Is Sidney Powell insane?

Politics & Elections
#1

If you haven’t heard of this woman, she is one of the lead lawyers for Donald Trump’s election-overturning campaign of odd lawsuits. She is an actual lawyer with a long resume of doing legitimately lawyery things.

Powell’s claims regarding the election are, even by the grim standards of today’s discourse, lunacy. Today she id an interview on Newsmax in which her interviewer openly told her her claim was “nuts,” and for Newsmax to call a Trumpist nuts takes some nuttery.

It’s going to be hard for me to sum up Powell’s theory, such as it is - well, it’s impossible, because it’s just batshit. I believe her position is that some 7,000,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden using “algorithms” in Dominion voting machines, at the behest of George Soros, Hugo Chavez (yes, I know Hugo’s been dead for awhile now) the Clintons of course, and literally thousands of other people. Many Republicans, including Georgia governor Kemp and Georgia SOS Raffensberger, are secretly on Dominion’s payroll and doing their nefarious bidding. Bernie Sanders was robbed of the 2016 nomination by Dominion, and knows it, but is also on their payroll.

I’m just scratching the surface here. Even by Trumpian standards it’s bananas. It’s sub-Alex Jones. It’s QAnon stuff, and to be honest, Powell does not look or sound like she is bullshitting (whereas her counterparts Rudy Giulani and Jenna Ellis are obviously bullshitting.) She looks and sounds like she is emotionally disturbed. What’s going on with this lady?

#2

Absolute power Trump corrupts absolutely.

#3

Her content is being produced for an audience of one. I’ll let you guess who that “one individual” might be.

#4

“Everything Trump touches dies.”

#5

The recent footage I’ve seen certainly showed a heroic struggle with reality, but is this any more than any lawyer (?ethically) representing their client’s interests and instructions, which might be to deny everything even though your fingerprints are on your weapon and the whole thing was filmed, and you later baked an “I done it” cake?

Is there an appropriate, presumably Latin, legal term for ‘don’t call me batshit until you’ve met my client’?

#6

Here’s the funny thing- the results more or less matched the polls, except that the GOP did somewhat better than expected.

If there was massive fraud, it would go against polling.

Of course the True trumpists are eating this shit up.

#7

You may have not had immersed yourself in a Trump message board like I did for a month prior to Election Day. They were convinced that the polling was so wrong that not only would Trump win, he would win in a landslide. Several Trump posters asked, in complete and utter seriousness, if Trump could carry New York and California.

Another Trump supporter, post-election, suggested on another forum that it is possible that California has been a red state all along and the past few decades of California being blue were a myth.

Another posted that a server seized in a raid indicated that Trump had actually won 410 electoral votes, but that this fact was obscured.

It’s not about “Biden was leading in the polls, and widely anticipated to win, but Trump performed better than expected, so why are Trumpers complaining?” No - these people genuinely thought Trump was headed towards a sure landslide victory.

#8

Hell, look at Loren Culp here in WA. He lost by over half a million votes, in the worst showing for a gubernatorial candidate in this state in four decades, in a state where no Republican has been elected governor since 1980, hasn’t voted Republican for president since Reagan, and currently has a grand total of one Republican holding statewide elected office, and he’s still claiming the election was rigged against him.

When Prophecy Fails certainly feels relevant right now.

#9

Here’s a 20 minute phone call interview she had with Newsmax an hour ago; she describes the coming legal battle as “biblical”.


She’s a lunatic.
#10

From this article:

(Hasen is a law prof in California specialising in election law.)

#11

As Kevin O’Leary once (in)famously said “You’re a nut bar factor 6.” Sidney Powell is off the charts on the O’Leary nut bar scale.

#12

From the Wikipedia page for Dominion Voting Systems:

#13

Trump has failed. He got elected but he couldn’t get a second term and he’s heading for former presidenthood.

But a lot of the people around Trump are flying higher than they ever would have otherwise. Regardless of whether she wins or loses, Sidney Powell is a now a lawyer for the President. She can coast along with this for years.

So while Powell might be insane, there are plenty of sane reasons for her to be doing and saying what she is.

#14

she grew up here in NC. She got her UNC BA in just 2 years which is certainly not easy to do. Back then online classes did not exist. I assume she went to summer school every year. She finished UNC law school at 23. She worked as a federal prosecutor for a while. Her friends say she was not interested in politics as far as they knew

#15

I heard some of her insane comments during my lunch break listening to CSPAN last week. There’s one thing these Trump election lawsuits have in common so far, and that is that the claims made at the press conferences ain’t the claims made before a judge.
All she’s got to do is prove it, right? Let’s see her make that claim before a judge. It’s too bad that so many Americans believe the dumbest fucking things, but that’s where we are. Sigh. It’s too early to start drinking.

#16

I saw an article mocking her. I reluctantly clicked on it, for it was written by Tucker Carlson.

Once you skip over the conspiracy stuff, mostly pro-Trump/anti-Democratic Party but including stuff on UFOs (!), he said that Powell should release this proof if she has any, and he clearly doubted she had any. Tucker Carlson thinks she’s full of BS.

The last swing state certifies tomorrow, and no real work gets done on the weekend, so if Ms. Powell had actual proof of fraud, she would have released it already. Of course now we have to worry about faithless electors, pressure being put on Pennsylvania (which is supposed to certify election results tomorrow), etc.

When is it too early on a weekend?

#17

Well, now I know the name of the weird looking woman who was always behind Oozy.

#18

Not much to see here.

Every profoundly evil government in history finds plenty of willing enablers happy to sell their country for a not so large pile of money or power, however fleeting.

She’s being offered something of great value to her for selling her soul to the Debil. That something may be positive, like promise of a cabinet post, or negative, like a promise these deepfakes won’t be delivered to the news media and state Bar.

#19

Exactly. Trump’s only got months left. But for Powell, this fame can last a lifetime. She is now a household name whereas, mere weeks ago, nobody in the nation knew her. After Trump leaves office, she’ll still have a lot of useful notoriety and name recognition to do things.

#20

Has anyone asked her–or any other Trump enabler–why, if the D’s are so good at fixing elections that they can change 7 million votes, they didn’t fix a few senatorial and house elections?