Sidney Powell

Sidney Katherine Powell (born May 1, 1955) is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and conspiracy theorist who attempted to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. In August 2023, she was indicted along with Donald Trump and eighteen others in the prosecution related to the 2020 election in Georgia, arising from the attempt by the former president and his allies to subvert the election outcome in Georgia and other key states lost by Trump. In October 2023, as part of an agreement with Georgia prosecutors, she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties. She was sentenced to six years of probation and agreed to testify against the other defendants.Powell began her career as an assistant United States attorney in the Western District of Texas. During her tenure, she prosecuted Jimmy Chagra, who was implicated in the May 1979 assassination of United States district judge John H. Wood Jr.In 2003 she represented James Brown, a Merrill Lynch executive involved in the Enron scandal; a decade later she wrote Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice to denounce the judicial corruption she perceived in Brown's trial.In 2019, Powell defended retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn in United States v. Flynn. She claimed that Flynn was framed by a covert "deep state" operation, and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

In 2020, Powell joined the legal team of then-President Trump in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. She alleged that a secret international cabal involving communists, "globalists", George Soros, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), the Clinton Foundation, the CIA, and thousands of Democratic and Republican officials—including then-Trump ally and Georgia governor Brian Kemp—used voting machines to transfer millions of votes away from Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Powell continued filing election lawsuits independently in district courts, and ultimately lost four federal lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. After several interviews in which Powell spread election fraud lies, Trump's legal team distanced itself from her, though she continued to meet with the president in the White House. After she accused the election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic of engaging in a conspiracy to rig the election, both companies sued her for defamation.In August 2021, Michigan federal judge Linda Vivienne Parker formally sanctioned Texas conspiracy theorist L. Lin Wood, Powell, and seven other pro-Trump lawyers for their suit seeking to overturn Trump's election loss. She determined the nine attorneys had participated in "a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process ... by filing baseless and frivolous lawsuits in order to undermine public confidence in the democratic process". The judge ordered them to pay the state of Michigan and the City of Detroit for their expenses in defending against the lawsuit. The court also referred Powell and the other lawyers to state disciplinary authorities for possible disbarment for ethics violations. The State Bar of Texas' Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline brought a disciplinary action against Powell, alleging that she violated the rules of professional conduct governing lawyers; that proceeding is pending.