As the deranged attorney who once had Donald Trump’s ear and led the litigation front of his 2020 coup attempt, Sidney Powell is sitting on a mountain of secrets. Now that she’s flipped, she might be the most dangerous witness yet against the former president.
On Thursday, just one day before the start of her Atlanta trial, Powell surprised the nation with a guilty plea. She cut a sweetheart deal, avoiding years behind bars for her role in a scheme to defraud the election and coordinate a covert GOP mission to access election computers in a rural Georgia county.
However, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is getting plenty in return. Powell has agreed to give investigators any information they want about her private meetings with the former president, including documents in her possession that would detail his plan to stay in power after losing to his rival, President Joe Biden.
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“One thing to note is just how favorable this plea deal is for her. She’s been permitted to plead guilty to misdemeanors… to get this good of a deal, she really has to know something,” said Amy Lee Copeland, a former federal prosecutor in Savannah, Georgia.
Copeland pointed to the tell-all session that Powell apparently had with prosecutors late Wednesday—one that attorneys revealed in court when they announced this new agreement.
“I suspect that proffer pretty much directly led to this plea deal,” Copeland said. “The fact that she was in a meeting at the White House, she can testify to what Trump said at that meeting. And we don’t have a whole lot of people who’ve been willing to do that. That’s going to be pretty powerful for the DA.”
Powell played a key role in Trump’s multi-pronged attack to reverse the nation’s legitimate election. While others on Trump’s team coordinated meetings of fake electors in different states and nudged members of Congress to halt certification of the electoral college vote, Powell tried to weaponize the judiciary by getting state and federal judges to overturn results. After vowing to “release the Kraken” during a Fox Business Network interview shortly after the November 2020 election, Powell filed lawsuits across the country—all of which failed miserably.
“She can talk about some of the people who are very high up in this indictment,” Copeland noted.
It might not be long before the American public gets a preview of just how damning Powell’s testimony can be. On Thursday, she agreed to testify against each co-defendant at every trial—and the very first one starts today, with jury selection set to begin in the sectioned-off trial of Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who authored legal memos about fake electors.
Her access to the nation’s former leader—and her role as his court commando—cannot be overstated.
Although she was widely viewed by the legal profession as a kooky conservative and a peddler of dangerous conspiracy theories, Trump still tapped her for legal advice as he plotted to remain at the White House. At one point, he even considered empowering her as a “special counsel” to oversee a federal investigation into supposed voter fraud, according to The New York Times.
One particular episode during Trump’s final weeks in office encapsulates her proximity to the plot: an infamous Dec. 18, 2020 meeting at the Oval Office that one White House aide called “unhinged.”
Powell joined a trio of Big Lie proponents: fellow “Kraken” lawyer Emily Newman, disgraced former Army general Michael Flynn, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. The meeting appeared to be premised on the idea that they could convince Trump he had the authority to take extreme measures in this time of fabricated crisis.
They met in private for some 15 minutes before more reasonable White House personnel stepped in to run interference, only to discover that the ragtag band of misfits was driving a wedge between the then-president and his top White House lawyers.
During the House Jan. 6 Committee hearings last year, former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann recalled the shouting match that transpired once they shuffled into the room.
“What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts," Herschmann testified, singling out his interactions with Powell.
“She says, ‘Well, the judges are corrupt’... I'm like, ‘Every one? Every single case in the country you guys lost? Every one of them is corrupt? Even the ones we appointed?’” Herschmann said.
Prosecutors can now probe Powell about what was discussed during the first half of that meeting, with the threat of harsher legal punishment hanging over her head if she doesn’t tell prosecutors everything. Those questions could bolster the DA’s case by eliciting details about Trump’s thinking at the time, potentially establishing the degree to which Trump was personally involved in her later criminal actions—the ones to which she’s already admitted to in court.
“She’s someone who would bring out the absolute wildest in Trump. The things he probably said to her would be jaw dropping. To that extent, it’s red meat for the criminal trial,” said Kevin J. O’Brien, a former federal prosecutor in New York.
If the Fulton DA’s Office squeezes Powell’s testimony for all it’s worth, it might be able to establish the highly sought after proof of mens rea, the notion that Trump knew what he was doing was just plain wrong.
“He probably vented to her about all the evil things that were happening to him and how he would wreak vengeance on a second term,” O’Brien added.
Steve Sadow, Trump's lead attorney in the case, countered the notion that Powell could be dangerous.
“Assuming truthful testimony in the Fulton County case, it will be favorable to my overall defense strategy,” he said, without clarifying what that might mean.
And Powell’s danger as a witness doesn’t just apply to the big boss. Powell also worked alongside humiliated former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, another Trump lawyer who spent months spreading outright lies about fake election fraud.
“Giuliani is absolutely dead. Not that he doesn’t have enough troubles already, but this is the worst blow yet to him… she’s got to be trouble for Trump and double trouble for Giuliani,” O’Brien said. “The floodgates are going to start opening in the Georgia case and it really vindicates Willis’ approach to the case. Even if it’s a headache administratively, they’re going to have plenty of cooperating witnesses against the people left standing.”
Things have already been rough for Powell. As the time passed following Powell’s failure to drag the nation’s courts into supporting the MAGA revolution, the lawyer also lost her place in the former president’s inner circle. A year after her Kraken campaign, sources told The Daily Beast that she was unwelcome at Trump properties—and advisers actually kept a lookout to make sure she couldn’t get anywhere near him.
Left on her own, Powell kept raising money for her nonprofit, “Defending the Republic,” a corporation that claimed to be on a “fight to preserve the foundation of America.” The Washington Post found that, in the year following the 2020 election, it had spent less than half of the $16.4 million it had raised.
The Daily Beast reached out to a dozen people who touted making donations during that time, asking if Powell’s decision to eventually flip on Trump made them regret their support for her mission. Will Talcott, who describes himself as an American pilot now living in the Philippines, recalled sending her $100.
“She did what she had to do. I don't begrudge her,” he said.
