How Sidney Powell's Plea Deal Could Hurt Trump in the Georgia Racketeering CaseThe election conspiracy theorist struck a deal that allows her to avoid prison by testifying for the prosecution.
JACOB SULLUM
10.20.2023
After the 2020 presidential election, Sidney Powell tirelessly promoted a baroque conspiracy theory claiming that Donald Trump had been deprived of his rightful victory by a combination of deliberately corrupted voting machines and phony ballot dumps. At first, Powell explicitly did that on behalf of the Trump campaign, joining the "elite strike force team" of lawyers who were determined to reverse Joe Biden's victory. She also pressed her outlandish and unsubstantiated fraud claims in numerous TV appearances and in lawsuits she filed on behalf of aggrieved Republicans. And even after the Trump campaign disassociated itself from Powell on November 22, 2020, the president and representatives such as Rudy Giuliani continued to tell the same basic story.
The fruitless attempts to validate that story included a bizarre incident in which employees of SullivanStrickler, a forensic data firm hired by Powell, copied election software and ballot records at the Board of Elections and Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, on January 7, 2021, the day after Trump supporters enraged by his stolen-election fantasy rioted at the U.S. Capitol. That freelance investigation was the basis for the state criminal charges to which Powell pleaded guilty on Thursday, the day before her election-related racketeering trial was scheduled to begin.
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What does Powell know that could hurt Trump's defense? She was not directly involved in the actions that the Georgia indictment cites as the basis for 12 of the 13 charges against Trump. Those charges involve things like encouraging Republican candidates for the Electoral College to present themselves as the state's "duly elected and qualified" electors, asking Georgia legislators to recognize those "alternate" or "contingent" electors instead of Biden's, making knowingly false statements in a post-election lawsuit, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" the votes necessary to reverse Trump's loss in that state, and lying to Raffensperger toward that end.
Powell has no direct knowledge about any of that. But her testimony could be important in supporting the racketeering charge against Trump by verifying some of the "overt acts" in furtherance of the alleged conspiracy.
The indictment lists 161 of those. In addition to the specific offenses that Willis says Trump committed, they include a lot of conduct that was not inherently criminal but allegedly was aimed at the illegal goal of reversing the election outcome. Twelve of the "overt acts" involved Powell. They include two events that directly involved the Trump campaign or Trump himself.
On November 19, 2020, Powell appeared at a press conference alongside two of her co-defendants in the Georgia case, Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, another campaign lawyer, to claim that the election had been stolen through massive fraud. All three lawyers spoke as representatives of the Trump campaign. Since Willis has video evidence of that ridiculous presentation, she hardly needs Powell to establish that it happened. But Powell probably can shed light on the motivation behind it, which could reinforce the prosecution's argument that it was part of a criminal conspiracy to keep Trump in the White House.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2023/10/20/how-sidney-powells-plea-deal-could-hurt-trump-in-the-georgia-racketeering-case/
