Fox News contributor Karl Rove blasted pro-Trump “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell on Tuesday, joining a chorus of Trump advisers and White House officials pushing President Donald Trump to stop turning to the conspiracy-spewing attorney for advice on overthrowing the election.
In a series of reportedly bonkers Oval Office meetings in recent days, the president has suggested making Powell a special counsel on election fraud, given consideration to former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s idea of declaring martial law to “re-run” key swing state elections, and discussed issuing an executive order for the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines. (The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday afternoon that Trump has told Powell that he does not intend to name her as special counsel.)
Interviewing Rove on Tuesday’s Bill Hemmer Reports, guest host John Roberts noted that the president also recently met with several Republican lawmakers about a plan to block Congress from formally counting Electoral College votes in a last-ditch attempt to subvert the 2020 election and keep Trump in office.
ADVERTISEMENT
“And then there’s other things that have been kicked around too, which the president denies, like bringing in the military to rerun elections in certain states. What do you make of that?” Roberts added.
“I’m going to accept the president at his word,” Rove replied. “We do know that General Flynn suggested that. He did so publicly. And talk about an idiotic idea!”
“No president would have the authority to do that,” the longtime Republican strategist continued. “So General Flynn may have served honorably, but he’s not a constitutional law scholar. When it comes to giving good advice to the president about politics, he’s at the bottom of the list in my opinion.”
Roberts, meanwhile, brought up the fact that Powell has been a frequent presence at the White House recently, despite the Trump legal team dropping her last month after a bizarre press conference that featured her pushing an outlandish conspiracy about corrupt voting software stealing votes from Trump.
Adding that Powell is now claiming she’s been “banned” from the White House, Roberts reported that she still has the ability to call Trump and isn’t on a “do-not-admit list,” further stating that many senior White House officials would prefer she stay away from the president.
“Mrs. Powell has peddled theories that have little basis in fact,” Rove exclaimed. “The idea that Hugo Chavez from the grave was somehow involved in stealing this year’s election.”
Powell, along with other Trump allies and the president himself, have repeatedly and baselessly claimed that Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines and software were deliberately used to flip millions of votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden in battleground states. She has also alleged that the long-dead Chavez, liberal philanthropist George Soros, the CIA, Georgia Republicans and Chinese communist money are all part of this nefarious plot.
Rove, who is currently leading the GOP’s fundraising effort in the Georgia Senate runoff elections, continued to lash out at Powell, namely over her “Kraken” voter fraud lawsuits that have been laughed out of court.
After noting that one of Powell’s “expert military intelligence” witnesses was actually a mechanic who couldn’t pass the military intelligence entrance exam and another of her experts confused Minnesota for Michigan, Rove pleaded with Trump to dump Powell.
“What she has done to sorta throw mud upon the president through her antics is unbelievable,” he grumbled. “The president has been so ill-served by this crowd, and she's chief among them.”
Rove’s disavowal of Powell comes a day after Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani—who has peddled his own series of unhinged and insane election conspiracies—distanced the Trumpist attorney from the president, saying Powell only “speaks for herself” and not the administration or Trump.
The harsh assessment of Powell also follows Fox News airing a series of fact-checks debunking phony election claims about Smartmatic, which issued a legal threat of action and retraction demand to the network and other right-wing outlets.
“Fox News told its millions of viewers and readers that Smartmatic was founded by [the late Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez, that its software was designed to fix elections, and that Smartmatic conspired with others to defraud the American people and fix the 2020 U.S. election by changing, inflating, and deleting votes,” Smartmatic’s letter read, citing numerous comments made on Fox airwaves by its hosts, commentators, and Powell herself.
