After Sidney Powell was fired as a lawyer for the Trump campaign after making all manner of wild conspiracy theories about how the CIA and Hugo Chavez had worked with Dominion Voting Systems machines to swing the election against Trump, one could be forgiven for thinking that her 15 minutes of fame were over. But no.
She is back in the limelight for two reasons. One is that Dominion is threatening legal action against her unless she withdraws the allegations made against the company that they claim has damaged its reputation and resulted in its employees being threatened.
“As a result of your false accusations, Dominion has suffered enormous harm, and its employees have been stalked, have been harassed, and have received death threats,” the letter states. “We demand that you immediately and publicly retract your false accusations and set the record straight. If you refuse to do so and instead choose to stand by your defamatory falsehoods, that will be viewed as additional evidence of actual malice.”
But more serious is that Trump wants to give her a bigger role in his attempts to overturn the election results, to the extent of even appointing her as a special counsel to investigate election fraud, to the consternation of his other advisors who vocferously oppose the move.
President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump’s aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn’s more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.
Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden — an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said. It wasn’t clear whether Trump endorsed the idea, but others in the room forcefully pushed back and shot it down.
…One person described the meeting as “ugly” as Powell and Flynn accused others of abandoning the President as he works to overturn the results of the election.
…“It was heated — people were really fighting it out in the Oval, really forceful about it,” one of the sources said.
One of the sources described an escalating sense of concern among Trump’s aides, even those who have weathered his previous controversies, about what steps he might take next as his term comes to an end.
I am a little surprised by this report, mainly that Trump seemed to have lost control of the meeting. Given how little time is left, I would have thought that he would have come down on Powell’s side and told her to get kraken immediately with her ‘investigations’. (No, this whole post was not just a set up for that pun.) But it is the attorney general who appoints special counsels and Barr is not going to do so since he has publicly said that he has seen no evidence of fraud. But he is leaving in a day or two and it is not clear what his replacement will do, though career official will likely oppose the move.
The idea of declaring martial law and re-running the election and Giuliani’s suggestion of seizing the voting machines is really talk about staging a coup and the fact that it was openly discussed as just one of many policy options is staggering. We have become numb to extremism.
They are so extreme that even Mitt Romney is shaking his head.
Donald Trump’s flirtation with declaring martial law in battleground states and appointing a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to help his attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden are “really sad” and “nutty and loopy”, Mitt Romney said on Sunday.
“He’s leaving Washington with a whole series of conspiracy theories and things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their head wondering what in the world has gotten into this man,” the Utah Republican senator said.
Nothing has ‘gotten into this man’. He was always like this but you did not want to see it. What Romney and his Republican allies have done is cheer him along as long as he was president, which made him think that he could do anything he wants.
Mano, I think there is a typo in your paragraph after the second blockquote. You write “But it is the attorney general who appoints special counsels and Barr is going to do so since he has publicly said that he has seen no evidence of fraud.” I suspect you meant to write Barr is not going to do so.
[Thanks! I corrected it. -- Mano]
This TPM article (Criminal Conspiracy) is behind a pay(?)wall, but as per an except in Pharyngula’s current [Pandemic and] Political Madness All the Time thread here at FtB, the elephant in the room at the meeting was Flynn (following is excerpted from that excerpt):
Release the kraken pun.
Trump is an imbecile who orients toward people who tell him what he wants to hear.
Raw Story has an interesting article about Yertle’s own reelection probably having been stolen, based on a large number of oddities in KY voter stats (Democrats voting for the Turtle and Biden, more voters on the rolls than people eligible in the districts, Democratic bastions that have never voted for McConjob until this election, etc., etc.).
I’m generally skeptical about conspiracy theories, but we’ve seen time and time and time again over the last decades how every Republican accusation is actually a confession, so I’m not finding this as hard to swallow as I normally would. I hope someone will point out why this does not hold water and I can stop thinking about it, but it sure sounds like a serious investigation might be in order. Not that it will happen either way.
Dominion also threatened to sick their lawyers on FoxNews for defamation. Suddenly all talk about how Dominion rigged the election went away from FoxNews. That said it has been migrated to NewsMax and OANN.
And Powell, IIRC could be someone other lawsuits, is whining that the supreme court is only taking her petition(s) on the 14th of January
What happens if Trump puts forth Sidney Powell as Attorney General after Barr? Perhaps Flynn as SoD. If the intent is to cross-wire the operational structures of government, Trump does seem to thrive on chaos, I would think that would be an obvious move.
@lorn #7:
In practical terms? I think most likely nothing. Most things take awhile or a lot of people agreeing to shortcuts. If those two got in now they’d get the slowest of slow marches on everything they did. The actual work still gets done by underlings. And they’re only going to have 12.5 business days to do all that damage in.
I think the real problems are more likely to come from people who have been harming an organization for awhile. They’ve had time to figure out how to inflict the most damage. Some newbie who has less than two weeks to figure out what they can even do is not that likely to do more than bother their coworkers for a couple weeks.