Trump campaign cuts ties with attorney Sidney
Powell after bizarre election fraud claims
Powell has made a raft of incorrect claims, including
that Georgia’s voting software was created at the behest of late Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez
Associated
Press
Mon 23 Nov
2020 03.26 GMT
1149
Perhaps Sidney Powell has gone too far even for Rudy
Giuliani this time.
The Trump
campaign’s legal team has moved to distance itself from the firebrand
conservative attorney after a tumultuous few days in which Powell made multiple
incorrect statements about the election voting process, unspooled complex
conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.
“Sidney
Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal
team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,”
Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement on
Sunday.
Trump
himself has heralded Powell’s involvement, tweeting last week that she was part
of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
There was
no immediate clarification from the campaign and Powell did not immediately
return an email seeking comment.
The
statement hints at chaos in a legal team that has lost case after case in its
efforts to overturn the results of the 3 November election. Law firms have
withdrawn from cases, and in the latest setback, Matthew Brann, a Republican US
district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to
disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.
“This claim,
like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two
distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a
damning order, issued on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign
filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.
It came
after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent
states from certifying their vote totals.
The
statement on Powell was the latest sign of wariness over her approach even
within some conservative circles. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show
last week that his team had asked Powell for evidence to support her claims,
but that Powell had provided none.
Powell made
headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by
Giuliani and Ellis, she incorrectly suggested that a server hosting evidence of
voting irregularities was located in Germany, that voting software used by
Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in
favour of Biden.
However,
her contributions that day were largely overshadowed by Giuliani’s hair dye
malfunction.
In a
subsequent interview with Newsmax on Saturday, she appeared to accuse Georgia’s
Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state of being
part of a conspiracy involving a voting-system contract award that she contends
harmed Trump’s re-election bid.
“Georgia’s
probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr Kemp and the
secretary of state need to go with it,” she said, later adding that a lawsuit
she planned to file against the state would be “biblical”.
The status
of that lawsuit was unclear on Sunday night.
Powell, a
former federal prosecutor, took over last year as the lead lawyer for Trump’s
former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in special
counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Since then,
a federal judge has rejected her claims of prosecutorial misconduct and has
responded quizzically to some of her arguments, including her suggestion at a
hearing several weeks ago that her conversations with Trump about the Flynn
case were privileged.
She has
supported a Justice Department motion to dismiss the prosecution, a request
that remains pending before US district judge Emmet Sullivan.
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