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What We Know About Sidney Powell,

the Lawyer Behind Wild Voting
Conspiracy Theories
A frequent guest on conservative radio and TV, she briefly
became a public face of the Trump campaign before being cut
loose on Sunday.

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Sidney Powell, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, was let go after she unspooled a
baseless conspiracy theory claiming election fraud. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Jeremy W. Peters and Alan Feuer

Dec. 8, 2020

Until late last week, most Americans who aren’t regular consumers
of right-wing talk radio and cable news probably had not heard of
Sidney Powell, an appellate lawyer from Texas who joined
President Trump’s legal team earlier this month as it undertook a
fruitless pursuit to prove that fraud cost him the election.

Ms. Powell burst into national attention on Thursday, when she

appeared alongside Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is leading the
president’s legal efforts, at a surreal news conference where she
made claims that strained credulity, even for a presidential
campaign that has repeatedly lowered the bar. In a matter of
minutes, Ms. Powell blamed Cuba, Venezuela, the Clinton
Foundation, the billionaire George Soros and Antifa, a loosely
defined left-wing movement, for somehow making votes for Mr.
Trump disappear.

Mr. Giuliani seemed unfazed as his new colleague floated these

fanciful theories. And when Ms. Powell finished speaking, the
former mayor of New York added another possible conspirator she
had left out: Black Lives Matter activists.

Mr. Trump, however, was not so pleased. And he apparently had

enough after Ms. Powell later accused Georgia’s Republican
governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state, Brad
Raffensperger, of being paid off for their involvement in the plot.

“Georgia is probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow

up,” Ms. Powell said over the weekend in an interview with
Newsmax TV. “And Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state need to go
with it.”

The Trump campaign on Sunday issued a statement from Mr.

Giuliani and another campaign lawyer, Jenna Ellis , disavowing Ms.
Powell .

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Inside the Wild and

Ms. Powell’s role on the Trump team was never clear. She did not Wonderful World of
appear in court at any of the dozen or so hearings so far in election- Mushrooms

elated cases, nor did she sign any of the hundreds of filings in
The Glowing Secret
nearly 40 election lawsuits submitted by the Trump campaign. That Mammals
How then did she become a public face of Mr. Trump’s legal team, Have Been Hiding

which Ms. Ellis described at the news conference as an “elite strike

force,” with Ms. Powell at her side?

The Michael Flynn case

Ms. Powell did not have much of a reputation in conservative legal
circles until last year when she took on the case of Michael T.
Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, who had pleaded
guilty to lying to the F.B.I. but later sought to withdraw his plea.
The case became something of a cause célèbre among many
Trump loyalists, who have long insisted that the president and his
allies were the target of nefarious “deep state” law enforcement
and intelligence officials.

Ms. Powell, a native North Carolinian who began her legal career
as an assistant federal prosecutor in Texas, certainly believed that.
And through her aggressive defense of Mr. Flynn — she often used
incendiary rhetoric, accusing the F.B.I. of committing “atrocities”
against her client — she became an admired figure on the right and
a frequent guest on conservative radio and television programs.

Her visibility in the media caught the eye of the president, who
spoke with her numerous times by phone.

While representing Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell also used her media
appearances to amplify social media posts promoting QAnon, the
baseless conspiracy theory whose proponents believe Mr. Trump is
battling a cabal of satanic pedophiles. But this approach did not
hurt her in the eyes of the president’s defenders, including
Attorney General William P. Barr. After her attempts to get the
Flynn case dismissed failed, Mr. Barr agreed to appoint a U.S.
attorney to review the case, a step that ultimately led him to direct
the Justice Department to drop the charges against her client. The
case is still in limbo.

In a statement to The New York Times earlier this year, Ms. Powell
said she had long considered “prosecutorial misconduct and
overreach” a problem. Conspiracies within the American
government have been a preoccupation of hers for some time: In
2014 she self-published a book that purports to be a seminal work
in “exposing ‘the Deep State.’”

The book arose from her work in private practice, where she spent
years representing defendants in the Enron financial scandal,
including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and James A.
Brown, a former executive at Merrill Lynch. During that time she
began to impugn the motives of one of the federal prosecutors on
the case, Andrew Weissmann, who went on to be a member of the
special counsel team under Robert S. Mueller III, who led the
investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

False claims of voter fraud

Though the false narrative that Ms. Powell laid out last week at the
news conference was new to many Americans, she had been
making those and other claims for more than a week as a frequent
guest on right-wing talk radio and cable news programs, and as a
source for pro-Trump websites like Breitbart News.

Her accusations were specific to the election, but they resembled

the claims that Mr. Trump and his supporters have made for years
about a vast web of enemies working to undermine him.

The basic case she has presented on conservative media was as

convoluted as it was far-fetched: Venezuela, Cuba and other
communist nations were behind a plot to hack into voting
machines and steal millions of votes from Mr. Trump, with the help
of a secret algorithm.

In an interview last week on the top-rated “Rush Limbaugh Show”

— in which she spoke for nearly 20 minutes and faced no
skepticism from the guest host, Mark Steyn — Ms. Powell claimed
that the voting machines in question had been designed to rig
elections for the former ruler of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, who died
in 2013. They were “so hackable a 15-year-old could do it,” she said.
And she cited unnamed “math experts” she had supposedly
consulted who told her how an algorithm added votes for President
Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s totals.

In an interview the day before on Fox Business, Ms. Powell also

said the conspiracy involved “dead people” who voted “in massive
numbers” — again offering no proof — and described how
fraudulent paper ballots were also part of the scheme.

Speaking early last week to the right-wing radio host Mark Levin,
who has the fourth-largest audience in talk radio, Ms. Powell said
she had obtained an affidavit from someone purportedly present
when the scheme was hatched by pro-Chávez forces in Venezuela
to rig his elections.

Because of her involvement in the Flynn case, the pro-Trump

media often presented her as an expert with unimpeachable
credentials.

“Sidney Powell is no joke,” declared one Breitbart article published

last week, which mentioned her early career as a federal
prosecutor and her work for Mr. Flynn. Mr. Limbaugh, too, told his
audience last week that he seriously doubts she would be putting
her credibility on the line if she hadn’t uncovered serious
wrongdoing.

Other Trump allies were less convinced that her claims should be
taken seriously. Tucker Carlson of Fox News said last week that
when he pressed Ms. Powell, she failed to produce any evidence to
support the elaborate conspiracy she purported to have uncovered.
His dissent was not appreciated by the president’s defenders, or by
Ms. Powell, who said Mr. Carlson had been “very insulting,
demanding and rude” to her.

Despite initial praise from the president, who announced less than
two weeks ago that she had been added to his team of “ wonderful
lawyers ,” it was never clear during her brief time with the
campaign what her job was supposed to be. Her efforts on behalf of
the Trump campaign appeared to be largely limited to public
relations She has defended the president and attacked the integrity
of the vote solely on Twitter, on television and at news conferences,
acting more as a publicity agent than a lawyer.

She has said she plans to file a suit in Georgia but hasn’t yet. It is
unclear whether that work will continue now that the Trump
campaign has cut her loose.

Trump’s Campaign to Undermine the Election

Trump Team Disavows Lawyer Who Peddled

Conspiracy Theories on Voting
Nov. 22, 2020

Trump’s Legal Team Sets a Precedent for Lowering

the Bar
Nov. 20, 2020

Giuliani Is Said to Seek $20,000 a Day Payment for

Trump Legal Work
Nov. 17, 2020

Jeremy W. Peters covers national politics. His other assignments in his decade at The
Times have included covering the financial markets, the media, New York politics and
two presidential campaigns. He is also an MSNBC contributor. More about Jeremy W.
Peters
Alan Feuer covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about
mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption and El
Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The Times in 1999. More
about Alan Feuer
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 24, 2020 , Section A , Page 17 of the New York edition with the
headline: How ‘Wonderful’ Lawyer Who Pushed Conspiracies Lost Confidence of Trump . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
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