Sidney Powell learns actions have consequences

Finally!

(Attorney Sidney Powell)

There was no louder voice insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump than Sidney Powell.

“We are talking about hundreds of thousands of votes,” Powell, a lawyer to, among others, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, told fellow far-right traveler Lou Dobbs in an interview less than two weeks after the election. “President Trump won this election in a landslide.”

She also, in that same interview, famously pledged to “release the Kraken” — a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy related to what some claimed was a widespread conspiracy to keep Trump from the presidency.

Around that same time, in a separate interview with Newsmax, Powell said this:

Georgia is probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up … and Mr. Kemp and the Secretary of State need to go with it because they’re in on the Dominion scam. … Another benefit Dominion was created to reward is what I would call election insurance, that’s why Hugo Chavez had it created in the first place. I also wonder where he got the technology, where it actually came from because I think it’s him or … the CIA.

Well, she was right that Georgia would play a major role in her future endeavors!

On Thursday morning, just one day before her trial in the state was set to begin, Powell pled guilty to six misdemeanor counts of intentional interference of election duties in Georgia.

As CNN noted:

As part of her guilty plea, Powell is admitting her role in the January 2021 breach of election systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia. With the help of local GOP officials, a group of Trump supporters accessed and copied information from the county’s election systems in hopes of somehow proving that the election was rigged against Trump.

Her sentence seemed, at first glance, to be light. Six years of probation and a written apology letter to the citizens of Georgia. But, Powell also agreed, as part of the plea deal, to testify against other defendants in future trials in Georgia.

Which is intriguing. Because there are 17 other defendants charged with various forms of election interference in the state in 2020. And one of them just happens to be former president Donald Trump. (All 17, including Trump, have pled not guilty.)

The Powell plea then matters for a few reasons.

1. If she is able to provide evidence that suggests that Trump was an active part of the plot to overturn the Georgia results, it significantly increases his legal peril in the case.

2. Symbolically, it sends a message that actions have consequences, that you can’t just say and do whatever you want in service of a conspiracy theory without suffering some level of punishment.

Now, do I expect Powell’s conviction to change the minds of the majority of Republican voters who believe the 2020 election was stolen? I do not. They are so deep down the rabbit hole with Trump on 2020 that they will insist Powell was compromised by the Deep State or was some sort of liberal plant all along.

(Trump, as of this writing, had not reacted to the Powell plea news.)

But, for the rest of us, this does matter. Because Powell was SO vociferous in her assertion that the election was stolen. And that she would be the one to expose this deep and broad conspiracy to keep Trump out of the White House. And that anyone who believed the election was free and fair was just a stooge.

To see her brought low by our legal system — to be held to account for her lies and deceptions — affirms my faith that the process, at least some times, still works the way it’s supposed to.

Today is a good day for justice and truth. And, man, we haven’t had enough of those lately.