Sidney Powell footed the bill over an effort to access and copy data from a Georgia county’s election systems in the hopes of somehow proving election fraud against Donald Trump, according to a sprawling report on her alleged part in the plot produced by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
The report, which runs to nearly 400 pages and was obtained by The New Yorker, lays out how Powell was contractually obligated to ensure that the work by the data-services firm she hired to carry out the breach was legal—which, of course, it wasn’t. Much of the report itself, according to The New Yorker, uses information provided by the Coalition for Good Governance, an elections-watchdog group that had earlier obtained discovery rights.
Powell, a Texas-based attorney with ties to Trump’s legal team, was one of 19 people, including Trump, to be indicted by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in August for trying to subvert election results in Georgia. On Thursday, Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts related to the scheme; as part of her plea deal, she will be required to testify against her co-defendants if called upon.
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Powell’s plea came a few weeks after her attorney, Brian Rafferty, tested out a number of last-minute legal strategies. At one point, Rafferty argued that his client’s case “really boils down” to the activity of just one day: Jan. 7, 2021, the day when the firm’s team visited the elections office of Coffee County, Georgia.
“That’s it,” Rafferty said. “The whole case is about whether or not that visit was authorized and what, if any, role she had in it, which is very little, if none.”
The bureau’s report, according to The New Yorker, “complicates” Rafferty’s argument, making it clear that Powell underwrote the first part of the plot, which also took place across more than a single day. On Jan. 7, employees of the firm, SullivanStrickler, were caught on surveillance video being welcomed into the county elections office by a local GOP official, Cathy Latham. (Latham has been indicted in the Fulton County case, and has pleaded not guilty.) Over the next few days, footage shows more conspirators arriving at the office.
According to the bureau’s report, a retainer agreement sent by SullivanStrickler charging $26,000 for one day of work in Coffee County by four employees bears Powell’s name. She paid for the firm’s services through her nonprofit legal advocacy group, Defending the Republic. Testimony collected by the bureau also reveals that Powell oversaw the work done in Coffee County with the help of the firm’s chief operations officer, Paul Maggio.
The report also explains that the firm “did not do any type of independent due diligence to ensure the legality of their work,” because, as one company executive put it, “the majority of SullivanStrickler’s customers were lawyers, who are officers of the court and as such, the affirmation in the agreement indicating the proper authority for the proposed work was suitable.” Or to put it another way: Powell was on the hook when it came to conducting due diligence to certify that the firm’s work was all above board.
SullivanStrickler went to Coffee County on the invitation of another sympathetic local official, Misty Hampton, the county’s former elections supervisor and another co-defendant in the Fulton County case. (She has pleaded not guilty.) “Per the Ga law I do not see any problem assisting you with anything yall need accordance to Ga. law,” she wrote in a Dec. 31 message to a lawyer representing Giuliani and Latham, who were at that point trying to prove the existence of supposed voting machine issues to the Georgia legislature.
“Yall are welcome in our office anytime,” Hampton added.
The report, according to The New Yorker, disputes that this constituted formal permission for SullivanStrickler to paw through the county’s elections data, noting that no official invitation was “generated or agreed upon by Coffee County Officials granting outside access to their voting equipment.”
That didn’t stop Trump’s team from pushing forward, however, with one of his attorneys messaging a SullivanStrickler employee the day after that “we were granted access -by written invitation! - to the Coffee County Systens [sic]. Yay! Putting details together now.”
Georgia’s administrative code, according to The New Yorker, prohibits anyone but election board employees to enter rooms where the elections systems or equipment is stored—something Powell would have known had she fulfilled her contractual obligation to ensure the plot’s legality.
“If Powell wrote the check with no knowledge of the illegality of the scheme, it would be a good defense,” John K. Carroll, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told The New Yorker. “With knowledge of the scheme, it is an incredibly damning act… Even the getaway driver is guilty of robbing the bank.”
A few hours before The New Yorker’s report was published on Sunday, Trump loudly and falsely proclaimed on Truth Social that Powell had “never” been his attorney.
“Sidney Powell was one of millions and millions of people who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!!!” he wrote in part. “MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS.”
While Powell never appeared as Trump’s representative in court, she was named by the former president in a Nov. 14, 2020 tweet celebrating his “truly great” legal team. Later that week, Powell joined Rudy Giuliani and attorney Jenna Ellis at an infamous news conference where the trio, presenting themselves as an “elite strike force team,” laid out baseless claims of election fraud and a series of preposterous conspiracy theories as Giuliani’s makeup began to run down his face.
Just days later, however, the Trump team distanced itself from Powell, who had begun to make the rounds on conservative news channels to push claims too far-fetched even for them.
“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” read a statement from the campaign, attributed to Giuliani and Ellis. “She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity.”
Powell continued to meet with Trump and his allies, however, including in Dec. 2020, when she was present at a White House gathering where the then-president’s circle discussed ordering the military to seize voting machines. Trump also weighed appointing Powell as a special counsel to investigate voting fraud.
Around that time, The New Yorker reported Sunday, Powell also made a pilgrimage to Tomotley Plantation, a South Carolina residence owned by the disgraced election-denying attorney Lin Wood. There, she worked as a member of a so-called “brain trust” of MAGA-affiliated figures scheming to keep Trump in power. The bureau’s report describes Tomotley as “the central hub for the voter fraud information processing.” It was shortly after she began traveling to the plantation that she first hired SullivanStrickler, sending them to Nevada, Michigan, and finally, Georgia.
