Despite calling her a member of their legal team earlier this month, Donald Trump’s campaign said in a statement late today that Sidney Powell is neither a member of its legal team nor a lawyer for Trump in his personal capacity.
It’s an attempt to move away from a controversial figure who has been busy disrupting the foundation of our Republic.
Powell was a part of the campaign’s wild, conspiratorial Thursday press conference and baselessly floated unfounded conspiracy theories that included a claim that President-elect Biden won the 2020 presidential election thanks to “communist money” from the Venezuelan regime.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump ally, called Powell’s actions “a national embarrassment” due to her “outrageous conduct.”
Trump told allies that Powell was too much, even for him, after her Thursday media appearances.
During one interview, Powell repurposed a popular phrase that has since taken off on Twitter as a clarion call for the right while a source of mockery for the left.
“I’m going to release the Kraken,” Powell declared defiantly while saying she would expose the deck was stacked against Trump in the election by “Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media and even the media companies.”
Her conspiracy theory regarding Dominion voting machines has been debunked by individual states, including GOP-lead Georgia, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump specifically noted that Powell was a member of his campaign’s legal team earlier this month.
The Republican National Committee also featured Powell in a tweet:
For more than a week, Powell has made the rounds on right-wing talk radio and cable news, facing little pushback as she laid out a conspiracy theory that Venezuela, Cuba and other “communist” interests had used a secret algorithm to hack into voting machines and steal millions of votes from President Trump.
She spoke mostly uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on Monday on the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” the No. 1 program on talk radio.
Hosts like Mark Levin, who has the fourth-largest talk radio audience, and Lou Dobbs of Fox Business praised her patriotism and courage.
All week on networks like Newsmax and OANN and talk radio programs, Trump’s supporters have been given a steady diet of interviews with Trump allies, campaign officials and news stories that promote allegations of fraud with little or no context.
One lawyer who is assisting the Trump campaign in its efforts, Lin Wood, went unquestioned this week on Levin’s show when he made the fantastical claim that Trump had won the election with 70 percent of the vote.
A story that OANN broadcast on Friday afternoon falsely declared, “The state of Michigan is back in play,” giving credence to Trump’s extraordinary but almost certainly unsuccessful efforts to delay certification of the vote in Detroit.
A spokesperson of Dominion Voting Systems addressed the conspiracy theories about the company on Fox News Sunday, saying it was “not physically possible” for its machines to change voter selections.
“This is a nonpartisan American company. It is not physically possible for our machines to switch votes from one candidate to the other,” Michael Steel said on Fox News’ “America’s News HQ.”
“Let’s be very clear, our election system is run by local elected officials and nonpartisan poll watchers. We simply provide a tool to count the ballots and to print and count ballots,” he added. “There is no way such a massive fraud could have taken place and there are no connections between our company and Venezuela, Germany, Barcelona, Kathmandu, whatever the latest conspiracy theory is.”
Attorneys working for the Trump campaign laid baseless claims of voter fraud during a press conference last week that included allegations that Dominion had ties to Venezuela.
Pressed by Fox News’ Eric Shawn as to how he could be sure the voting machines were secure, Steel responded “When a voter votes on a Dominion machine, they fill out their ballot on the touchscreen, they are given a printed copy which they then give to a local election official for safekeeping.”
“If any electronic interference had taken place, the tally reported electronically would not match the printed ballots,” he added. “And in every case where we’ve looked at in Georgia, all across the country, the printed ballots, the gold standard in election security, has matched the electronic tally.”
Christopher Krebs, who Trump fired as top U.S. cybersecurity official last week, has pushed back against the claims, tweeting last week, “On allegations that election systems were manipulated, 59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’”
Senate Republicans have by and large avoided commenting on Trump’s actions, with more than 40 not responding to requests for comment Thursday and Friday about the president’s effort to have Michigan legislators reject the Biden victory there of more than 150,000 votes.
Republicans are aware that any perceived lack of loyalty to the president could prompt him to attack the defectors — just as Trump did Saturday night when he called Judge Brann a “product of Senator Pat ‘No Tarriffs’ Toomey.”
Powell first rose to conservative prominence after criticizing the Mueller investigation and becoming the primary attorney for Trump’s former national security adviser adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to the FBI for lying about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. during Trump’s transition.