Today is full of good news. First Jim Jordan threw in the towel and now crackpot lawyer Sidney Powell has done the same:
Sidney K. Powell, a member of Donald J. Trump’s legal team after he lost the 2020 election, pleaded guilty on Thursday morning to six misdemeanor counts instead of facing a criminal trial that was to begin next week.
....The guilty plea was a blow to Mr. Trump, who faces the most charges of any defendant along with Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer. Both men face 13 counts. Significantly, it means that a member of the Trump legal team will cooperate with the prosecution as it pursues criminal convictions related to efforts to keep the former president in power after he lost the 2020 election.
You will recall Powell as the attorney who popped up at Rudy Giuliani's side shortly after the 2020 election and, in machine gun style, blamed Cuba, Venezuela, the Clinton Foundation, the billionaire George Soros, and Antifa for somehow scavenging votes away from Donald Trump. She was so insane that even the Trump campaign disavowed her. Nevertheless, a couple of weeks later she was at a meeting in the White House and Trump reportedly was mulling the idea of appointing her as a special counsel to oversee an investigation of voter fraud.
Later she was sued by Dominion Voting Systems and filed a statement suggesting that she was innocent of defamation because her claims were so outlandish no one could reasonably believe them:
The filing says that the claims Powell made in interviews on Fox News and Fox Business, and in a press conference at the Republican National Committee are not statements of fact. In particular, her claims “that she had evidence that the election result was the ‘greatest crime of the century if not the life of the world,’” or that Democrats “developed a computer system to alter votes electronically” would not be accepted by a “reasonable person” as “statements of fact.”
Powell and her lawyers go further, citing Dominion’s criticism that Powell’s claims were “wild accusations,” “outlandish claims,” “inherently improbable,” or “impossible” as evidence that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims.”
Anyway, it's not clear how close Powell ever was to Trump or how much she knows about his efforts to overturn the election. So it's possible that flipping her won't accomplish much. But it can't hurt.
I would think that Willis' team would have figured out the value of her testimony, particularly in support of Georgia's RICO, in order to reach this plea deal. Her importance likely comes from speaking directly with Trump and his other campaign lawyers.
Yeah, that was my assumption as well. Powell realized a trial was not going to go well and offered to give up what she knew about Trump's involvement in return for not spending a really long time in jail. The slap on the wrist Willis offered (six years probation and an apology) suggests what she had was valuable enough to essentially let her off the hook to fry the bigger fish down the line (i.e. Trump and Clark).
In the hearing, it was noted that they'd recorded a proffer last night as part of this agreement, and she agreed to hand off all documents requested.
https://youtu.be/EbbfOM5Eock?si=xHgjaKNWcozmzXH2
She seems like a highly impeachable witness, given her scale of nonsense. She seems like she's gotten off with the lightest possible sanctions.
That's going to be true of anyone you flip in a RICO case -- you're basically asking one lying, scumbag crook to testify against his or her former accomplices.
Presumably things won’t hinge on just her testimony alone. She will have emails, texts and other documents with solid information. Her testimony will weave this information into a clear narrative.
It's the sheer daffiness of so many things she's said.
That has to be because she has a lot of information prosecutors can use against Trump, Rudy, etc. If she doesn’t deliver you can bet they will hit her with a really stiff sentence.
My guess is she has hard proof that corroborates something useful to the prosecution. She may be too nutty for jurors to believe her story telling, but if she can provide confirmation about something juicy someone trustworthy said, that's valuable.
I also imagine that there are several other defendants thinking really hard about times they've spent with her... I would not surprise me if there are more flippers tomorrow morning.
Recordings?
no reasonable person would believe her? of course not. fox didn't believe her but it spread her lies anyway. and no reasonable person would vote for donald john trump, but 74 million of our fellow citizens did just that. in that context the term "reasonable person" has no meaning.
I would bet there are a lot of documents, texts and emails to back up her testimony.
I kind of hope Trump makes a post where he angrily denounces Powell for "ratting me out", because that fits so well with his wanna-be mobster fantasies.
I wonder if one of the reasons she flipped was that he wasn't going to pay her legal bills any more. Loyalty is 100% a one-way street for Trump. You owe him, but he owes you shit.
I believe the Kraken lady was in the White House December meeting in which those gathered opined and discussed the possibility of using the National Guard to seize the voting machines, and then the US Army to “rerun” the election.
Mike Flynn was there. He probably was there in his role as a military advisor.
The Kraken didn’t seem to have anything to do with the military part of the plan, but she overheard plenty. I’m sure she’ll squeal like a deal to avoid the almost certainly coming superseding indictment in DC of Donald Trump. She’s one of the “UN indicted co-conspirators.”