Sidney Powell, a prominent conservative lawyer who backed former US president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, on Thursday pleaded guilty and could testify against Trump and others in election racketeering case in Fulton County, Georgia.
Powell, 68, who was set to go on trial on Monday, is the second of the 19 defendants to plead guilty in the case, in which Trump is also charged. She agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, meaning she could detail at trial her interactions with him and his inner circle after the election. She is also barred from communicating with codefendants, witnesses and the media until the case is over.
Powell appeared before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee to plead guilty to six misdemeanor counts of intentionally interfering with the performance of election duties. The agreement reached with prosecutors means she will avoid the most serious racketeering charge, a felony carrying up to 20 years in prison.
Photo: AFP
A person familiar with the situation said close advisers to Trump were surprised by the news that Powell had decided to plead guilty, but were not concerned that any testimony or other cooperation she would provide would hurt his defense.
Under her deal, Powell faces a sentence of six years of probation — 12 months per count — and a US$6,000 fine and US$2,700 in restitution. She was also required to write an apology letter to Georgian residents.
As part of the deal, Powell on Wednesday night gave a recorded statement about her actions, prosecutors said.
The guilty plea is “hugely significant,” said Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University. “Powell may very well be a central person in the overall alleged RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] conspiracy. She could quite possibly be a damaging witness against Donald Trump.”
When asked about the Powell plea, Trump’s Georgia-based attorney Steve Sadow said in an e-mail: “Assuming truthful testimony in the Fulton County case, it will be favorable to my overall defense strategy.”
No trial date for Trump has been set in Georgia. Trump is separately facing federal charges in Washington that he conspired to obstruct the 2020 election results. Powell matches the description of one of the unindicted co-conspirators, but she has not been charged in that case.
If Powell testifies, she would likely be questioned closely about some of her election fraud claims that had no apparent basis in fact. Powell was an architect of the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged by voting-machine companies and foreign hackers. Shortly after the election she appeared at a press conference alongside Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, where she alleged a plot to swing the election to US President Joe Biden that involved voting-machine tampering and Venezuela.
She was kicked off the campaign legal team in late November 2020, but continued to press false election fraud claims and advise Trump. Vowing to release the “kraken” — an allusion to the ancient mythological monster — Powell pursued multiple failed election contests in courts across the nation to try to overturn Biden’s wins in battleground states.
In mid-December, she and other conservative activists clashed with White House officials during an Oval Office meeting with Trump. Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel at the time, told congressional investigators that he had pushed back on a proposal to appoint Powell as a special counsel to probe voter fraud claims.
Her guilty plea focused on her role in conspiring to unlawfully access election equipment in Coffee County, Georgia, and interfere with the duties of the county’s election director at the time, Misty Hampton, a codefendant. Hampton has pleaded not guilty.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS