Sidney Powell
Sidney Katherine Powell is an American attorney and former federal prosecutor. In August 2023, she was indicted along with Donald Trump and eighteen others in the Georgia election case. In October 2023, she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties. She was sentenced to six years of probation and agreed to testify against the other defendants.
Prior to her political involvement, Powell served as an assistant United States attorney in the Western District of Texas. She was best known for prosecuting high-profile drug smuggler Jimmy Chagra and, as private counsel, defending Merrill Lynch executives in proceedings related to the Enron scandal.
Later in her career, Powell began promoting conspiracy theories. Powell defended retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn in United States v. Flynn, claiming that he was framed by a covert "deep state" operation, and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with QAnon. After the 2020 election, she claimed that there had been a global conspiracy to tamper with voting machines, despite lacking evidence. After she accused the election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic of engaging in a conspiracy to rig the election, both companies sued her for defamation.
In 2020, Powell joined the legal team of then-President Trump in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. Powell continued filing lawsuits independently and ultimately lost four federal lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. In August 2021, Michigan federal judge Linda Vivienne Parker formally sanctioned Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers for their frivolous suit seeking to overturn Trump's election loss. The attorneys were ordered to repay the legal expenses incurred by the defense and recommended for disbarment. The State Bar of Texas' Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline brought a disciplinary action against Powell, alleging that she violated the rules of professional conduct governing lawyers. The Fifth District of Texas Court of Appeals in Dallas, led by a three-judge panel, all Democrats, concluded on April 17, 2024, that the State Bar of Texas' arguments were without merit. Powell again avoided bar sanctions on January 31, 2025.
Early life and education
Sidney Katherine Powell was born on May 1, 1955, in Durham, North Carolina, grew up in the city of Raleigh, and knew from an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer.She graduated from Needham Broughton High School and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts. At the age of 19, she was accepted into the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she graduated in 1978 with a Juris Doctor degree. She began her legal career as one of the youngest federal prosecutors in the U.S.
Career
From 1978 through 1988, Powell was an assistant United States attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas and the Eastern District of Virginia, where she handled civil and criminal trial work. She was appointed Appellate Section Chief for the Western District of Texas and then the Northern District of Texas.Powell established her own law firm in 1993 in Dallas, Texas. Around 2002, she began to practice in Asheville, North Carolina, but moved back to Texas later.
Prosecution for assassination of Judge John H. Wood
Powell was best known as one of the prosecutors in the 1979 trial of Jimmy Chagra who was accused in the assassination of John H. Wood Jr., a federal judge from Texas. He was acquitted of involvement in the assassination but convicted on other charges. He later admitted to his role in the conspiracy to murder the judge.Defense of Enron
In the 2000s, Powell represented firms and executives involved in the Enron scandal, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and former Merrill Lynch executive Jim Brown. She was an outspoken critic of the Enron Task Force prosecutions, and accused prosecutor Andrew Weissmann of overreach. After that, Powell wrote extensively about prosecutorial abuses in the 2014 book Licensed to Lie. The book was noticed by then-Senator Orrin Hatch, who described it as "powerful". The experience contributed to her distrust of government institutions.Comments regarding Ted Stevens
In Licensed to Lie, Powell contended that prosecutors in the corruption trial of U.S. senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, held in 2008, before federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, intentionally withheld "Brady material" they should have disclosed to the defense and that they returned Rocky Williams, a terminally ill witness, to Alaska, ostensibly so that his testimony would not exonerate Stevens. The senator was subsequently convicted of seven felony counts of corruption for failing to annually declare gifts from VECO owner Bill Allen. However, due to numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct, Attorney General Eric Holder moved to dismiss the indictment prior to sentencing, effectively vacating the conviction.Defense of Michael Flynn
After publishing her first book, Powell continued writing opinion pieces for right-leaning websites. In 2017, Weissmann joined Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation, reviving interest in Licensed to Lie from Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity. Using her status as a former federal prosecutor, Powell became a leading voice against the Mueller investigation; in a February 2018 op-ed, Powell wrote that retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn should "withdraw his guilty plea" for making false statements to the FBI, alleging "egregious government misconduct". Powell's appearances on Fox News to discuss the Flynn case were noticed by President Donald Trump, and the two spoke on several occasions. To raise money for Flynn's defense, Powell spoke at a November 2018 conference, where she met Flynn's siblings. They agreed that Flynn was the victim of a "deep state plot" and had only pleaded guilty because he was coerced.Flynn released his law firm of Covington & Burling and retained Powell to serve as his lead attorney in June 2019. On the same day this was disclosed, Powell sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr requesting the "utmost confidentiality" and argued that Flynn's prosecution was due to "corruption of our beloved government institutions for what appears to be political purposes". Among other things, she requested that Barr appoint an outsider to investigate. Six months later, Barr appointed Jeffrey Jensen to conduct an investigation.
The Justice Department filed a motion to drop Flynn's prosecution with presiding federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan in May 2020. Sullivan did not immediately grant the motion; Powell later requested a writ of mandamus from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to compel Sullivan to drop the case. After an initial ruling in favor of Powell by a three-judge panel of the court, the case was appealed to the full court, which denied the mandamus request in an 8–2 ruling and returned the case to Sullivan's court. Powell had argued to the full court that Sullivan's role was "ministerial", giving him no discretion but to comply with the Justice Department motion, to which judge Thomas Griffith replied: "It's not ministerial and you know it's not. So it's not ministerial, so that means that the judge has to do some thinking about it, right?" Other judges on the court also pushed back on Powell's characterization of a federal judge's role. After Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, Sullivan dismissed the case as moot, though he stated he probably would have denied the Justice Department motion had the case proceeded. According to a Justice Department official, the Justice Department was not consulted about the pardon.
Soon after taking the Flynn case, Powell had accused the Justice Department of prosecutorial misconduct against Flynn; in a footnote to a June 2020 court brief, the department described Powell's allegations as "unfounded and provide no basis for impugning the prosecutors from the D.C. United States Attorney's Office".
Powell has been described as a proponent of conspiracy theories about Flynn, namely that he was framed by members of the "deep state" who were trying to eject President Donald Trump from office.
2020 presidential election
Days before the 2020 presidential election, Dennis Montgomery, a software designer with a history of making dubious claims, asserted that a government supercomputer program would be used to switch votes from Trump to Biden on voting machines. Powell promoted the conspiracy theory on Lou Dobbs Tonight on November 6, and again on November 8, 2020, on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business program,...claiming to have "evidence that that is exactly what happened".On December 10, – long after other hosts had started to push her for more evidence – Dobbs continued to praise her.
"Sidney Powell, thank you for all you're doing," "It is the Lord's work."
The Washington Post indicated Bartiromo asked Powell for proof of specifics of voting fraud made by her, supposedly including dead voters casting ballots, ballots lacking Trump's name, and a postal employee's confession that he had postdated mailed ballots. She said "Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software." "I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that." Powell alleged that a secret international cabal involving communists, "globalists", George Soros, Hugo Chávez, the Clinton Foundation, the CIA, and thousands of Democratic and Republican officials—including then-Trump ally and Georgia governor Brian Kemp—used voting machines to transfer millions of votes away from Trump in the 2020 presidential election. She also asserted that the CIA ignored warnings about the software, and urged Trump to fire director Gina Haspel. Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, characterized the supercomputer claim as "nonsense" and a "hoax". CISA described the 2020 election as "the most secure in American history", with "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised".