Sidney Powell is a tall, dignified-looking attorney who became something of a cult figure among Trumpsters.  Shortly after the election, Powell unleashed her “Kraken” in four legal cases aimed at overturning or at least modifying the 2020 election results of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  None succeeded.

I remember watching Powell on television, where she talked confidently about foreign governments that used voting machines to shave votes from one candidate so they could be given to the other candidate.  These foreign voting irregularities happened many years ago.

Powell cited a credible witness in support of her claims: CIA subcontractor Navid Keshavarz-Nia.  Regarding this man, the New York Times used to be very complimentary.  It reported that his co-workers in U.S. Intelligence felt that Keshavarz-Nia “was always the smartest person in the room.”  Keshavarz-Nia filed an affidavit that made many assertions supportive of Powell’s arguments.

To say the least, these claims were intriguing.  However, I kept waiting for Powell to slide her story into the current decade.  Were her claims applicable to the 2020 election?  After all, elections had changed in several ways, such as these:

1. During the last 15 years, most states started using paper backups.  In a post-election audit, those could be used to spot electronic cheating.
2. There was a proliferation of mail-in ballots, and they are inherently more susceptible to identity theft.  (Just ask Jimmy Carter.)
3. In the 2020 election, many states dropped or severely reduced signature-matching requirements.  That made the illegal harvesting of ballots safe and easy.

To me, cheating with machines is possible but no longer necessary unless the fraudsters miscalculate.  (For example, they do not submit enough harvested ballots to alter the election results.)  If they have enough time, motivation, access to registration lists, and access to ballots, then stuffing drop boxes with harvested ballots is probably the fraud methodology of choice.  And that is exactly what happened in the 2020 election.  If you doubt it, watch 2000 Mules again.

For these reasons, I was skeptical that Powell had witnesses who could testify regarding the recent use of machines to shave votes.  Although it was theoretically possible that Powell’s conjectures were correct, she never produced the evidence.  That only hurt the person she was trying to help: President Donald Trump.

Shortly after January 6, Powell was, apparently, part of a group that sought to test one of the Georgia voting machines.  This is being portrayed as the crime of the century, and it led to Powell’s recent plea deal.

Powell pleads guilty

By now you have heard that Sidney Powell pleaded guilty in the so-called Georgia election interference case.  However, it seems that she has not recanted her views regarding election fraud.  Her guilty plea concerns only a misguided effort to test an election machine in Coffee County.  It is barely a crime at all, since there was no criminal intent.  The so-called Powell conspirators made pictures of ballots after getting permission from Misty Hampton, the Coffee County elections administrator.  No one was trying to destroy records, change votes, or damage equipment.  Big deal!

Of course, the mainstream media (MSM) are not satisfied to see Powell get hit with a few little misdemeanor charges related to her efforts to examine a voting machine.  After all, she is not even going to jail!

The MSM want to portray this as a serious crime involving the fraudulent election claims of Donald J. Trump.  That sells copy in left-wing media.  In a rewriting of history, a slew of media outlets now describe Sidney Powell as a Trump consigliere, who is now trying to distance herself from the crimes of Donald Trump.  For example, the New York Times reported on October 19, 2023:

Ahead of her Georgia Trial, Sidney Powell seeks distance from Trump. Ms. Powell, a lawyer who promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud after Donald J. Trump’s 2020 defeat, now says she never represented him or his campaign [emphasis added].

As you can see, the Times has a breaking news story: Powell “now” seeks to distance herself from Trump.  However, the story is bogus.  Trump is the one who distanced himself from Powell, and he did it long ago.

Here is what the same publication (N.Y. Times) reported way back on November 22, 2020:

Trump team disavows lawyer who peddled conspiracy theories on voting. President Trump’s campaign issued a striking repudiation of Sidney Powell, who had offered up widely derided conspiracy theories as she tried to aid the president’s baseless challenges to vote counts.

Trump’s position is not refuted by Sidney Powell, who says (through her lawyer) that she “did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign” after the election.

There is one more issue to mention.  On December 18, 2020, Powell and a few of her supporters tried to pitch a controversial idea to Trump, who rejected it.  The idea was to make Powell a special counsel to investigate election fraud.  Powell said that Trump seemed very interested in her ideas, but after “10 or 15” minutes, the meeting ended.

Here is the bottom line.  Powell pleaded guilty to a few minor misdemeanors to save herself the hassle and cost of fighting this case.  It is a nothingburger that will not affect Trump in any way — except on loony left-wing platforms.

Joe Fried is an Ohio-based CPA who has performed and reviewed hundreds of certified financial audits.  He is the author of the book Debunked? and a new book called How Elections Are Stolen.  It outlines 23 problems that must be fixed before the 2024 elections.  More information can be found at https://joefriedcpa.substack.com.

Image via Picryl.