Conspiracy theorist attorney Sidney Powell was at the White House on Sunday night following a Friday night White House meeting with former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has suggested imposing martial law to re-run the election.
CNN reports on the Sunday meeting: “She was spotted by CNN leaving the residence side of the White House shortly before 9 p.m. ET. Powell denied that she was meeting with Trump, but when pressed again as to whether she met with the President or other White House officials, she retorted: ‘It would be none of your business.' Powell declined to answer when asked whether the President plans to appoint her as a special counsel to investigate alleged voter fraud…”
The NYT reported on Friday's meeting: “Mr. Giuliani joined the discussion by phone initially, while Ms. Powell was at the White House for a meeting that became raucous and involved people shouting at each other at times, according to one of the people briefed on what took place. Ms. Powell's client, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom the president recently pardoned, was also there, two of the people briefed on the meeting said. Some senior administration officials drifted in and out of the meeting.”
Vanity Fair adds: “At one point in the meeting, Trump apparently asked about Powell receiving security clearances to conduct her work, even as the president's outgoing attorney general, William Barr, said the Justice Department has investigated found no evidence of election-altering fraud. As others in the room pointed out Powell's failure thus far to support her fraud claims with verifiable evidence, the attorney “accused other Trump advisers of being quitters,” according to the Times. Another reported idea weighed during Friday's meeting was an executive order to seize voting machines to examine them for alleged fraud, after Giuliani separately asked the Department of Homeland Security to do so earlier in the week—apparently to no avail, according to the Times, as he was told the department does not have such authority.”
Powell, as you may recall, was thrown under the bus by Trump's legal team in November after making some insane claims at Rudy's hair dye press conference, because her theories were apparently even too out there for them.
The Guardian reported: “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.”
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Trump adviser Jenna Ellis released a statement on Sunday distancing themselves from her and disavowing any association: “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.”
Powell responded: “I agree with the statement today. I will represent #WeThePeople and seek the Truth. I intend to expose all the fraud and let the chips fall where they may. We will not allow the foundations of this great Republic to be destroyed by abject fraud or our votes for President Trump and other Republicans to be stolen by foreign interests or anyone else.”
Meanwhile, Politico riffs on Trump's mental breakdown: “His current crisis, though, his eviction from the White House now just a month out, is something altogether different and new. ‘He's never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can't escape from,' Mary Trump, his niece and the author of the fiercely critical and bestselling book about him and their family, told me. ‘We continue to wait for him to accept reality, for him to concede, and that is something he is not capable of doing,' added Bandy Lee, the forensic psychiatrist from Yale who's spent the last four years trying to warn the world about Trump and the ways in which he's disordered and dangerous. ‘Being a loser,' she said, for Trump is tantamount to ‘psychic death.' The combination of an unprecedented rebuke meeting an uncommonly vulnerable ego has some people wondering if there is a chance that Trump's unusual actions suggest something potentially more dire. Could he be on his way to a mental breakdown?”
