Sidney Powell

Sidney Powell
File:Sidney Powell.jpg
Born	1955 (age 68–69) Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
Education	University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (BA, JD)
Occupation	Attorney
Years active	1978–present
Website	Official website

Sidney Katherine Powell (born 1955) is an American attorney and former 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.

In 1988 she ceased working as a prosecutor, and in 1993 she established her own firm. She has represented various clients, especially in appellate matters. She represented executives in the Enron scandal and defended General Michael Flynn in 2019. In the weeks after the 2020 United States presidential election, she joined Trump's legal team to challenge Joe Biden's election victory over President Trump.

She has made claims of a "deep state" plot to frame Flynn, and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with QAnon. More recently, Powell has alleged that a secret cabal of international Communists, Venezuelans, Cubans, Chinese, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, "globalists", thousands of Republican and Democratic officials, and others have rigged the counting of ballots in the 2020 presidential election, which she claimed Trump won "by a landslide".

Early life

Sidney Katherine Powell was born into a working-class family in Durham, North Carolina, grew up in the city of Raleigh. 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, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, funding her education with student loans. 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. She began her legal career as the youngest United States Attorney in the US.

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 and then the Northern District of Texas.

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

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. 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.

Notable cases

Assassination of Judge John H. Wood

In 1979 Powell was one of the prosecutors in the trial of Jimmy Chagra, where he was convicted of continuing criminal violations. 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, he was "the undisputed marijuana kingpin of the Western world." Carl Pierce, a co-worker who headed up the drug trafficking unit, described it as a period where 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. Chagra was released from prison for health reasons in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 9, 2003, and reportedly placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. He died of cancer on July 25, 2008.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Powell's appearances on Fox News to discuss the Flynn case were noticed by President Trump, and the two spoke on several occasions. On the same day it was disclosed Flynn had fired his attorneys, Powell sent a letter 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.

In May 2020, the Justice Department filed a motion with presiding federal judge Emmett Sullivan to drop Flynn's prosecution. 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. 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?" Other judges on the Court also pushed back on Powell's characterization of a federal judge's role. 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."

2020 presidential election

In November 2020 Powell joined President Donald Trump's legal team challenging the legality of the November presidential election results. During the days after the election, the Trump campaign filed numerous lawsuits in several states over alleged vote harvesting, illegal votes, machine errors, vote dumps and late-counted votes.

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 theory on Lou Dobbs's Fox Business program two days after the election, and again two days later on Maria Bartiromo's program, claiming to have "evidence that that is exactly what happened." During a subsequent appearance on Bartiromo's program, Powell alleged that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were "designed to rig elections," that family members of government officials were paid kickbacks in those states purchasing Dominion products, and linked the situation to the CIA, stating that director Gina Haspel "should be fired immediately." Christopher Krebs, a former Microsoft executive and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), characterized the supercomputer claim as "nonsense" and a "hoax." Asserting that Krebs's analysis was "highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud," Trump fired him by tweet days later.

Powell alleged, during a November 19 press conference that a communist plot had been engineered by Venezuela, Cuba, China, Hugo Chavez, George Soros and the Clinton Foundation to rig the election. She also alleged that Dominion "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." She also repeated an allegation made by OANN, Congressman Louis Gohmert, and others that accurate voting results had been transmitted to the German office of the Spanish firm Scytl, where they were tabulated to reveal a landslide victory for Trump, and that a company server had been seized in a raid by the United States Army. Scytl and the Army stated the allegation was false. Scytl has not had any offices operating in Germany since September 2019. Powell suggested that candidates "paid to have the system rigged to work for them." 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."

Powell said she had based her allegations of voter fraud in part on a comparison of votes cast and total voters registered in Michigan, from which she concluded that more people had voted than were registered to vote in Michigan. However, Powell's conclusion was erroneous, because she had mistakenly compared the Michigan vote tallies with population data from Minnesota (rather than Michigan).

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, based on authority putatively resting in Article Two of the Constitution.

Defamation lawsuits against Powell

Dominion Voting Systems sent a letter to Powell on December 16, 2020, demanding she publicly retract her unsubstantiated allegations about the company. Shortly thereafter, the Trump legal team instructed dozens of staff members to preserve all documents relating to Dominion, Powell and others for any future litigation. Smartmatic sent a similar demand letter to conservative television outlets and within days Fox News, its sister network Fox Business and Newsmax broadcast segments walking back conspiracy allegations they had previously promoted.

On January 8, 2021, Dominion sued Powell for defamation and asked for over $1.3 billion in damages. On February 4, 2021, Smartmatic filed a defamation lawsuit that accused Powell, Fox News, some hosts at Fox News, and Rudy Giuliani of engaging in a "disinformation campaign" against the company, and asked for $2.7 billion in damages.

On March 22, 2021, lawyers defending Powell against Dominion's lawsuit filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. They argued that "no reasonable person would conclude that the statements [by Powell about the 2020 election] were truly statements of fact". Instead, “it was clear to reasonable persons that Powell’s claims were her opinions and legal theories", argued the lawyers. Furthermore, the lawyers claimed that Dominion could not prove that Powell took action with "actual malice", because "she believed the allegations then and she believes them now".

Writing

Powell has written opinion pieces for The New York Observer, The Daily Caller, The Hill, Fox News, and other news outlets. She has published two books:

In addition, Powell has published several journal articles on law practice. Examples include:

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.

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 and the discovery of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene. The film went on to raise millions of dollars for cancer charities.

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. 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.

Personal life

Powell has a son from a former marriage. She has participated in volunteer work for women's shelters and other charities.

QAnon

Powell has been described by some sources as a supporter of QAnon, a far-right group 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. However, despite having retweeted major QAnon accounts and catchphrases and appearing on QAnon shows on YouTube, Powell has denied knowledge of QAnon.

External links

• Official website