson has only become more public and overt about his support for Trump.

The messaging in Wilson’s interview for Flynn’s nonprofit was a classic appeal to authoritarianism by invoking fear — part of Trump’s playbook since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Wilson claimed that a military assault similar to the one launched against Israel by Hamas is imminent at the U.S southern border.

The remedy, Wilson suggested, is to ensure that Trump wins the 2024 election, adding, “I’ll be leading the charge with him right behind him.”

‘There was no goldmine’

Keliikoa confirmed her QAnon association, which inspired her ballot skepticism, during her deposition earlier this year.

She allowed that she sent Burk a link to a three-hour documentary video series Fall of the Cabal, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular recruitment tool for QAnon followers.”

Keliikoa testified that following the November 2020 presidential election, she became suspicious because “we were moving ballots after places were called.” (That wouldn’t have been unusual, considering that the U.S. Postal Service was under a federal court order to locate and deliver mail-in ballots that hadn’t been received by Election Day.) One package that caused a scanner to triple beep — meaning “that it’s not recognized” — also concerned her.

“I believe that something looked wrong,” Keliikoa testified when asked under oath by Burk whether still believes that she witnessed election fraud at the FedEx facility in November 2020.

But Keliikoa admitted that she had nothing of value to share with the ad-hoc security team that sequestered her in a hotel in December 2020.

“They wanted to know if I knew about a plane coming in with these illegal ballots,” Keliikoa recalled. “I told them, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That didn’t come from me. I don’t know what you’re saying.’ They were asking me if I knew about stuff that was going on outside of my workplace. I don’t. I was working. I don’t go out to other places.”

This didn’t stop Powell, who included a “Jane Doe” witness — Keliikoa presumably — on a witness list filed as part of an Arizona ballot lawsuit in support of Trump’s stop-the-steal effort. “Jane Doe,” Powell said at the time, would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona on or about before Nov. 3, 2020.”

No one was more disappointed by Keliikoa’s statement than Penrose.

“I thought when we exfil-ed her and we got her to write her affidavit, I thought we were going to have a goldmine of information,” he later told Burk, using the spy-craft term “exfiltrate” that means to furtively remove someone from a hostile area.

“There was no goldmine,” Penrose continued. “She had a picture of two ballot bags, and I asked her: ‘Would you know if ballots came across the tarmac from that Korea Air flight?’ And the answer was, ‘I just know what comes in this bay door from the USPS and what goes out these bay doors to get loaded on FedEx planes.’ So, the answer was there was no smoking gun per se with respect to that.”

The band breaks up

These days, few of the people involved want to discuss the Seattle ballot brouhaha, now revealed as a tangle of conspiracy theories, creative fantasies and outright lies — all in service to Trump’s goal of retaining presidential power that he was about to lose.

Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Penrose’s lawyer John S. Irving said, “We don’t have anything to add.”

Keliikoa declined to comment to Raw Story for this story.

In an email to Raw Story last week, FedEx Media Relations said, “We do not have any comment at this time.”

Hurrington, the Marine Corps veteran who drove Keliikoa in the SUV, could not be reached for comment. Flohr also could not be reached for comment.

Some of the key players involved have also split up.

Keliikoa said in her deposition that one of the men who met her at the hotel told her it would “be in my best interest not to keep in contact” with Burk because she was a “troublemaker.”

Burk told Raw Story this month that Keliikoa had previously told her that it was Penrose who called her a “troublemaker,” but during her deposition, she claimed that she didn’t remember the names of anyone at the hotel.

“That was clearly projection since he was overseeing and directing a group of heavily armed former law enforcement holding my family and me hostage using fear and deception, who then spent months continuing to use that group to manipulate and malign my character to cover for their bad behavior,” Burk told Raw Story.

Flynn and Powell are both defendants in Burk’s lawsuit, along with former Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend. Burk accuses the defendants of civil rights violations, false imprisonment, assault, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.

In a filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Flynn’s lawyers wrote that Burk’s claims are “baseless” and “frivolous,” while denying that their client sent the security team to her house or that he intended that they hold her “hostage.”

But Flynn’s efforts to distance himself from Burk are belied by the fact that Flohr — aka “Yoda,” the ex-law enforcement volunteer dispatched to her home in Arizona — flanked Flynn as part of his security detail when he spoke at a pro-Trump rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., less than a week after he was at Burk’s house in December 2020.

Flynn is currently promoting a documentary movie that portrays him as a victim of political persecution, and Trump has hinted that he may bring his former national security adviser back to public service — and the taxpayer-funded payroll — should he win election to a second term.

Flynn did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by Raw Story through his lawyers.

Last year, Powell pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties in Georgia.

Burk is suing Koch for fraudulent misrepresentation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress in the Arizona state courts, separate from her federal claim against Flynn, Powell and Townsend. Representing herself, Burk deposed Keliikoa for her lawsuit against Koch. Last week, Burk filed a motion to consolidate her case against Koch with her federal lawsuit against Powell and Flynn.

Under cross-examination by Koch’s lawyer in March, Keliikoa downplayed her role in giving life to the “ballots on planes” theory.

“The only relevance I have is a lot of people got involved and it turned into, like I said before, a big s---show where a lot of people were involved that should have never even been there, that should have never been involved,” she said. “And I got thrown into the mix like everybody else. I was used as a pawn. That’s what makes me mad.”

Knowing what she knows now, Keliikoa said, she would have never agreed to write the affidavit.

“I thought people really wanted to help,” she said in her deposition. “And now I know otherwise.”

“Nobody really cares,” she added, “because everybody has their own objective.”

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Key players

Staci Burk is a former school board member from Arizona who found herself in the middle of a conspiracy theory concerning illegal ballots and airplanes after the 2020 election.

Roland Hurrington is a Marine Corps veteran enlisted to pick up Sabrina Keliikoa at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport FedEx air freight terminal in December 2020.

Geoffrey Flohr, also known as “Yoda,” is a retired Michigan State Police officer who volunteered for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security group in late 2020 and early 2021. He used Staci Burk to track down Sabrina Keliikoa.

Michael Flynn is a retired lieutenant general who served as national security advisor for President Donald Trump before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, and Flynn emerged alongside Sidney Powell as a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Sabrina Keliikoa is a former FedEx supervisor and QAnon adherent who claims to have been detained by a security team linked to Michael Flynn that obtained an affidavit about election ballots observed at her facility shortly around the time of the 2020 election.

Carissa Keshel was a volunteer who served as attorney Sidney Powell’s assistant in late 2020, as Flynn worked with Powell to overturn the 2020 election.

Kenneth Scott Koch is a security contractor formerly employed by Mayhem Solutions Group (now MSG Risk Management & Intelligence) who “fabricated” a story about his involvement in illegal ballot trafficking. Koch organized anti-lockdown protests in Arizona and was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers.

Jim Penrose is a cyber-security expert who worked for the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama. He traveled to Washington state to obtain an affidavit from Sabrina Keliikoa.

Sidney Powell is a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits in Arizona and other states seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on outlandish claims of voting fraud.

Kelly Townsend is a former Arizona state House member who told Staci Burk it was imperative that the “Seattle whistleblower” (now revealed to be Sabrina Keliikoa) come forward and report her suspicions about illegal ballot trafficking after the 2020 election.

Donald Trump is the former president of the United States who is again running for the presidency in 2024. Many of the actions described in this story were done in Trump’s name.

Shawn Wilson is the president of MSG Risk Management & Intelligence (formerly Mayhem Solutions Group). Jim Penrose told Staci Burk that he was initially concerned that Wilson, along with Kenneth Scott Koch, were “hostile actors” intent on harming Sabrina Keliikoa.

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The supreme scheme: How Alito and Thomas are fueling the ongoing Trump coup

Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann May 20, 2024

Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, needs to act.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito was just caught red-handed promoting Trump’s fascist “stop the steal” campaign to overthrow the 2020 election and end democracy in America by flying the upside-down flag at his home. He then went on Fox “News” and lied that it was his wife’s fault and that she did it because schoolchildren at a nearby bus stop saw a neighbor’s “F*ck Trump” yard sign.

In fact, as the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt pointed out this past weekend:

“Mrs. Alito was so alarmed by the degradations and profane, yet protected speech that she went immediately home, and inverted the American flag signaling distress. Here’s the problem: there were no school buses and no school children on them in January 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. Schools in the city were closed for a full year as a result of the pandemic and didn’t re-open until March 2021.”

READ: America in the final stage of a 40-year transition

But Alito’s fingers were apparently far deeper in the January 6th coup attempt than most Americans realize. Trump lawyer Sydney Powell pointed out on Stew Peters’ rightwing YouTube channel that she, Louie Gohmert, and Kari Lake (among others) had filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6th.

It was a legal attempt to try to do what Trump sent a mob to do when the legal strategy failed:

“We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use per the Electoral Act provisions that simply don’t jibe with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Justice Alito was our circuit court justice for that. 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 Count Act.” (emphasis mine)

The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, is the provision under which a contested election for president gets thrown to Congress, as happened in the 1876 election where Democrat Sam Tilden got more electoral and popular votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by the first count.

That election ended up thrown to the House because three states had submitted two sets of Electoral College votes (just like Trump’s are fake electors), so Congress cut a deal to end Reconstruction in exchange for making Hayes president, even though he arguably lost the election.

The lawsuit, filed by Gohmert, Kari Lake, and a handful of Republican operatives, demanded the delay so Republicans on the Supreme Court could decide who’d be president, just like they did in the 2000 election. It called for:

“[R]espondent Vice President of the United States to refrain from invoking the dispute-resolution provisions of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 … for the duration of this Court’s consideration of a timely filed petition for a writ of certiorari. As set forth in the argument below, the ECA violates the Electors’ Clause, the Twelfth Amendment, and the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty.”

If Alito would rule that Pence must defer to Congress per the 12th Amendment, the election of 2020 would be thrown to the House with each state having one vote. There, the presidency would have gone to Trump 27-23, because 27 states’ congressional delegations were then controlled by Republicans.

This was not a brand-new or hastily organized plan. I wrote on March 13, 2020 — eight months before the election — that Republicans I knew in Washington DC had informed me that the Trump folks were planning this exact strategy.

And, sure enough, here it was, with Sam Alito as the inside man.

The invasion of the House chamber by the “stop the steal” traitors was, by the theory of this plan, supposed to delay the counting of electoral college votes at least for a day, to give Alito time to act on the next day, January 7th. He and the courts would then rule that the 12th amendment took precedent to law made since then, Congress would declare Trump the winner, and that would be the end of the discussion.

But Nancy Pelosi got wind of the plot and blew it up by re-convening Congress at 8 pm to count the votes, just two hours after the last of the rioters had left the building and before Alito could rule. As Trump‘s senior attorney Powell told Peters:

“Nancy Pelosi had finagled to file an amicus brief in it — there had been inside goings on in Congress where I believe it was Steve Scalise and [Speaker Kevin] McCarthy [who] kept her from being an actual party; she wanted to work herself inside the case as a party but somehow that didn’t happen — so she got notice when we made our filing because she’d filed an amicus brief. And then everything broke loose and she really speeded up reconvening Congress to get the vote [count] going, or [Bill Barr’s] Justice [Department] might have issued an injunction to stop it all, which is what should have happened.”

In the end, Alito had to turn down the lawsuit on the morning of January 7th because Congress had already voted to certify the election for Biden.

As a result, we’ll never know how close we came to having a single corrupt Supreme Court justice overturn the election, but that flag flying outside his house gives us a pretty good clue as to what he may well have done the morning of January 7th had Pelosi not quickly acted the previous evening.

But Alito’s attempts to overturn our democracy weren’t limited to his support for Trump’s treasonous acts on January 6th. Were it not for Alito, Clarence Thomas, and at least two other Republicans on the Court, Donald Trump would by now have almost certainly been convicted in federal Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom of seditiously trying to overthrow our government.

That federal criminal case was rapidly moving along when Trump’s lawyers made the absurd assertion that he was immune from prosecution for his attempted sedition because of a brand new, previously unheard of, and totally bizarre, made-up doctrine of presidential immunity. Even Richard Nixon didn’t have the cojones to try that one: he simply admitted his guilt and accepted a pardon to avoid going to prison.

It only takes four members of the Court to grant certiorari, allowing the Court to hear a case: four or more Republicans on the Court went out of their way to give Trump the delay he desperately needed. On February 28th, they granted cert and scheduled oral arguments for the very last day of their 2023-2024 session, the week of April 22nd.

To add insult to the injury to our republic, in oral arguments Alito dropped this little bomb on America, turning the case against Trump inside-out and claiming Trump should get a free pass to crime all he wanted:

“I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully, if that candidate is an incumbent?

“All right. Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?

“And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”

Thankfully, at least for the historical record, the Attorney representing Jack Smith’s Justice Department, Michael Dreeben, immediately replied:

“I think it’s exactly the opposite, Justice Alito.”

But Alito, not Dreeben, is on the Court and is the decision-maker. Alito thus gave — and continues to give — Trump a desperately needed further delay by slow-walking his own part of the Court’s decision in the Trump immunity case.

Even if they rule against Trump, which everybody assumed would happen before Alito dropped that rhetorical turd into the proceeding, by giving Donny the delay he wanted, the Republicans on the Court reduced the chance that Trump will ever be held to account for his crimes.

While the Court typically releases their decisions during the summer, they have the option of waiting as long as they want — even until well past the November election date. So, if Trump is elected, he can fire Jack Smith and end the prosecution himself.

And it’s not like Alito and Thomas don’t have a stake in this fight. If Biden is re-elected, by the 2028 election Alito will be 78 and Thomas 80. Insiders have speculated that both would like to retire soon and have their replacements appointed by a Republican president.

And it won’t be the first time a corrupt Republican on the Court threw an election just to insure that body remained in Republican hands. You’ll recall, in 2000 Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband told friends that the reason she voted to stop the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount and make George W. Bush president was simply because she didn’t want Al Gore to choose her replacement.

Arguably the most galling part of this entire pathetic drama is the response of Democrats with subpoena power in the US Senate. Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, for example, issued a miserably weak request for Alito to recuse himself from cases having to do with January 6th, rather than demand the man resign and calling a hearing to make it happen.

We all know what would have happened if the shoe was on the other foot.

A Republican-controlled Senate confronting a Democratic Supreme Court appointee accused of corruption would be holding nationally televised public hearings, dragging that justice and his family and intimates before Congress for a grilling, and demanding both prosecution and impeachment.

That’s exactly what happened in the spring of 1969, when Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee — along with a coordinated effort by President Nixon and Republicans in the media — accused the most liberal member of the Court, Abe Fortas, of being corrupt.

This was Nixon’s chance to flip the balance of the Supreme Court, while conservatives across the nation were still angry about the Brown v Board decision.

Fortas had taken a $20,000 payment from a man he’d defended years earlier; the man hadn’t been able to pay at the time, and finally came up with the money a year or so after LBJ put Fortas on the Court. Not exactly a crime, by any measure.

Fortas was also paid a $15,000 advance for a book he wrote, and Republicans alleged his wife had evidence of tax evasion, although it later turned out that charge was entirely manufactured out of thin air. No crimes here, either.

Nonetheless, the complaints about “Supreme Court corruption” and accompanying threats and pressure from Congressional Republicans against Fortas and his wife — and the firestorm in the media stirred up by Republican commentators — was so intense that Fortas resigned on May 14, 1969 just to get the torture to stop.

Consider that when you think about Alito’s wife hanging the upside-down flag, or her close association with hard-core rightwing causes including her alleged involvement in “Operation Higher Court.” Or Ginni Thomas’ involvement with the January 6th coup attempt itself, texting Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” and “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

Keep in mind that in the 2016 election, the singular thing that caused millions of Republicans — who otherwise considered Trump a fraud, con man, and sexual pervert — to vote for him was that Mitch McConnell was holding Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court open.

As Vox reported:

“One in five [2016] voters told CNN in an exit poll that the Supreme Court was one reason they had cast a ballot. Of the voters who said it was the ‘most important factor’ in their decision, 56 percent voted for Trump. According to the Washington Post, 26 percent of all Trump voters polled said that the Supreme Court was the basis of their decision.”

This fall, the corruption of the Supreme Court by corporate, billionaire, and fossil fuel interests should be at the top of Biden’s re-election campaign: polls show a majority of Americans are horrified by it.

Both Thomas — whose bribe-taking in exchange for his votes on Citizens United and other cases is well documented — and his rightwing buddy Sam Alito must resign or face impeachment. If Republicans could pull it off against a totally innocent Abe Fortas back in the day, Democrats should be able to do it now against two guys whose corruption is obvious to everybody.

Democrats in Congress — particularly on the Senate Judiciary Committee — need to grow a damn spine and make it happen.

NOW READ: The Supreme Court's wealth-driven corruption crisis

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an 10 23

How Trump conspiracy lawyer Sidney Powell got chomped by her own ‘kraken’

:

Jordan Green

andRaw Story

October 22, 2023

MAGA attorney Sidney Powell rocketed to notoriety in 2020 amid her brash claims about election fraud and lawsuits based on esoteric technical jargon purported to support fantastical narratives about foreign interference.

She promised to “release the kraken” in a bid to keep then-President Donald Trump in power.

But Powell’s plea deal on Thursday marks a significant win for prosecutors in the Georgia criminal racketeering case against Trump and his allies — including Powell — for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Her agreement stemming from her involvement in a secret effort to access and copy election files in Coffee County, Ga., increases pressure on her co-defendants, up to and including Trump his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who competed with her for access to electronic voting machines at the center of their alleged conspiracy.

Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties, according to the Washington Post. As part of her deal, she is required to pay a $6,000 fine and $2,700 in restitution to the state of Georgia, turn over documents and testify truthfully against her co-defendants.

While Powell, along with the other 18 co-defendants in the case, was accused of participating in a larger conspiracy that includes a fake electors scheme, attempting to corrupt the U.S. Justice Department and harassment of two Georgia election workers, the specific accusations against Powell were limited to one relatively obscure episode.

In it, Trump’s allies dispatched a team to collect sensitive election data from Dominion Voting Systems machines in an elections office in rural Coffee County only one day after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Fulton County prosecutors alleged that Powell “corruptly conspired” with others, including a former local Republican official who signed on as a Trump elector, a Georgia bail bondsman, and the elections director in Coffee County, of unlawfully accessing “secure voting equipment and voter data,” including “ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information.”

The case against Powell was chiefly built around the claim, to which she has now conceded in her guilty plea.

Powell’s plea reflects a tacit acknowledgement that she contracted and paid SullivanStrickler, an Atlanta-based computer forensics company, to access and copy data from the Coffee County elections office. Her plea marks an about-face from a two-fold defense strategy in which her lawyer argued in a series of court filings last month that no crime had been committed and that if one had been, his client was not involved.

“Members of this conspiracy — of this enterprise — go to Coffee County — and they take things that aren’t theirs,” John Floyd, an expert on Georgia racketeering lawyer who is assisting Fulton County prosecutors, told Judge Scott McAfee during a hearing earlier this month. “They copy ballots. They copy data. They copy other information, and they copy software that belongs to Dominion.”

Floyd rejected an initial argument by Powell’s lawyer that the breach was lawful just because Misty Hampton, the former elections director, extended an invitation to Trump’s allies. Beyond arguing that Powell and her co-defendants defrauded the state by breaching the election equipment, he told McAfee that they also took Dominion Voting Systems’ private property.

Powell is the second defendant to plead guilty in the case, following Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, who pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties, and has agreed to testify against his co-defendants, including Powell.

With her guilty plea on Thursday, the “kraken” Powell promised to release has now come back around to envelop her.

How Powell reached this point is a story steeped in data, drama and betrayals on a most Trump-y team of rivals.

Deflecting blame on to allies and rivals

Powell’s defense, before she pleaded guilty, provides a window into the overlapping efforts by her co-defendants, most notably former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to access the voting machines in order to gather data that could be used to fuel dubious claims of election fraud and ultimately overturn the election.

Emails, phone texts and testimony unearthed in legal discovery for the case, as well as through the investigation by the now-disbanded U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, paint a most complicated picture of allegiance and antagonism among Trump’s closest MAGA loyalists.

They show that while Powell and Giuliani had become bitter rivals by the time of the Coffee County breach, they shared an interest in accessing voting machines, and their respective teams worked with an overlapping pool of lawyers, political operatives and technicians to achieve that objective.

Many of these individuals have not been charged to date, although texts, emails and testimony show they were involved in coordinating data collection and analysis. The materials also show that officials in the Trump White House were apprised of their efforts.

[Rudy Giuliani points to a map as he speaks to the press about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election, inside the Republican National Committee headquarters on Nov. 19, 2020, in Washington, DC. Also pictured, at center, is attorney Sidney Powell. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Evidence against Powell chiefly comprised a contract signed with SullivanStrickler on Dec. 6, 2020, to collect and analyze election data from Dominion voting machines — not in Coffee County, but in Antrim County, Mich., where Trump allies were then scrutinizing election-night irregularities. The Coffee County breach, which took place a month later, was performed under the same agreement, the government alleges.

Phone texts that Powell herself submitted as evidence to the Fulton County, Ga. court, if anything, bolstered the prosecutors’ case against her. They show the chief operating officer of SullivanStrickler instructing an employee two days after the visit to the Coffee County elections office that “we are not uploading/giving access to anyone until we are paid.”

Later, he added, “Let’s keep communications quiet for now. I am now negotiating directly with Sidney.”

The company’s director of data risk and mitigation testified in a separate civil case last year that Powell was the customer and paid the bills for the data collection in Coffee County.

But Powell’s lawyer, Brian Rafferty, seized on the fact that metadata from the contract shows that a man named Jim Penrose was the author of his client’s electronic signature.

“It shows right here in the middle of this document that Jim Penrose signed this,” Rafferty told the court earlier this month. “And if you look at the contract, it’s not even a signature; it’s somebody typed her name. So, when it says, ‘Sidney Powell,’ somebody typed it. And the person who typed it is James Penrose.”

ALSO READ: Trump insiders blindsided by Sidney Powell plea deal

Penrose is a cybersecurity consultant and former National Security Agency official who worked closely with Powell in the period following the 2020 election. Powell acknowledged in her testimony to the House Select January 6 Committee last year that Penrose was part of a group of Trump allies that joined her at Tomotley, defamation lawyer Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, beginning in mid-November 2020 to strategize how to overturn the election.

Penrose could not be reached for comment for this story.

In a court filing, Rafferty also deflected blame onto Giuliani’s legal team. He noted that a different attorney, Preston Haliburton, submitted an open records request to the Coffee County Board of Elections & Registrations. Haliburton is a professional boxer-turned-personal injury lawyer in Atlanta. At the time, he identified himself as “counsel of record for the Giuliani legal team.”

Texts from the encrypted Signal messaging app obtained in discovery show that an invitation letter from Coffee County Election Director Misty Hampton, in response to Haliburton’s request, then made its way to Katherine Friess, a member of the Giuliani legal team. Rafferty noted that yet another lawyer — Charles Bundren — was included in separate Signal chat to discuss the Coffee County election data that took place on the day of the breach.

‘Lives in both worlds’

Testimony by Powell and Giuliani to the House Select January Committee suggests their efforts to access the Dominion voting machines, leading to the Coffee County trip, were significantly more intertwined than either might want to admit.

Giuliani and his co-counsel Jenna Ellis — also a defendant in the Georgia racketeering case — had conspicuously distanced themselves from Powell with a public statement indicating she was working on her own and not representing the Trump campaign on Nov. 22, 2020.

But just two weeks later, Powell’s team was executing a contract with SullivanStrickler to collect and analyze the election data from Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Mich., while Friess, with the Giuliani legal team, flew to the rural community to meet with Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy.

Another significant player close to both Powell and Giuliani — a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron — was also involved in the effort to access the voting machines in Antrim County, according to Giuliani.

Giuliani told the House Select January 6 Committee that “Katherine Friess was in Antrim County with Phil Waldron when that was being done.” Powell also testified to the committee that she believed that Waldron inspected the voting machines in Antrim County.

A retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological influence operations, Waldron now owns a distillery in Texas. Although he has not been charged, his name would come up repeatedly in relation to the various efforts to access voting machines following the 2020 election.

ALSO READ: 'Devastating for Trump': Legal analysts expect others to follow Sidney Powell to plea deal

The committee subpoenaed Waldron after obtaining a 38-page PowerPoint presentation that he circulated among members of Congress, and that committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) called “an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election.” Waldron sued to block the committee, claiming that the information sought by Congress was part of a confidential and proprietary work product under a contract he signed with unnamed attorneys to investigate the 2020 election.

Giuliani testified to the committee that he considered Waldron to be part of his team. Powell also worked with Waldron and told the committee she valued his expertise.

“I know he was looking at logistics for, like, for example, if we could get access to the machines,” Powell testified. “He knew — or my understanding was he knew — people that would know how to analyze them — you know, reputable, unimpeachable, military, nonpartisan, bipartisan, whatever you want to call it, but professionals who would know how to look at whatever it was and make sense of it.”

Waldron is widely believed to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the Fulton County indictment. As one of the overt acts cited in the alleged conspiracy, Powell sent an email to SullivanStrickler Chief Operating Officer Paul Maggio on Dec. 21, 2020, instructing him that she, along with “Individual 6” and others, “were to immediately ‘receive a copy of all data’ obtained by SullivanStrickler LLC from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Michigan.” Numerous media outlets have identified “Individual 6” as Waldron.

Waldron could not be reached by phone or email for comment for this story.

Jim Penrose has described Waldron as the “crossover” between the Powell and Giuliani teams.

“Phil Waldron is the one who lives in both worlds,” Penrose told an Arizona woman named Staci Burk during a phone call on Christmas day in 2020. “Most of the remainder of the team operates independently of one another.”

At the time, the Powell team was cultivating Burk as a potential witness.

Burk is now suing Powell and five other defendants for civil conspiracy, violation of civil rights, false imprisonment and assault, alleging that Powell’s associates attempted to pressure her into signing an affidavit that could be used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to seize voting machines. Burk’s suit also alleges that the defendants frightened her into allowing a private security group to take up residence in her home. Members of the security group ultimately stole Burk’s cell phone and took it to the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., a hub for high-level Trump allies on Jan. 6.

Burk obtained a default judgment against Powell in the case on Oct. 2 from a federal court clerk in Arizona, after Powell failed to respond to her complaint.

ALSO READ: Trump's prison presidency? How he could run — and win — from behind bars.

But Powell’s lawyer, Robert H. Holmes, told Raw Story that “the default was taken fraudulently” and that “Ms. Powell was never served” with a summons for the lawsuit. Based on Burk’s request, ABC Legal Services, the process serving company, opened an investigation into the delivery of the summons. According to a report, the process server reported that he left the summons outside the door of an apartment in Dallas on Sept. 2.

Burk provided a copy of the report, which was completed on Wednesday, to Raw Story.

“When the server knocked on the door to the listed unit, the resident inside looked through the peephole and asked who he was and what he wanted in a hostile manner,” the report states. “The server stated his name, and told the resident that he was looking for Sidney Powell as he had some legal documents for her. The resident said to leave the documents at the door because she was not going to open the door. The server noted that he receives that reaction often since he is an African-American male.”

The report adds that the process server “left the documents outside the door,” and then from down the hallway, “saw the woman crack the door open and grab the documents” before returning inside.

The report concludes by indicating that ABC Legal Services is offering Burk the option of having the summons re-served on Powell.

If Penrose’s later actions called into question his loyalties, during the time period when Trump allies were trying to get access to the voting machines in Coffee County he made it clear that he was on Team “Kraken.”

“I’m investigating this on behalf of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, right, the people that are gonna take this right up to the president and the Supreme Court, and work on these cases,” he told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call in 2020.

Penrose told Burk at the time that the team had already spent $75,000 to investigate claims about illegal ballots on airplanes before determining that there was nothing to substantiate them.

Obsession with voting machines takes hold

Trump and other White House officials received frequent updates on the efforts of the Giuliani and Powell teams, working in tandem, to access the voting machines in late 2020 and early 2021.

Friess, one of the lawyers on Giuliani’s team, forwarded talking points and a press release about a report produced on the Antrim County election data to Giuliani around Dec. 14. The email also went to Bernard Kerik, the team’s chief investigator; and Boris Epshteyn, another lawyer.

“Here’s — the press release is approved,” Friess wrote in the email, which was obtained by the House Select January 6 Committee. “Needs to go to the White House. President and VP just briefed. They are thrilled.”

Kerik then forwarded the email to an aide to White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, the email chain shows.

The report contained the bold claim that “the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

Trump predictably seized on the report, tweeting, “WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!”

But an analysis published in March 2021 by J. Alex Halderman, co-chairman of the Michigan Election Security Advisory Commission, concluded that the report “contains an extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements and conclusions.”

ALSO READ: Inside the 11 scenarios that deny Trump the presidency — without him actually losing Election 2024

The false claims about Dominion voting machines were at the heart of a contentious, late-night meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020 in which Powell, along with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, urged Trump to use the military to seize voting machines and re-run the election.

The meeting reportedly devolved into a screaming match between Powell’s entourage and members of the White House counsel team.

Giuliani also joined the meeting after being alerted that Powell, Flynn and Byrne were at the White House. He proposed an alternative to the military option floated by Powell’s camp.

“His point of view was that in some way the campaign, I believe, was going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” Derek Lyons, a former Trump administration official who was present at the meeting, told the committee.

Lyons added that Giuliani argued that examination of the machines in Georgia could produce “evidence that could then be leveraged to gain additional access to additional machines.”

Giuliani confirmed in his testimony that “we were trying to use the civil process to get access to the machines,” adding that he vaguely recalled “negotiating with one of the boards for access to some of the machines.”

‘Name calling and misogynistic behavior’

After the Dec. 18 meeting, Powell found herself ostracized from Trump’s inner circle at the White House, most notably Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — also a co-defendant in the Fulton County case.

“It is imperative I be included in meetings scheduled today with you, Rudy, and with the President, about the machines and any of these issues,” Powell wrote in an email to Meadows on Dec. 21, which was obtained by the House Select January 6 Committee.

Powell would later explain to congressional investigators that the urgency of meeting with Trump, Meadows and Giuliani was that she didn’t trust the Giuliani team to handle the mission appropriately.

“Rudy was off, you know, in a couple different directions trying to access the machines,” Powell said. “And I was concerned that it needed to be a process that was completely transparent and preserved so that there could be no question about it and that the people doing it have military qualifications or credentials approved by both sides, however you want to put that, but, anyway, unimpeachable credentials, and perform the examination in a recorded, transparent process. And I don’t know how Rudy and people were doing that.”

The Fulton County indictment alleges that Powell made false claims to the House Select January 6 Committee through statements in her testimony that minimized her role in the efforts to access voting machines in Michigan and Georgia.

The feud between Powell and Giuliani reached a nadir during a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting in Meadows’ office at the White House, before Meadows shunted her away from a scheduled meeting with Trump. Powell recalled that Friess and Waldron were also there, and an email obtained by the House Select January 6 Committee confirms Waldron’s attendance.

Powell described the meeting as “the epitome of devolution into name calling and misogynistic behavior from Mr. Giuliani toward me.”

She added, “I do remember Mr. Giuliani just absolutely lashing out about me being unfit to practice law, called me several names. And, I mean, he just went on and on.”

Following the meeting in Meadows’ office, Powell made her disdain for Giuliani clear in a Dec. 22 email to the two men and to Molly Michael, Trump’s assistant, that was obtained by the committee.

“Also be advised Michigan trip was not set up properly on ground with locals,” Powell complained. “Team is there with no access. It has cost us great expense and should be reimbursed by Rudy’s funding. Georgia machine access promised in meeting Friday night to happen Sunday has not come through.”

‘Y’all are welcome any time’

Late on New Year’s Eve, the Giuliani team received a welcome surprise.

“We have received your open record request, and I will be speaking with my board, and per Georgia law I do not see any problem assisting you with anything ya’ll need [in] accordance to Georgia Law,” Hampton, the Coffee County election director, wrote in a response on official letterhead. “Y’all are welcome in our office any time.”

A Georgia Bureau of Investigation summary obtained by Powell through discovery indicates that Hampton’s letter came in response to an open records request by Preston Haliburton, the Atlanta lawyer who identified himself as “counsel of record for the Giuliani legal team.”

Haliburton also identified himself as counsel for Cathy Latham, the Coffee County GOP chair, when he told the Georgia Senate Election Law Study Subcommittee that she was claiming whistleblower status during a Dec. 30, 2020, hearing. Latham is also a defendant in the Fulton County case, and is accused of participating in both the Coffee County breach and the fake elector scheme.

Haliburton did not return a message left by Raw Story at his office last week.

A Signal group chat obtained by Powell through discovery also suggests that the Giuliani team initiated the Coffee County project. The chat opens with a message from a woman named Jennifer Jackson on Jan. 1, 2021.

“Just handed [sic] in DC with the Mayor,” Jackson’s text reads. “Huge things starting to come together.

“Most immediately, we were just granted access -by written invitation! To the Coffee County Systens. [sic] Yay!” the message continues. “Putting details together now with Phil, Preston, Jovan etc. Want to give you a heads up for your team.”

“Phil” and “Preston” appear to refer to Phil Waldron and Preston Haliburton, while “Jovan” appears to refer to Jovan Pulitzer, a former treasure hunter to whom Trump allies turned for advice on forensic analysis of ballots.

Jackson closed her message by writing that the message “was from Katherine,” likely referring to Katherine Friess, the lawyer on the Giuliani team.

While the Giuliani team celebrated the invitation, the Signal group chat shows the SullivanStrickler employees deferring to Powell’s team, likely in recognition that under their contract, she would be footing the bill.

“Should we reach out to Penrose for potential guidance?” SullivanStrickler employee Greg Freemyer wrote.

“Let’s wait for the request,” Paul Maggio, the chief operating officer, counseled. “If they need us, they will call.”

A separate Signal group chat entitled “Coffee_County_Forensics” shows Penrose — Powell’s associate — managing the project. In the first message on Jan. 6, 2021 at 7:35 p.m. — as police regained control of the U.S. Capitol after a deadly riot, and Congress prepared to reconvene to complete the certification of Joe Biden as president — Penrose sent the initial message to the Signal group — introducing Maggio to Scott Hall, the Georgia bail bondsman who has now pleaded guilty alongside Powell to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties.

According to the Fulton County indictment, Hall conveyed his interest in the Coffee County expedition to Latham, the local GOP chair.

In the next message in the Signal thread, Penrose asked Maggio to take the lead on the project.

Another lawyer — someone who has not been publicly identified with either the Powell or Giuliani teams — was also in the Signal group.

A minute after Penrose delegated leadership to Maggio, Charles Bundren wrote, “We need cell numbers to identify who they are for the people at the elections HQ.”

Bundren is a Dallas-area lawyer who, with few exceptions, has attracted little notice in the public examination of the Jan. 6 saga. In 2014, Bundren joined fellow lawyer John Eastman — one of the defendants in the Fulton County racketeering case, who is accused of leading the effort to corruptly pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject legitimate Joe Biden electors — in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the University of Texas at Austin’s use of race-conscious admissions.

More recently, Bundren represented Waldron in his suit seeking to block the House Select January 6 Committee’s efforts to obtain his cell phone records. But then Bundren stepped aside as Waldron’s lawyer and joined him as a co-plaintiff to block review of his own cell phone records. In Waldron’s lawsuit seeking to block the congressional committee, he claimed that he was investigating the 2020 election under a contract with unnamed attorneys in Collin County, Tex., which is where Bundren’s law office is located.

Posting in the “Coffee_County_Forensics” Signal group chat in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, Hall instructed the SullivanStrickler team to text Hampton and Latham before they arrived at the election office. Hall was planning to fly down to Coffee County from Atlanta, and Latham texted Maggio the address for the Douglas Municipal Airport so he could pick up Hall, according to the indictment.

Just before 3 p.m., Maggio wrote in the chat: “Collection is going well. No real issues at this point. Looking to be here until 6-7 PM this evening.”

Then, at 7:47 p.m., Maggio reported that his team had completed the assignment and were driving back to Atlanta.

After each update, Bundren replied in the thread: “Thanks.”

Bundren has not been charged in the Fulton County case.

Double-cross?

Following the Jan. 7, 2021 visit to Coffee County, a man named Doug Logan — who would later lead the so-called “audit” of the 2020 election in Arizona — was tasked with analyzing the data. As Powell’s defense team emphasized before she pleaded guilty, texts exchanged between Logan and Penrose suggest that Charles Bundren was directly overseeing the project.

“If you can draft a report for review on Friday morning with Charles Bundren that would be best — we only have until Sat to decide if we’re going to use this report to decertify the Senate runoff election — or if we hold it for a bigger movement later,” Penrose wrote in a Jan. 20, 2021 text to Logan that was obtained by Powell through discovery.

“I’m not going to brief Sidney on these findings yet,” Penrose added. “I’d ask you to do the same, so we can maintain agility on how to use it.”

Logan would later testify under oath in a deposition for a separate lawsuit that Bundren was the lawyer “that we were doing work under.” He added that Penrose told him that Bundren “was the main attorney on this work.”

More than a year after Logan’s work on the project, congressional investigators asked Giuliani if he had received a report on the Coffee County voting machines.

“Yes, sir,” Giuliani testified. “Yeah.”

Asked who gave him the report, Giuliani replied, “I don’t want to guess at it. Probably was Phil Waldron.”

As for Powell, her guilty plea means there’s a good chance she will take the witness stand and testify against her co-defendant Giuliani, who has admitted to being a consumer of the work product that came out of the Coffee County breach.

Key players in Sidney Powell’s legal drama

Charles Bundren: Dallas area attorney. He oversaw collection and analysis of Coffee County election data, according to Doug Logan.

Katherine Friess: Lawyer on the Giuliani legal team. She was involved in the examination of the Antrim County, Mich. voting machines, which led to a bogus report claiming election fraud, and then reportedly received a letter inviting Trump allies to examine voting machines in Coffee County, Ga.

Rudy Giuliani: Trump’s former personal attorney and the former mayor of New York City. A member of Giuliani's legal team was involved in examination of the Antrim County election data, and he received a report on Coffee County election data.

Preston Haliburton: Atlanta personal injury lawyer. He submitted the open records request to the Coffee County Board of Elections & Registrations while serving as “counsel of record for the Giuliani legal team.”

Scott Hall: Georgia bail bondsman. He flew to Coffee County on a private plane to accompany contractors as they collected elected data, and has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties.

Misty Hampton: Former Coffee County election director. She invited the Trump allies to visit the election office in January 2021, and is a codefendant alongside Powell, Latham, Trump and 16 others in the Georgia RICO conspiracy case.

Cathy Latham: Former Coffee County GOP chair. She spoke with Scott Graham Hall, and appears to have helped him make arrangements to travel to Coffee County to accompany contractors as they extracted election data. She is a codefendant alongside Powell, Hampton, Trump and 16 others in the Georgia RICO conspiracy case.

Doug Logan: Owner of Cyber Ninjas firm that conducted the so-called Arizona audit. He worked as an analyst on the Coffee County election data, and submitted a report on it to Charles Bundren.

Jim Penrose: Former National Security Agency official. He allegedly signed Sidney Powell’s name on the contract with SullivanStrickler, oversaw the data collection during the team’s visit to Coffee County, and directed Doug Logan to write a report on the data for attorney Charles Bundren

Sidney Powell: Lawyer who filed “Kraken” lawsuits to try to overturn the 2020 election. Her signature is on the contract with SullivanStrickler under which the Coffee County election breach was carried out.

Donald Trump: Former president accused of leading a criminal racketeering conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Trump is the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination.

Phil Waldron: Retired Army colonel with a background in psychological influence operations. He reportedly traveled to Antrim County, Mich., to inspect voting machines and was reportedly briefed on the plan to breach the Coffee County election system.

===

rww1023

...District Attorney Fani Willis. Many commentators suggested that the plea was bad news for Trump, an indication that Powell had “flipped” against the former president. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Right Wing Watch noted after the plea deal was announced that Powell’s pinned tweet still suggested that election fraud took place in Fulton County, Georgia. It still does. More to the point, Powell’s “Defending the Republic” email newsletter sent Monday morning makes it clear that she is still in Trump’s camp. It includes links and excerpts from several stories that she encourages readers to share.

The first excerpt is from the right-wing Epoch Times, quoting Trump attorney Steve Sadow saying the pleas by Powell and others were the result of pressure from Willis under threat of prison time. The story cites Sadow saying that Powell’s testimony could only be favorable to Trump if she testifies truthfully.

The second item Powell shared with supporters is a from a Real America’s Voice network interview with Powell’s friend Don Brown. “If Sidney is guilty of anything, it’s of this: she’s a red-blooded, American patriot who’s only told the truth.” He argued that “the spin” that should be that the plea is a defeat for Willis, who he denounced as a “rogue prosecutor.”

The third item was a Sunday morning post by Trump himself to his Truth social account, in which he praised Powell for doing a “valiant job” defending Mike Flynn from “this now Fascist government of ours.” Powell’s newsletter quotes Trump: “Sidney Powell was one of millions of Americans who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!!!”

The fourth item is a link to a commentary at right-wing publication The Federalist that claimed Willis had “extorted a guilty plea from Powell” and “went nuclear” to “weaponize” the criminal justice system against Trump.

Powell had been charged with multiple felonies; she was permitted to plead guilty to six misdemeanor charges in return for agreeing to testify and serving six years of probation for conspiracy to interfere with performance of election duties. Under Georgia’s First Offender Act, the conviction will disappear from her record if she successfully completes her sentence.District Attorney Fani Willis. Many commentators suggested that the plea was bad news for Trump, an indication that Powell had “flipped” against the former president. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Right Wing Watch noted after the plea deal was announced that Powell’s pinned tweet still suggested that election fraud took place in Fulton County, Georgia. It still does. More to the point, Powell’s “Defending the Republic” email newsletter sent Monday morning makes it clear that she is still in Trump’s camp. It includes links and excerpts from several stories that she encourages readers to share.

The first excerpt is from the right-wing Epoch Times, quoting Trump attorney Steve Sadow saying the pleas by Powell and others were the result of pressure from Willis under threat of prison time. The story cites Sadow saying that Powell’s testimony could only be favorable to Trump if she testifies truthfully.

The second item Powell shared with supporters is a from a Real America’s Voice network interview with Powell’s friend Don Brown. “If Sidney is guilty of anything, it’s of this: she’s a red-blooded, American patriot who’s only told the truth.” He argued that “the spin” that should be that the plea is a defeat for Willis, who he denounced as a “rogue prosecutor.”

The third item was a Sunday morning post by Trump himself to his Truth social account, in which he praised Powell for doing a “valiant job” defending Mike Flynn from “this now Fascist government of ours.” Powell’s newsletter quotes Trump: “Sidney Powell was one of millions of Americans who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!!!”

The fourth item is a link to a commentary at right-wing publication The Federalist that claimed Willis had “extorted a guilty plea from Powell” and “went nuclear” to “weaponize” the criminal justice system against Trump.

Powell had been charged with multiple felonies; she was permitted to plead guilty to six misdemeanor charges in return for agreeing to testify and serving six years of probation for conspiracy to interfere with performance of election duties. Under Georgia’s First Offender Act, the conviction will disappear from her record if she successfully completes her sentence.

rww

---

an 10 23

thursday, October 19 saw a major bombshell in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' sweeping election interference case against former President Donald Trump. In an Atlanta courtroom, Sidney Powell — a former Trump lawyer and one of the many co-defendants —.

Powell, CNN reported, will avoid prison and be given a six-year probation sentence. In return, she must fully cooperate with Willis' office.

Legal expert Kimberly Wehle, a former federal prosecutor who is now a law professor at the University of Baltimore, offers three major takeaways in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on October 19.

POLL:Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Wehle's takeaways are: (1) "Two of 19 defendants have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors," (2) "Don’t be surprised if (bail bondsman Scott) Hall and Powell produce some jaw-dropping testimony," and (3) "Assuming (Kenneth) Cheseboro's trial goes forward, it will reveal a lot about the strength of the case against Trump."

IFrame Content

00:1203:44

"Whether Powell's and Hall's testimony will hurt Trump's defense remains to be seen," Wehle explains. "Powell's counsel claims that she 'did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign' following the election, although Rudy Giuliani introduced her as one of 'the senior lawyers' representing Trump during his 2020 campaign. Having participated in a news conference shortly after the election at the White House, at a minimum Powell can testify as to conversations she had with Trump that could reveal what he knew about the true election results and what he intended to have happen in the lead-up to the January 6th insurrection."

Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results are the focus of two separate criminal prosecutions: Willis' for the State of Georgia and special counsel Jack Smith's federal case for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Unlike Smith, Willis is using RICO laws to prosecute Trump.

Wehle notes, "Powell's testimony could be important to special counsel Jack Smith, too, as she's believed to be one of the unindicated co-conspirators in the federal January 6th case. According to testimony obtained by the House January 6th Committee, Trump privately described her as 'crazy.'"

READ MORE:'Trump should be very concerned': Legal experts react to Sidney Powell’s bombshell guilty plea

*Read Kimberly Wehle's full article for The Bulwark at this link.

---

Watch: Sidney Powell pleads guilty in Georgia election interference case - Alternet.org

1 VIOLATION OF THE GEORGIA RICO

(RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS) ACT O.C.G.A. 16144(c)

2 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1640-1

3 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

4 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 1610-20

5 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16101

6 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1610-1

7 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16102'0

8 IMPERSONATING PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. 16-1023

9 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT INIPERSONATIN PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-8 16-10-23

10 FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. 169-1(b)

11 CONSPIRACY To COMMIT FORGERY 1N THE FIRST DEGREE

12 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS

13 CONSPIRACY TO COMmIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§

14 CRiminAL ATTEMPT To COMMIT filing FALSE DOCUMENTS O.C.G.A. §§ 1641 16102o.1(b)(1)

15 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT FALSE DOCUMENTS

16 FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. 16-9-1(b)

17 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT FORGERY THE FIRST DEGREE

18 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS

19 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 16-10-20

20 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT INFLUENCING WITNESSES O.C.G.A. §§ 16-41 161093(b)(1)(A)

21 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT INFLUENCUYG WITNESSES O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-1& 16-10-93(b)(1)(A)

22 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND writings  O.C.G.A. §§ 16-41 161020

23 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16-10-1

24 FALSE STATENIENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-1020

25 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 161020

26 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

27 FILING FALSE DOCUMENTS O.C.G.A. 16-1020.1(b)(1)

28 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 16-10-1

29 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

30 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT SOLICITATION OF FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8, 16-4-7 16-10-20

31 INFLUENcing WITNESSES O.C.G.A. 161093(b)(1)(A)

32 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT ELECTION FRAUD

O.C.G.A. §§ 21-2603 21-2-566

33 CONSPIRACY TO CONIMIT ELECTION FRAUD

O.C.G.A. §§ 21-2-603 21-2-574

34 CONSPIRACY To COMMIT COMPUTER THEFT O.C.G.A. §§ 1648 16993(a)

35 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT COMPUTER TRESPASS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 16-9-93(b)

36 CONSPIRACY TO COMIVIIT COMPUTER INVASION OF PRIVACY O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 169-93(c)

37 CONSPIRACY TO DEFRAUD TIE STATE O.C.G.A. 16-1021

39 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16101

39 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-1020

40 FALSE STATEMENTS and writings

41 perjury

Act 45.

On or about the 8th day of December 2020, MICHAEL A. ROMAN sent text message to unindicted co-conspirator 1ndividual 4, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, stated that he had spoken to MISTY HAMPTON, and asked unindicted co-conspirator

Individual to "get" MISTY HAMPTON to attend the hearing before the Georgia

...

144

On or about the 7th day of January 2021,SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL,CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL,and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of INTERFERENCE WITH PRIMARIES AND ELECTIONS,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 21-2-566, in Coffee County, Georgia, by willfully and unlawfully

tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating ...

145

On or about the 7th day of January 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, andMISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of UNLAWFUL POSSESSION OF BALLOTS, in Violation of O.C.G.A. 21-2-574, in Coffee County, Georgia, by causing certain members ofthe conspiracy, who were not officers charged by law with the care of ballots and who were not persons entrusted by any such officer with the care of ballots for purpose required by law, to possess official ballots outside of the polling place

in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an overt act in

furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 146.

On or about the 7th day 0fJanuary 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of COMPUTER THEFT,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 169-93(a),

in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with knowledge that such use was without

authority and with the intention oftaking and appropriating information, data, and software, the property ofDominion Voting Systems Corporation in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an act of

racketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 1614-3 (5)(A)(Xix) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe

conspiracy.

Act 147.

On or about the 7th day of January 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of COMPUTER TRESPASS,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-9- 93(b),

in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with knowledge that such use was without authority and with the intention ofremoving voter data and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation data from said computer

in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an act of racketeering...

148

On or about the 7th day of January 2021,SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of COMPUTER INVASION OF PRIVACY,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-9-93(c),

in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with the intention of

examining personal voter data with knowledge that such examination was without authority. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3 (5)(A)(xix) and an overt act in

furtheranCe ofthe conspiracy.

Act 149.

On and between the 6th day 0f December 2020 and the 7th day ofJanuary 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM

HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON committed the felony ofiense of CONSPIRACY TO

DEFRAUD THE STATE,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-10-21, in Cofiee County, Georgia, by unlawfully conspiring and agreeing to commit theft of voter data, property which was under the

control of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Rafiensperger, state officer, in his official capacity. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3 (5)(B) and an overt act in

furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 150.

On or about the 9th day of January 2021, the 10th day of January 2021, the 11th day 0fJanuary 2021, and the 13th day of January 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 25, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from

Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Cofiee County, Georgia, by downloading said data fiom server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l6-l43(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 151.

On or about the 9th day of January 2021, the 10th day of January 2021, the 11th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 18th day ofJanuary 2021, and the 19th day ofJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 26, whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading

said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering...

On or about the 10th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 12th day of January 2021, the 13th day of January 2021, the 25th day of February 2021, and the 26th day of February 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 27, Whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading

said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 153.

On or about the 13th day 0fJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from

Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l614-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe conspiracy.

Act 154.

On or about the 18th day of January 2021, MISTY HAMPTON allowed unindicted co-

conspirators

Individual 25 and Individual 29, whose identities are known to the Grand Jury,to access non-public areas of the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coflee County, Georgia, and facilitated their access to Dominion Voting Systems equipment This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 155.

On or about the 22nd day ofApril 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose

identity is known to the Grand Jury, sent an email to the Chief Operations Ofiicer of SullivanStrickler LLC directing him to transmit all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, to unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 30, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, an attorney associated with SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL and the Trump Campaign. This

...

160

On or about the 10th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 12th day of January 2021, the 13th day of January 2021, the 25th day of February 2021, and the 26th day of February 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 27, Whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury,unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading

said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 153.

On or about the 13th day 0fJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from

Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l614-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe conspiracy.

Act 154.

On or about the 18th day of January 2021, MISTY HAMPTON allowed unindicted co-

conspirators

_{

}_

Individual 25 and Individual 29, whose identities are known to the Grand Jury, to access non-public areas of the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coflee County, Georgia, and facilitated their access to Dominion Voting Systems equipment This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 155.

On or about the 22nd day of April 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose

identity is known to the Grand Jury, sent an email to the Chief Operations Ofiicer of SullivanStrickler LLC directing him to transmit all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, to unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 30, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, an attorney associated with SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL and the Trump Campaign. This...

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 8 23

Trump reneged on 'handshake agreement' to pay lawyers pushing false election claims: report

Brandon Gage August 16, 2023

Four of former President Donald Trump's legal advisers listed as unidentified co-conspirators in United States Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith's criminal indictment for the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election were never paid "despite the fact that their lawsuits and false claims of election interference helped the Trump campaign and allied committees raise $250 million in the weeks following the November vote," CNBC's Brian Schwartz reports.

"Trump has a long history of not paying his bills," Schwarts writes, noting one of the people that he "stiffed" was Rudy Giuliani, the ex-New York City mayor who was Trump's personal defense counsel and a long-time personal friend.

"Trump and Giuliani had a handshake agreement that Giuliani and his team would get paid by the Trump political operation for their post-election work, according to Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for longtime Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik," Schwartz says. "But the Trump campaign and their affiliated committees ultimately did not honor that pledge, according to campaign finance records. The failure to pay Giuliani and his team came up last week in a private interview between prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith's team and Bernard Kerik, a member of Giuliani's team in late 2020, according to Parlatore."

Schwartz recalls that "Federal Election Commission records and testimony from the House January 6th Select Committee hearings reveal that none of the private sector lawyers identified -- but not indicted -- in that case got paid for their post-election work: Not Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro or John Eastman."

Trump reneging on his gentleman's contract with Giuliani, Schartz observes, "is all the more striking" given that Giuliani was charged along with Trump by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for trying to steal the election in Georgia under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) of 1970 — upon which Giuliani built his career as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Trump's fundraising push after he lost to President Joe Biden is also under scrutiny by Smith, whom Politico's Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney explained on August 8th is investigating if Trump'sSave America Political Action Committee "violated federal laws by raising money off claims of voter fraud they knew were false."

Those efforts, predicated on Trump's insistence that the election was stolen from him, raked in $250 million, according to the final report released by the House January 6th Select Committee.

READ MORE: Why Trump’s Georgia indictment is a 'reminder of the genius of American federalism': op-ed

"The money came in response to countless fundraising appeals that claimed it was needed to fund Trump's election challenges in court," Schwartz continues. "Yet instead of paying the lawyers who tried unsuccessfully to overturn his loss, the money went into Trump’s leadership PAC."

In fact, "Trump's entire political network, including his joint fundraising committees, spent over $47 million combined from the start of 2020 through the end of 2021 on legal fees, according to a report by OpenSecrets," Schwartz adds. "Today, that money is instead helping Trump pay his own legal bills. The PAC spent over $20 million in the first half of the year alone on legal fees as the president faced the first two of his four indictments."

READ MORE: Judge randomly assigned to Georgia Trump case once worked for Willis: report

Schwartz's report is available at this link.

'I’ve never seen anything like it': Economic analyst breaks down origin of Jared Kushner’s $3 billion profit

Trump releases attack on Jack Smith’s wife just hours before arraignment

Trump ally mocked reporter's purported ignorance of Georgia law — now she's been indicted

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crazy like fox woman talks to wind, decapitated, kraken src

https://www.alternet.org/email-ghost-woman-crazy-election/

CYA? post domin discovery, sev execs say nuts but odered 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? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 group? 14 A Q A Q A Q A Q A Q A Q A 15 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 ground swell 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 23 concerns about everything. I'm pretty open in general with the world about what my 24 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 of Barbara 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 19 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 20 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 23 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 25 Democracy." It's everywhere. 91 1 And the fact that people have known about it on both sides of the aisle for this 2 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 by Dr. 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 with Dominion. 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 in Georgia. 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 the 13848 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. 8 9 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 20 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/

2x? jun 2023

an

Trump's ally and attorney Sidney Powell is among those who Friday largely lost their bid to overturn sanctions related to frivolous claims made in election fraud lawsuits challenging the 2020 results in Michigan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that a lower court mostly got it right when it sanctioned Powell and other attorneys in connection with false claims made in an attempt to reverse the election in favor of Trump. The news comes a month after Powell and other attorneys were hit with a lawsuit by a Michigan attorney regulations agency alleging they committed professional misconduct.

The Sixth Circuit ruling explained how the attorneys refuted their own made-up positions:

"Three voters and three Republican nominees to the electoral college in Michigan brought this suit in a bid to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. The complaint plausibly alleged that Republican election challengers had been harassed and mistreated during vote counting at the TCF Center in Detroit, in violation of Michigan law. But the complaint also alleged that an international 'collaboration'—with origins in Venezuela, extending to China and Iran, and including state actors in Michigan itself—had succeeded in generating hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes in Michigan, thereby swinging the state’s electoral votes to Joseph Biden. Many of those allegations—particularly the ones concerning Dominion voting machines—were refuted by the plaintiffs’ own exhibits to their complaint."

The news was also picked up by Libertarian magazine Reason.com, which explained that the "court concluded that a few of the allegations were not sanctionable, and that two attorneys were sanctioned who should not have been, but otherwise affirmed the district court's conclusions, and reduced the financial award by a modest amount."

"I expect Powell, et al., will file further appeals, but I doubt additional filings will produce different results," the magazine wrote on Friday.

You can read the full opinion by clicking this link.

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?’”

READ MORE:_{**Sidney Powell facing possible sanctions by Texas regulators for filing frivolous election lawsuits**}_

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.”

READ MORE:_{**Mike Pence: John Eastman 'didn’t even believe what he was telling' Donald Trump about election fraud**}_

an 8 22

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace confessed that one of the stories she was covering was "the scariest thing I’ve heard on this program in a long time."

In a recent report by *Washington Post*reporter Aaron Davis, it was revealed thatallies of former President Donald Trump copied files from Georgia's electronic voting systems and then shared them with Trump's lawyers and other election deniers.

Wallace asked if that meant that people like Sidney Powell had her hands on such data. Davis said that they've made inquiries about whether Powell is one of those who has the data, but they haven't heard back yet.

"One interesting thing that you can tell, because of the detail of this particular computer data, is that while it was being taken from Georgia and used and shared among people in Georgia, it was also being shared among, say, Doug Kogan with the Cyber Ninjas working in the Arizona case and being shared with lawyers working on the Antrim, Michigan case," David explained. "So, there was multistate sharing of this data by attorneys who were trying to maintain some kind of arm's length from the Trump campaign itself and make it appear as if these were individual efforts."

He said that it's clear that all of it was being organized by the same pro-Trump sources.

"There are contracts that show — signed by Sidney Powell, signed by Jesse Banal, attorney and outside counsel for the Trump campaign, authorizing this forensic work, and one of the almost laughable parts of the contracts that have turned up now is that the computer forensics firm said, 'We trust that all of this information and stuff is stuff that you're licensed to use,'" Davis cited.

It turns out the info they were evaluating and doing forensic work on belonged to the government.

So, "it is a national issue," Davis continued. "And to your lead-in, you're right. So much of the post-2020 time period was people trying to look back and say, 'what happened before,' and 'was there problems about how the election was taking place?' Here, we're starting years before the next presidential election with a certain segment of the population bent on proving that there are problems with this software, and now have it. And we don't know how they could untangle and use it to manipulate or sabotage future elections."

"That is the scariest thing I've heard said on this program in a long time," Wallace confessed. She then turned to former CIA officer Tracy Walder and asked, "what do you need Russian election meddlers for when you have Sidney Powell?"

Watch the video below or at this link.

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/

https://news.yahoo.com/pro-trump-lawyer-rising-stop-090303115.html

in  late 2020, as then-President Donald Trump was waging a multi-front campaign to cling to power, a little-known attorney and self-described former special ops commander began working on Trump’s behalf, badgering senior Justice Department officials in an effort to rope them into the plot.

In the months since Trump’s failed coup attempt, government documents and emails have further revealed the extent of this attorney Kurt Olsen’s behind-the-scenes crusade to try to keep him in power. The twice-impeached former president had clearly taken a shine to Olsen and his work. But since the fallout from the 2020 presidential election, it appears that Olsen’s former colleagues want to distance themselves from him—to the point where his onetime law firm has effectively disowned him and airbrushed him from its history.

Olsen’s recurring appearances in the ongoing Capitol Hill investigations into what led to the MAGA riot on Jan. 6 raise some glaring questions. How did a virtually unknown private attorney and associate of extreme MAGA personalities stumble his way into influencing the functions of the executive branch—to the degree that the most senior DOJ personnel had to concoct plans to fight off his onslaught?

For 18 years, Olsen worked as a partner at Klafter, Olsen & Lesser, a small New York-based law firm he co-founded.But shortly after he signed on to help Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election at the Supreme Court, the firm changed its name and registered a new website—without Olsen’s name in the URL—on Feb. 24. Now, where Olsen’s bio used to be, a disclaimer says, “Kurt Olsen is not affiliated in any way with Klafter Lesser LLP.”

Partners at Klafter Lesser did not respond to requests from The Daily Beast for comment. Olsen did not provide comment, either.

Emails released by the House Oversight Committee and reporting by Politico show that after the election, the Maryland attorney rose from relative obscurity in conservative politics to capture the ear of then-President Trump. Despite his access, several lawyers and administration officials intimately involved with the anti-democratic effort did not know or simply couldn’t remember Olsen—a reflection of the disjointed and chaotic state of post-election MAGA politics as different factions pushed competing authoritarian ideas and fought amongst themselves

Out of six knowledgeable Trumpworld sources contacted for this story, several said they hadn’t directly dealt at all with Olsen, though they knew Trump was enamored by the ideas he was selling. One former senior Trump aide said they purposely avoided contact or involvement with Olsen, describing his legal theories as pure “nonsense.”

[Rudy Giuliani’s Law License Suspended Over Election Lie Spree

Predictably, none of that trepidation from Trump administration brass prevented the then-president from embracing Olsen or his fringe legal opinions.

Olsen’s ascent to the heights of MAGA activism began in December 2020 when Paxton put together a Supreme Court case to toss out Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Pennsylvania. The Texas attorney general reached outside his office for help and appointed two special counsels to assist in the case: Lawrence Joseph, a conservative attorney with experience filing briefs at the Supreme Court supportive of conservative causes and figures, and Olsen, whose office sat a few floors down from Joseph’s firm in the same Washington, D.C., office building.

The move placed Olsen, who had little-to-no national profile in conservative politics, at the tip of the spear in the Trump-backed effort to overturn the 2020 election in court. Prior to his legal career, the attorney “served as a Naval Special Warfare Officer assigned to SEAL Team Five”who “has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Far East, primarily as a special operations platoon commander,” according to a since-deleted bio at his former firm.

Paxton’s Supreme Court suit ultimately failed when all nine justices unanimously voted to throw it out on the grounds that the state of Texas lacked the standing to bring the case. Despite the suit’s failure, Olsen’s star continued to rise among the increasingly bizarre world of “Stop the Steal” notables.

Emails sent by Olsen to Justice Department officials, obtained by the New York Times and House Oversight Committee, show that after the Supreme Court tossed the Texas suit, Olsen managed to get in touch with Trump himself to brief him on an effort to revive the case.

At some point after the Texas suit’s failure, Olsen managed to get in touch with the president to pitch him on the idea of having the Justice Department bring a suit “modeled after the Texas action,” which would theoretically sidestep the lack of standing that had doomed the state-led effort.

“The President of the United States has seen this complaint, and he directed me last night to brief AG Rosen in person today to discuss bringing this action,” Olsen wrote in an email to the Justice Department. “I have been instructed to report back to the President this afternoon after this meeting.”

Olsen never got his meeting with Rosen, and the acting attorney general never took up Texas’ quixotic attempt to overturn the election. But, as Politico reported this month, the president’s interest in Olsen’s work grew so intense that in December, Trump himself made a point of bothering Rosen about the 54-page draft complaint that Olsen had been pushing to the highest levels of the federal government.

According to Politico, Rosen recently told Senate investigators that he counseled the then-president that the draft complaint was, at best, a waste of time.

Furthermore, Olsen’s name also appeared on a memo that was hand-delivered to Trump in his very last days in office—a memo that also appeared to include a recommendation on resorting to “martial law if necessary.” When pillow magnate and staunch Trump ally Mike Lindell visited the White House to brief Trump and administration officials and attorneys on his wild claims of Chinese hacking efforts in the 2020 election, Olsen’s name even appeared in a photo of documents Lindell brought to Trump, next to figures like Sidney Powell and Kash Patel, as suggestions for who Trump should appoint to senior positions during his quest to stay in power.

Lindell’s fondness for Olsen continued into the post-Trump era. As Lindell’s “cyber symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was ongoing last week, Olsen commented on aWashington Times story and was referred to as a member of the MyPillow CEO’s team of lawyers.

Olsen’s reported presence on Lindell’s legal team shows how he isn’t done associating himself with doomed efforts to overturn the 2020 election results or to reinstall Trump. The Aug. 11 Washington Times article in which Olsen is featured is headlined, “Cyber expert says his team can’t prove Mike Lindell’s claims that China hacked election.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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 the_{arrest}_ 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 — a_{self-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, with_{legacy 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 charges_{reportedly}_ 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 to_{retract}_ (and much later would be_{pushed 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 himself_{employed}_ by the public relations firm Lincoln Group, which was hired by the Defense Department to_{plant 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, Logan_{tweeted}_ out a link to a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” The document had been used in presentations by_{Phil Waldron}_, a retired Army colonel with a background in information warfare, as he_{briefed}_ 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 eventually_{dropped}_. 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 Periscope_{livestream}_ 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 by_{USA Today}_ and_{PolitiFact}_, and although it reportedly drew millions of views, it receded from public discussion as just one more QAnon-inspired conspiracy vehicle, as violence in_{Kenosha, Wis.}_ and_{Portland, 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 Powell_{told}_ 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, Merritt_{said}_ 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 by Sidney Powell so 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 of_{23 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-checking_{statement}_ 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 by_{Reuters}_, 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 with Sidney and 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 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 a_{website}_ 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 advisor_{Peter 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 withPhill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general who_{reportedly}_ 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 was_{arrested}_ 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 the_{false 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 Corsi_{published}_ 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 a_{story}_ 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 told_{CNN}_ 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 a_{hotel parking garage}_ with Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio on Jan. 5, 2021. Tarrio has been_{charged}_ with conspiracy, along with five other Proud Boys leaders, for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

The “Invincible Argument” document” would_{form the basis}_ of another lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, this one filed not by Powell 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,” SoRelle_{mentioned 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.”

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

Sidney Powell // Screengrab

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."

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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.

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121 an

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

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

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.

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 & Crimepointed 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."

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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."

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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.

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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 theTrump 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

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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.

:{

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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

:{

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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 ofFox 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 reportedthat 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 orthrew 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 involvinginternational 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?]^

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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 ofhigh-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, OANNand 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 inArticle 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

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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]

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 Powellon 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.

==

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

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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

Read more

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 andAndrew Weissmancontinued 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.

Read more See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Hardcover: 456 pages

Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group; First Edition edition (May 1, 2014)

Language: English

...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/06/13/sidney-powell-michael-flynn-s-new-attorney-anti-mueller-conspiracy-theorist-and-fox-regular/223921

many lnx pix

Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn’s new attorney, is an anti-Mueller conspiracy theorist and Fox regular

Blog ››› June 13, 2019 12:01 PM EDT ››› MATT GERTZ

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

President Donald Trump praised former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s decision to replace his legal team with Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney, conspiracy theorist, and harsh critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe who has made dozens of appearances on Fox News and Fox Business in recent years.

“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!”

Donald J. Trump

?

@realDonaldTrump

General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell. Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!

87.9K

3:21 AM - Jun 13, 2019

32.4K people are talking about this

After pleading guilty to charges of lying to the FBI in December 2017, Flynn began cooperating with Mueller’s team. Last week, he fired his legal team, a move that “triggered speculation in legal and political circles that he’s considering backing out of his plea deal with the government in a play for a presidential pardon,” according to Politico.

Powell’s hiring should bolster that conjecture. She is a former federal prosecutor who specializes in federal appeals in commercial litigation, but has carved out a sideline as a Fox pundit. According to her website, “Sidney the Media Figure is highly sought to comment on current legal issues and government investigations—especially the special investigation lead by Robert Mueller and his chief lieutenant Andrew Weissmann,” who the site describes as the “true villain” of her 2014 book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.

Indeed, Powell is one of a handful of lawyers that Fox’s pro-Trump hosts have relied upon to put a legal gloss on their alternative narrative that Mueller’s investigation was the result of an illegal anti-Trump conspiracy by the “deep state.” She has used Fox’s platform to claim the probe “was set up, basically, to impugn this presidency and to make it as hard as possible for Mr. Trump to carry out his duties” and to describe investigators as “creeps on a mission to destabilize and destroy this president.”

While Powell has a lower profile than more regular legal commentators like Alan Dershowitz or Victoria Toensing, the former federal prosecutor has still made more than two dozen appearances on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business show, and at least nine additional weekday interviews on Fox News, since January 2018.

Powell has an extremely active presence on Twitter, where she has argued that Flynn’s prosecution is a “horrific injustice” and that Mueller’s team engaged in “obstruction” by “hiding evidence that exonerates him.” As part of a pattern of frequently amplifying conspiratorial rants about the Mueller probe, Powell has also repeatedly retweeted major accounts that promote the QAnon conspiracy theory and shared articles from Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory website, Infowars (in October 2017, Powell was also interviewed by then-Infowars Washington bureau chief Jerome Corsi.).

Powell’s conspiratorial Twitter musings are not limited to the Mueller probe. She has repeatedly tweeted about George Soros, the Jewish billionaire philanthropist who is regularly targeted with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In December, she accused the Federal Reserve of deliberately trying to “#crash the market” as part of a deliberate plot to destroy Trump “and enrich #Soros & themselves. #Soros has done it before.”

She has also tweeted that “#Islam is only ‘religion’ of which I am aware that seeks to destroy others & would disenfranchise > 1/2 world population.”

Powell’s website sells T-shirts describing Mueller and six other key law enforcement figures in the case as “Creeps on a Mission.” The shirt is “a great gift for those who know the Mueller investigation of the President is its own crime,” according to the website.

One of Powell’s “other websites” is CreepsOnAMission.com, which breaks down the iconography of the shirt and provides capsule descriptions of the purported malfeasance of the people it depicts. It also embeds clips on that theme from the Fox shows of Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, claims “Mueller and his Hillary favored henchmen” are trying “to ensnare anyone he can reach within the circle of President Trump,” and urges readers to “Support President Trump & Our Mission” by wearing the shirt “to show your support for President Trump & The Rule of Law!”

Hannity frequently cites Powell’s book for its harsh criticism of Weissmann, a veteran federal prosecutor and former general counsel at the FBI who became a key member of Mueller’s team.

On Wednesday, Hannity praised Flynn’s hiring of Powell, arguing that a “change of course certainly looks imminent” for Flynn because “Powell said 16 months ago he should withdraw” his guilty plea.

Embedded video

Matthew Gertz

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@MattGertz

Sean Hannity on Flynn hiring Sidney Powell: "Thank goodness... Powell said 16 months ago, blasting the Mueller witch hunt, is now taking over. No word if he plans to withdraw, but a change of course certainly looks imminent. Powell said 16 months ago he should withdraw that plea"

16

5:14 AM - Jun 13, 2019

See Matthew Gertz's other Tweets

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Indeed, in a February 2018 op-ed for The Daily Caller, Powell wrote that Flynn should withdraw his plea because the newly appointed judge in his case, Emmet G. Sullivan, was likely to dismiss the charges against him. (Powell was one of a series of Flynn defenders who misinterpreted one of Sullivan’s orders to speculate that the judge believed Flynn might have been the victim of prosecutorial misconduct.)

In another op-ed published shortly before Flynn’s sentencing hearing in December, Powell claimed that Mueller had obstructed justice by supposedly destroying or suppressing evidence he was required to provide to Flynn’s legal team. On Fox, she speculated that because of this, Sullivan would “throw the entire prosecution of Gen. Flynn out for egregious prosecutorial misconduct.”

Instead, at the hearing, the judge rejected the notion that Flynn had been mistreated by investigators, blasted Flynn himself, and convinced him to delay sentencing and continue working with Mueller’s team rather than risk jail time.

After signing on as Flynn’s lawyer, Powell said in a statement that Flynn “will continue to cooperate with the government in all matters.” But Fox commentator Sara Carter, whose slanted reporting from pro-Trump sources helps fuel the Fox counternarrative on Mueller, said on Hannity’s program that Powell also stressed to her in an interview that “it would take about 90 days to get through [Flynn’s] file,” which could delay any sentencing and leave open the possibility that he could withdraw his plea.

Fox’s pro-Trump commentators have been urging Flynn to withdraw his plea since he pleaded guilty in the first place. They have also been calling on the president to pardon Flynn and other purported “victims” of Mueller’s investigation -- a notion Trump’s team has reportedly entertained.

If Trump does ultimately pardon Flynn, the former national security adviser would be only the latest recipient in a series of clemency decisions influenced by the network.

==

w/ links

...After pleading guilty to charges of lying to the FBI in December 2017, Flynn began cooperating with Mueller’s team. Last week, he fired his legal team, a move that “triggered speculation in legal and political circles that he’s considering backing out of his plea deal with the government in a play for a presidential pardon,” according to*Politico*.

Powell’s hiring should bolster that conjecture. She is a former federal prosecutor who specializes in federal appeals in commercial litigation, but has carved out a sideline as a Fox pundit. According to her website, “Sidney the Media Figure is highly sought to comment on current legal issues and government investigations—especially the special investigation lead by Robert Mueller and his chief lieutenant Andrew Weissmann,” who the site describes as the “true villain” of her 2014 book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.

Indeed, Powell is one of a handful of lawyers that Fox’s pro-Trump hosts have relied upon to put a legal gloss on their alternative narrative that Mueller’s investigation was the result of an illegal anti-Trump conspiracy by the “deep state.” She has used Fox’s platform to claim the probe “was set up, basically, to impugn this presidency and to make it as hard as possible for Mr. Trump to carry out his duties” and to describe investigatorsas “creeps on a mission to destabilize and destroy this president.”

While Powell has a lower profile than more regular legal commentators like Alan Dershowitz or Victoria Toensing, the former federal prosecutor has still made more than two dozen appearances on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business show, and at least nine additional weekday interviews on Fox News, since January 2018.

[vid?]owell has an extremely active presence on Twitter, where she has argued that Flynn’s prosecution is a “horrific injustice” and that Mueller’s team engaged in “obstruction” by “hiding evidence that exonerates him.” As part of a pattern of frequently amplifying conspiratorial rants about the Mueller probe, Powell has also repeatedly retweeted major accounts that promote the QAnon conspiracy theory and shared articles from Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory website, Infowars (in October 2017, Powell was also interviewed by then-Infowars Washington bureau chief Jerome Corsi.).

Powell’s conspiratorial Twitter musings are not limited to the Mueller probe. She hasrepeatedly tweeted about George Soros, the Jewish billionaire philanthropist who is regularly targeted with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In December, she accused the Federal Reserve of deliberately trying to “#crash the market” as part of a deliberate plot to destroy Trump “and enrich #Soros & themselves. #Soros has done it before.”

...

==

off bs

si**dney the Attorney** represents individuals, corporations, and governments in federal appeals in complex commercial litigation.  She has practiced law, primarily in the Fifth Federal Circuit for decades.  She has been lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals—350 of them as an Assistant United States Attorney and Appellate Section Chief in the Western and Northern Districts of Texas.  She is a past president of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and the Bar Association of the Fifth Federal Circuit, and a member of the American Law Institute.  It was from her experience in several of her cases that she felt compelled to become:

**Sidney the Author**wrote LICENSED TO LIE: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice after seeing a core group of federal prosecutors break all the rules, make up crimes, hide evidence, and send innocent people to prison.  The book reads like a legal thriller, but it names the prosecutors who then rose to positions of great power and the judges who turned a blind eye to their abuses of unfettered power.  She continues to write articles on government misconduct and prosecutorial misconduct for The Daily Caller, the Observer, the Hill, Fox News, and other outlets.

Sidney the Speaker can be seen on BookTV from her appearance at the CATO Institute with Judge Alex Kozinski.  She speaks often at local and national events, for non-profits and business associations, at CPAC, TPUSA, and other political symposiums, and at colleges and universities.  Audiences describe her presentations as “riveting.”

Sidney the Media Figure is highly sought to comment on current legal issues and government investigations—especially the special investigation lead by Robert Mueller and his chief lieutenant Andrew Weissmann, who is a true villain in ***LICENSED TO LIE***.  She frequently appears on Lou Dobbs Tonight, Shannon Bream’s show, Hannity, NewsMax TV, One America News, and countless radio shows.

Visit Sidney’s other websites at:

• creepsonamission.com
• licensedtolie.com
• federalappeals.com

==

Sidney K. Powell | The Federalist Society

https://fedsoc.org/contributors/sidney-powell

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Sidney Powell P.C. – Federal Appeals Attorney » Updates

www.federalappeals.com/category/updates/

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Unlicensed Federal Prosecutor Doesn't Doom Case, DOJ Tells ...

https://www.law.com/.../unlicensed-federal-prosecutor-doesnt-doom-case-doj-tells-supre...

May 8, 2019 - U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco giving opening remarks during the Federalist Society's Supreme Court Preview panel discussion on Sept.

Former Texas Prosecutor Sidney Powell on Legal Loopholes Behind ...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-texas-prosecutor-sidney-powell-on-legal-loop...

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Sidney Powell - Book Author of Best-Seller LICENSED TO LIE - LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidney-powell-90b35a24

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1.

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Sidney Powell | Success North Dallas

https://www.successnorthdallas.com/speaker/sidney-powell/

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1.

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Federalist Society members form group to stand up to Trump - Axios

https://www.axios.com/federalist-society-lawyers-trump-rule-of-law-7f347312-e4cd-4...

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1.

:{Nov 14, 2018 - A team of lawyers from the conservative :{Federalist Society:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, organized by Kellyanne Conway's husband George Conway, have formed a group ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Sidney Powell: "Mueller Report meets the Rule of Law" Tickets, Mon ...

https://www.eventbrite.com/.../sidney-powell-mueller-report-meets-the-rule-of-law-tic...

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:{Apr 29, 2019 - Eventbrite - ICON Lecture Series presents :{Sidney Powell:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:: "Mueller Report ... Triangle :{Federalist Society:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: 2019 Summer Associate Social tickets.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

An orthodox legal life and the case for Judge Kavanaugh | TheHill

https://thehill.com/.../396998-an-orthodox-legal-life-and-the-case-for-judge-kavanaug...

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annual report 2016 - AWS

https://fedsoc-cms-public.s3.amazonaws.com/.../kOMI3jmf8TMnNAYKwIwoR1R9Eu...

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:{The Federalist Society enjoyed great success in 2016. This past year ... The Texas Chapter receives the James Madison Chapter of the Year Award. Harvard ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

==

619 about to be sentenced 

:{Trump applauds Flynn's hiring of FBI critic as new lawyer...President Donald Trump on Thursday hailed Michael Flynn's move to hire a lawyer who has been a fierce critic of the FBI’s investigation into the former national security adviser.

“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell,” Trump tweeted. “Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!”...The message from Trump is one of the strongest indicators Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, remains in the president’s good graces and hints that a pardon might still be within the realm of possibility.

Flynn continues to be a recipient of the president's public support despite having been fired for having lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

Last week, Flynn fired his legal team and hired Powell, a former Justice Department attorney who has publicly dinged the investigation into Flynn, accusing the FBI of spying on the retired Army general as part of a "setup," arguing he should withdraw his guilty plea and that his case should be dismissed.

}:

Flynn's former legal team, which took a less hostile approach to his defense, attempted to advance such an argument late last year, earning his lawyers an admonishment from the judge handling his case.

Powell told POLITICO on Wednesday that Flynn would continue to cooperate with the government while he awaits sentencing.

Trump’s tweet comes less than a week after federal prosecutors released a voicemail left by former Trump lawyer John Dowd for one of Flynn’s attorneys just after Flynn withdrew from a joint defense agreement with the president in order to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. In the voicemail, Dowd appeals to Flynn lawyer Robert Kelner for a "heads up" on information that could implicate the president and compromise "national security."

"Remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feelings toward Flynn and ... that still remains," Dowd said.  Though a transcript of that voicemail was included in Mueller’s report, the audio release has renewed speculation that the Trump team was dangling a pardon. Trump has appeared to hint at possible pardons for several of his former associates who were wrapped up in Mueller’s investigation, repeatedly refusing to rule them out for Flynn or for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.