Sidney Powell hypes GA, MI election lawsuits after Trump dropped her – Business Insider
- Sidney Powell, the attorney formerly working with President Donald Trump’s campaign, on Wednesday released legal documents challenging the election results in Georgia and Michigan.
- Business Insider found that the Michigan suit had been lodged in federal court but could not verify the status of the Georgia one.
- Powell was dropped from Trump’s legal team after making outlandish claims that a vast communist conspiracy was responsible for stealing the election from Trump.
- Her legal documents repeated many of her allegations, including of Chinese and Iranian interference and digital vote-switching by machines linked to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Many of these claims have been debunked.
- One of the lawsuits misspelled words like “district,” and both had numerous typos.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Sidney Powell has pressed ahead with lawsuits alleging “massive election fraud” in Georgia and Michigan even after President Donald Trump’s legal team publicly dumped her.
Powell, an attorney who has been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, published the lawsuits on her website on Wednesday at midnight and announced them in a tweet using her catchphrase “The #Kraken was just released.”
As of Thursday morning, the tweet appeared to have been deleted, but the documents remained on Powell’s website.
Business Insider verified that the Michigan suit had been lodged in federal court but could not verify the status of the Georgia suit, which made many of the same claims.
The lawsuits are dozens of pages long and contain several spelling errors and typos, including “Districct Court” and “Distrcoict of Georgia” in one.
The documents repeat many of the baseless allegations Powell made at a press conference with Rudy Giuliani on November 19, when she was still part of the Trump campaign’s legal team.
A few days later, the Trump campaign disowned her, saying in a statement that she was “practicing law on her own.”
One unnamed Trump advisor told the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that Powell’s ideas were “too conspiratorial even for him.”
In the lawsuits, Powell charges that voting machines used in Georgia and Michigan switched votes to Joe Biden and had been designed to ensure that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, won his elections. These allegations have been debunked, according to CNN.
Citing Andrew Appel, a Princeton academic who has highlighted the vulnerabilities of voting machines, Powell said the machines had been designed to switch votes in a way that is undetectable.
But Appel — whose comments were published long before the 2020 election — has dismissed the idea that the software is part of a conspiracy, noting earlier this month that “vulnerabilities are not the same as rigged elections.”
Michigan has paper ballots that can be recounted by hand, Appel said. Georgia, which uses touchscreen ballot-marking machines, still has vulnerabilities, but “hacks and glitches” there “have been detected and corrected,” he said.
Powell’s lawsuits allege that software “was accessed by agents acting on behalf of China and Iran in order to monitor and manipulate elections.”
Powell previously declined to provide evidence for her claims at the request of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been open to many of Trump’s claims of election fraud.
In an unusual segment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Friday, Carlson called Powell out for refusing to provide evidence, saying he would have given her “the whole hour” if she had.
The segment prompted a right-wing backlash against Carlson that quieted after the Trump legal team distanced itself from Powell.
In Michigan, Powell’s lawsuit is against officials including Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor who was targeted in a right-wing kidnapping plot in October.
In Georgia, Powell’s suit is aimed at Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, among other officials.
Raffensperger, who said his family voted for Trump, recently wrote an opinion column defending his state’s election management and arguing that Trump had thrown him “under the bus.”
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