Sidney Powell
Sidney Katherine Powell (born 1955)[1] is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and conspiracy theorist who attempted to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. Her efforts led the State Bar of Texas to seek sanctions against her, including possible disbarment.[2] On August 14, 2023, she was indicted along with eighteen others in the prosecution related to the 2020 election in Georgia.[3]
Powell began her career as an assistant United States attorney in the Western District of Texas. During her tenure, she prosecuted Jimmy Chagra, who was implicated in the May 1979 assassination of United States district judge John H. Wood Jr.[4] She represented executives in the Enron scandal[5] and, in 2019, defended retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn in United States v. Flynn.[6]
In 2020, Powell joined the legal team of then-President Donald Trump in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. After several interviews in which Powell spread election fraud lies, Trump's legal team distanced itself from her, though she continued to meet with the president in the White House.[7][8][9][10] Powell continued filing election lawsuits independently in district courts, and ultimately lost four federal lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.
Powell claimed that Flynn was framed by a covert "deep state" operation,[6][11] and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. She alleged that a secret international cabal involving communists, "globalists", George Soros, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), the Clinton Foundation, the CIA, and thousands of Democratic and Republican officials—including then-Trump ally and Georgia governor Brian Kemp—used voting machines to transfer millions of votes away from Trump in the 2020 presidential election.[12][13][14] After she accused the election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic of engaging in a conspiracy to rig the election, both companies sued her for defamation.[15][16][17][18]
In August 2021, Michigan federal judge Linda Vivienne Parker formally sanctioned Texas conspiracy theorist L. Lin Wood, Powell, and seven other pro-Trump lawyers for their suit seeking to overturn Trump's election loss. She determined the nine attorneys had participated in "a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process" by filing baseless and frivolous lawsuits in order to undermine public confidence in the democratic process. The judge ordered them to pay the state of Michigan and the City of Detroit for their expenses in defending against the lawsuit.[19] The court also referred Powell and the other lawyers to state disciplinary authorities for possible disbarment for ethics violations.[20][21] In February 2023, a Texas judge dismissed a petition brought by the State Bar of Texas that alleged Powell had "violated legal ethics rules" with her work on Trump’s 2020 election reversal efforts.[22]