Sidney Powell (L) on Nov. 19, 2022 at the “elite strike force” presser, (R) in a Fulton County Jail mugshot.
“Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell, a known former member of Donald Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team to overturn the 2020 election, has motioned to sever her case from the 18 other Georgia racketeering (RICO) defendants, claiming she has “no substantive connection” with them.
Touting 45 years of lawyering “in the highest traditions of the Bar” despite facing sanctions and threats to strip her law license for doing the opposite in her failed “Kraken” cases, Powell asserted that it was a media-created falsehood that she represented Trump or the Trump campaign.
“She had no engagement agreement with either. She appears on no pleadings for Trump or the Campaign. She appeared in no courtrooms or hearings for Trump or the Campaign. She had no contact with most of her purported conspirators and rarely agreed with those she knew or spoke with,” said the motion filed by her lawyer Brian Rafferty. “It cannot be disputed that Ms. Powell went her own way following the election, and she never reached an agreement on a course of action with any indicted or unindicted coconspirator—and certainly not any illegal course of action.”
Trump once, in fact, included Powell as a member of the “truly great team” of “wonderful lawyers” waging his legal war to overturn the 2020 election based on the never proven (but costly) idea that voting machine companies — and perhaps the ghost of Hugo Chavez — had somehow flipped the election from Trump to Joe Biden.
It is true that Powell’s association with that team of Trump lawyers on stage was short-lived, as the campaign distanced itself from her in the wake of her increasingly outlandish stolen election claims. It is not true that she was never associated with the Trump campaign legal team.
Also on that team were co-defendants Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani, and Ellis herself once confirmed that Powell was on the “President’s national legal team”:
Jenna Ellis praises Trump legal team member Sidney Powell.
In whiplash-inducing fashion, Ellis attempted to completely purge Powell from the Trump legal team’s orbit just six days later.
Jenna Ellis distances Trump team from Sidney Powell.
“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” read a joint statement from Giuliani and Ellis from Nov. 22, 2020. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”
Years later, Rudy Giuliani would dub Powell the “wicked witch of the east” while he was deposed in a defamation lawsuit filed by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. That lawsuit has proven to be a real threat to Giuliani’s wallet moving forward, particularly now that a federal judge has ordered up a default judgment.
Powell asserted in her motion that the RICO indictment secured by Fulton County DA Fani Willis (D) accuses her of little more than exercising her First Amendment rights and almost being appointed by then-President Trump as a special counsel to investigate purported election-deciding fraud, or to “address the election issues,” as Powell put it in her testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee:
In an Indictment spanning 97 pages, Ms. Powell is falsely accused of participating in a RICO conspiracy because she attended a press conference exercising her First Amendment right to speak on a matter of great public interest and national importance; met with the President at the White House where she provided a legal opinion on Executive Order 13848; her typed name appears on a contract with a vendor for forensic work for Michigan and Arizona; and, after-the-fact, a non-profit she founded gratuitously paid SullivanStrickler’s invoice. That is all she is accused of, and her name is mentioned just 14 times throughout the Indictment. The passing allegations of her “false statements” to the January 6 investigation by Congress—for which the State has no jurisdiction—are taken out of context, the allegations are themselves insufficient as a matter of law, and her statements were true.
Powell was hit with five counts in addition to the top RICO charge, for allegedly conspiring to commit election fraud, conspiring to commit computer theft, conspiring to commit computer trespass, and conspiring to defraud the state.
The Georgia grand jury charged that Powell “entered into a contract with SullivanStrickler LLC,” paid the IT services company, and “caused employees” of SullivanStrickler LLC to “travel from Fulton County, Georgia, to Coffee County, Georgia, for the purpose of willfully tampering with said electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines” — constituting “overt acts to effect the object of the [RICO] conspiracy.”
Powell “unlawfully conspired and agreed to willfully tamper with electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines in the State of Georgia,” the indictment said, also naming co-defendant Cathleen Latham, who was previously identified as a would-be fake elector, bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall, and former Coffee County former county elections supervisor Misty Hampton.
Those same defendants are accused of conspiring to “use a computer with the intention of examining personal voter data with knowledge that such examination was without authority” and conspiring to “use a computer with knowledge that such use was without authority and with the intention of removing voter data and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation data from said computer.”
In her motion to sever, Powell argued that “she did not agree with any of her purported coconspirators to do anything improper” and asserted she could “receive a fair trial only if she is tried alone.”
That trial, Powell suggested, could take place over the course of just three days.
“Assuming the prosecution does not realize its error in indicting her and agree to dismiss this wrongful prosecution before trial immediately, Ms. Powell can be tried alone in three days at most and should receive a judgment of acquittal when the State rests,” the motion continued.
Powell’s lawyer bristled at the notion of his client being “forced to sit in a courtroom for weeks or months with co-defendants,” claiming it “will cause tremendous prejudice to Ms. Powell” if the case is not severed and if Powell doesn’t swiftly stand trial alone.
“It defies human nature even to imply that an adverse spillover effect would not occur. To the contrary, the spillover effect is real and would be devastating to Ms. Powell,” Rafferty said.
In closing, Rafferty argued that “the complexity of evidence for other aspects of the case, and the likelihood of prejudicial antagonistic defenses at trial” makes trying Powell alone necessary.
“It is only through severance that Ms. Powell’s constitutional rights will be protected, and she can receive a speedy and fair determination of her innocence in this case,” the motion ended.
DA Willis has already put defendants Powell and Kenneth Chesebro on notice about the real-world impact of their speedy trial demands.
You can read Powell’s motion to sever here.
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