Sidney Powell, the one-time Trump legal adviser — who famously failed to “release the Kraken” that would overturn the 2020 election — has flipped.
This news has been greeted with great glee in the usual circles. Ahhh, salivated The New York Times. “Sidney Powell’s Plea Deal Could Be a Threat to Trump.” Hurrah!
“Sidney Powell was Trump’s biggest ‘fighter.’ Now she’s a big threat,” trumpeted The Washington Post.
But like Powell, they are always promising a Kraken that will never come.
They dream that Powell’s testimony will deliver a lethal blow to Trump and his embattled former attorney Rudy Giuliani.
However, for anyone who paid attention to Giuliani’s testimony to Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 House committee, which he repeated in greater detail behind closed doors to special counsel Jack Smith, Powell was in bad odor with both Trump and Giuliani from the minute she started jabbering about Krakens, which Giuliani told the then-president was “crazy s- -t.”
Between them they fired her three times, because they thought she was a crackpot.
Powell, 68, has been targeted by Democratic prosecutors as their secret weapon to convict the former president for election interference. She is among the unindicted coconspirators in a federal indictment against Trump.
In August, she was charged in Georgia by Trump-deranged Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, along with Trump and 17 others, of conspiring to “unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”
Power of the plea deal
But those seven felony conspiracy charges miraculously disappeared Thursday when Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanors in a plea deal that has her escape jail, pay a modest fine and issue an apology to Georgia voters.
In return she has agreed to testify against Trump.
WaPo triumphantly describes Powell as “the government’s most prominent known asset in its quest to convict Trump, potentially now dangerous to the president she once supported.”
The newspaper also quoted an anonymous source who claimed Powell “soured on” Trump after he declined to name her special counsel and order the military to seize voting machines.
“She was disgusted with his unwillingness to take action.”
But in truth, it didn’t take long after the 2020 election for Giuliani, then Trump’s attorney, to realize that Powell had zero evidence for her farfetched claims, including that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez had hacked voting machines to rig the election for Joe Biden.
On Nov. 13, 2020, 10 days after the election, Powell teased her evidence: “I’m going to release the Kraken.”
A week later, Giuliani was so fed up with her baseless theories that he issued a statement making clear that she did not represent the president.
Giuliani told the Jan. 6 committee: “I didn’t think she was a member of our team even before that, effectively, but from the date she officially was not a member of our team.”
But somehow Powell managed to inveigle her way into the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, signed in by a junior staffer.
Giuliani recalled that he was eating dinner at a restaurant in Georgetown that Friday night while Trump was at the White House presiding over a stormy meeting at which Powell, Gen. Mike Flynn and businessman Patrick Byrne faced off against White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and colleagues over various harebrained schemes to overturn the election.
Trump called Giuliani and asked him to rush over and adjudicate. When Giuliani arrived, the warring parties were in separate rooms.
“The Powell group wanted the president to sign a document,” he testified, “that would allow seizure of the machines . . .
“And then they started really, really fighting, you know, yelling and screaming . . .
“Sidney said that she had affidavits . . . that showed foreign involvement in the election that, therefore, would justify the use of the military.”
But Giuliani told Trump that he had “a very bad experience with Sidney because she started out as part of our team and she would make allegations, then she wouldn’t give us the basis for it.
“Then our team would have to go out and try to defend it as best we could. And then it would turn out to be exaggerated.”
Krakens & ‘crazy s–t’
Giuliani told Powell: “I can’t operate like this. I can’t operate with you going off talking about Krakens and all sorts of crazy s–t.“
He also told her not to go on television before briefing him. “I constantly had to call her. I had to tell her to stay off television. She wouldn’t do it. So it was a terrible experience.
“And I told the president that every time I challenged her on something and I asked her for support, except one time, I never got it or the support turned out to be totally different than what she was talking about.”
Once Giuliani arrived, Trump and his White House team went upstairs to the residence and Powell and pals went to the Roosevelt Room while Giuliani assessed her “evidence” alone in the Cabinet Room.
He went through 12 affidavits Powell had produced to justify using the military to seize voting machines. It took Giuliani 45 minutes to realize they were a joke.
“She basically had one source that she found a way of repeating 12 different times through other people . . . I told the president [there was] nothing like would justify using the military . . .
“I told the president that he . . . couldn’t possibly sign these . . . And he said, ‘Well, if you tell me that, no, I don’t want to do it’.”
Then they all went upstairs and had a drink “because the president wanted everyone to be peaceful.”
But “a big fight started,” Giuliani said, and Trump finally had enough.
“The president called me over because I was the one closest to him, and he says, ‘Throw them out and I don’t want them back here again.’ ”
According to Giuliani, Powell, Flynn and Byrne tried to come back “two or three times, but they had put notices at the White House entrances that they weren’t to be allowed in.”
So whatever Powell has to say when she testifies for the prosecution will show only how deluded she was in the aftermath of the election.
Trump and Giuliani were not desperate enough to believe her crazy theories.
There is no excuse for her gullibility — but it would not be a surprise if she had been fed ludicrous ideas in a crude psy-op by anti-Trumpers which was successful beyond their wildest dreams.
The moral of the story for everyone is to maintain your New York cynicism, which Trump and Giuliani have in spades.
THERE YOU BRO
So James Biden wrote a $200,000 check for his powerful brother. No big deal.
The president’s younger sib wrote the personal check on the same exact day in 2018 that Americore Holdings, LLC, wired him $200,000 after he promised to use his political connections in the Middle East to secure funding for the company. Nothing to see here.
Joe Biden paid $2.75 million cash for his Rehoboth Beach house in 2017, just weeks after his son Hunter shook down his Chinese business partner for $10 million in a WhatsApp message that he claimed he was writing while alongside his father in Delaware. No big deal.
Well, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer does think these latest revelations in Biden family finances are important, and he’s doggedly persevering with his investigation despite GOP dysfunction. Good for him.
YA BOTTER WATCH OUT
An Australian cybersecurity firm has run the numbers on bot infestation of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Turns out Elon Musk was right: Bots outnumber humans as much as 4:1 on X, according to an artificial intelligence program developed by Internet 2.0.
Of 781,000 total accounts analyzed by the Fifth Column program, more than 79% potentially were bots, many bought and paid for by somebody to push lies.
Be careful who you trust online.
