Dominion plans to sue Sidney Powell, doesn’t rule out Trump

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Dominion Voting Systems plans to sue attorney Sidney Powell “imminently” for defamation, and it’s continuing to explore similar suits against President Trump and others, company founder and CEO John Poulos told the Axios Re:Cap podcast on Monday.

Between the lines: Dominion, which makes the voting machines used in Georgia and elsewhere, has been the subject of baseless accusations of malfeasance during last November’s elections. 

  • Trump, during his leaked call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, called the U.S.-based company “corrupt” and had to be corrected by Raffensperger after claiming machines had been recently removed and/or altered by Dominion employees. Continue reading.

Trump suggested naming Sidney Powell as special counsel on election in Oval Office meeting, reports say

During a White House meeting Friday, President Donald Trump floated the idea of naming conservative attorney Sidney Powell as a special counsel to investigate his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden, according to multiple media reports. 

In the Oval Office meeting, which was first reported by The New York Times, Trump discussedwith his advisers the possibility of appointing Powell to investigate election fraud claims and to potentially seize voting machines that Trump claimed were rigged against him.

Most of the advisers at the White House meeting, which included Powell, opposed the ideas. According to the Times, among those objecting to the suggestion of Powell as special counsel were Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani – who joined by phone – White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief of staff Mark Meadows. Continue reading.

Dominion Voting Systems fires back with legal action against Sidney Powell

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Dominion Voting Systems is now taking steps toward legal action against Sidney Powell.

Dominion and its voting machines have been at the center of several conspiracy theories and falsehoods surrounding the 2020 presidential election. Although President Donald Trump initially spread misinformation about mail-in voting, he and his allies began circulating falsehoods targeting Dominion voting machines as election results proved favorable for Biden.

Since then, Dominion Voting Systems claims it has been subjected to a “‘relentless and reckless disinformation’ campaign, led by Powell, Rudy Giuliani, other allies of President Donald Trump, and Trump himself,” according to Law & Crime. Continue reading.

Sidney Powell’s secret ‘military intelligence expert,’ key to fraud claims in election lawsuits, never worked in military intelligence

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The witness is code-named “Spyder.” Or sometimes “Spider.” His identity is so closely guarded that lawyer Sidney Powell has sought to keep it even from opposing counsel. And his account of vulnerability to international sabotage is a key part of Powell’s failing multistate effort to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Powell describes Spyder in court filings as a former “Military Intelligence expert,” and his testimony is offered to support one of her central claims. In a declaration filed in four states, Spyder alleges that publicly available data about server traffic shows that voting systems in the United States were “certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China.”

Spyder, it turns out, is Joshua Merritt, a 43-year-old information technology consultant in the Dallas area. Merritt confirmed his role as Powell’s secret witness in phone interviews this week with The Washington Post. Continue reading.

To boost voter-fraud claims, Trump advocate Sidney Powell turns to unusual source: The longtime operator of QAnon’s Internet home

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In her legal quest to reverse the reality of last month’s election, President Trump’s recently disavowed attorney Sidney Powell has gained a strange new ally: the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the QAnon conspiracy theory’s Internet home.

Powell on Tuesday filed an affidavit from Ron Watkins, the son of 8kun’s owner Jim Watkins, in a Georgia lawsuit alleging that Dominion Voting Systems machines used in the election had been corrupted as part of a sprawling voter-fraud conspiracy.

Powell has claimed that a diabolical scheme backed by global communists had invisibly shifted votes with help from a mysterious computer algorithm pioneered by the long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez — a wild story debunked by fact-checkers as a “fantasy parade” and devoid of proof. Continue reading.

What line did Sidney Powell cross that Rudy Giuliani didn’t?

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Ridiculous claims and embarrassing behavior are clearly acceptable. So what wasn’t?

There’s no question that, at least at one point, Sidney Powell was part of President Trump’s legal team as he pushed to overturn the will of the voters and earn a second consecutive term as president. Trump himself had touted her involvement in his “truly great team.” She was one of three attorneys who spoke during last week’s wild, overheated campaign news conference in which the “elite strike force” (as one member described them) delineated a wide-ranging and obviously hollow case for how Trump had somehow been wronged. Afterward, both Trump and the Republican Party shared snippets of her arguments.

Between then and Sunday afternoon, though, the relationship between Powell and the president soured. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has served as Trump’s personal attorney since last year, released a statement effectively slicing Powell out of the strike force. Something that Powell had done crossed some sort of line, and out she went, with the statement’s language leaving open the possibility that the remaining team might try to claim that Powell had never been formally representing Trump’s interests.

So what happened? Continue reading.

Michael Flynn’s New Lawyer Seeks Security Clearance, Citing Unknown Evidence

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — A lawyer Michael T. Flynn recently hired said on Monday that she would most likely need a security clearance to review classified materials that were separate from the documents that prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had already handed over in the case.

The lawyer, Sidney Powell, made the unusual disclosure during a hearing in Federal District Court despite prosecutors’ insistence that they included no classified information in the evidence they shared with the defense. Her remarks heightened speculation that Ms. Powell — who has pushed conspiracy theories about the special counsel’s investigation and sells anti-Mueller T-shirts on her website — may be preparing to accuse the government of wrongdoing in Mr. Flynn’s case.

“There is other information,” she said, but she declined to elaborate.

View the complete June 24 article by Michael S. Schmidt on The New York Times website here.

Sidney Powell, Flynn’s New Lawyer, Is Conspiracy Theorist And Fox News Regular

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!”

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.

View the complete June 13 article by Matt Gertz from Media Matters on the National Memo website here.