Getty Jenna Ellis stands behind Sidney Powell.
Sidney Powell, the former prosecutor who has been launching unverified voter machine allegations about the 2020 presidential race, is not a member of the president’s legal team, his lawyers Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani say.
Ellis and Giuliani wrote in a news release dated November 22 that “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”
The statement was attributed to Ellis, Trump campaign senior legal advisor and attorney for President Trump, and Rudy Giuliani, attorney for President Trump. The headline read, “Trump Campaign Statement on Legal Team.”
The statement came just days after Powell appeared alongside Ellis and Giuliani in a November 19 press conference alleging voter fraud. Giuliani, in particular, was mocked online after that press conference, in part because hair dye dripped down his face.
The election has been called in favor of now-President-elect Joe Biden, who leads Trump in both the popular vote and electoral votes. Trump has refused to concede and has launched a series of unsuccessful legal battles throughout the country, an attempt to call the results of the election into question.
Here’s what you need to know:
Powell Has Alleged Voter Machines Were Purposely Rigged to Subtract Votes From Trump But Hasn’t Provided Any Proof
At the press conference alongside Ellis and Giuliani, Powell alleged that an algorithm was purposely planted in voting machines to subtract votes from Trump and give them to Biden, but she didn’t provide proof. The voting machine company has denied the allegations, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson revealed on TV that when he asked Powell for proof, she angrily told him to stop talking to her.
In the press conference, according to Washington Examiner, Powell claimed there was “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, and interference with our elections.” But she didn’t offer proof of that either.
A lot of Powell’s comments in her television appearances refer to Dominion Voting Systems. That voting machine company denies any fraud allegations in a lengthy statement on its website, which you can read here. “Vote deletion/switching assertions are completely false,” the company says. “Dominion has no company ownership relationships with any member of the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, or the Clinton Global Initiative, Smartmatic, Scytl, or any ties to Venezuela. Dominion works with all political parties; our customer base and our government outreach practices reflect this nonpartisan approach.” The company adds, “Claims about software updates being done the night before Election Day are 100% false.”
We reached out to the company to see if it wants to make comment on Powell’s claims specifically after her Lou Dobbs’ appearance. This was their response:
The gist it that some erroneous claims appear to be conflating Dominion with a different industry company called Smartmatic.
DOMINION IS NOT, AND HAS NEVER BEEN, OWNED BY SMARTMATIC.
Dominion is an entirely separate company and a fierce competitor to Smartmatic.
Dominion and Smartmatic do not collaborate in any way and have no affiliate relationships or financial ties.
Dominion does not use Smartmatic software.
he only associations the companies have ever had were:
– In 2009, Smartmatic licensed Dominion machines for use in the Philippines. The contract ended in a lawsuit.
– In 2010, Dominion purchased certain assets from Sequoia, a private U.S. Company. Smartmatic, a previous owner of Sequoia, pursued legal actions against Dominion.
USA Today reported that a national coalition has announced there “is no evidence that any voting software deleted or changed votes” in the 2020 presidential election. You can read the statement of that national coalition here.
The group “includes the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Association of State Election Directors” described the election as “the most secure in American history,” USA Today reported, quoting the coalition as saying, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
On the Dobbs’ program, Powell said,
I can hardly wait to put forth all of the evidence we have collected on Dominion, starting with the fact it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez, and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries including this one. It was funded by money from Venezuela and Cuba and China has a role in it also…We have staggering statistical evidence.
As soon as the states stopped counting “the most egregious problems occurred,” Powell claimed.
She called the fraud “serious” and said machines were “producing altered election results…We are talking about hundreds of thousands of votes. President Trump won this election in a landslide. It’s going to be irrefutable.” Powell said “patriots are coming forward all day every day faster than we can collect their information” and said the machines were updated the night of the election and after the election. She said votes were “put in and replicated. There needs to be a massive criminal investigation, and it’s going to affect millions of voters and elections.”
She added that “changing a ballot” is a federal felony. She said Dominion has “been used all over the world to defy the will of people who wanted freedom.”
She said some governors and secretaries of state bought into the Dominion systems.
During the press conference, Giuliani said he was representing the Trump campaign and President Trump.
“The best way to describe this is when we began our representation of the president, we were set with a very anomalous set of results. The president was ahead on election night,” he said.
He said the campaign has statisticians who say “that it’s almost statistically impossible for Trump to have lost Pennsylvania in the time frame it happened.”
He said witnesses have come forward. “It’s not a singular voter fraud in one state. This pattern repeats itself in a number of states,” Giuliani claimed.
He alleged that the patterns would “suggest there was a plan from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud. Specifically focused on big cities controlled by Democrats and particularly focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption.” He cited Philadelphia and Detroit, but did not present evidence of a centralized scheme to engage in widespread voter fraud.
The accusations have not been backed up with evidence documenting widespread fraud.
Tucker Carlson Demanded That Powell Provide Evidence
Tucker Carlson received some heat from some conservatives when he demanded that Powell provide some evidence.
“I’m going to release the Kraken,” Powell said, according to a YouTube video of her Dobbs’ appearance, in which she also claimed that election fraud was “organized and conducted with the help by Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media and even the media companies.”
Powell responded to Carlson’s comments to journalist Anthony Leonardi of the Washington Examiner. “Apparently Mr. Carlson missed the news conference today,” she told him in a statement. “I would continue to encourage him and all journalists to review all the materials we have provided so far and conduct their own investigations. Evidence continues to pour in, but a 5 minute television hit is not my focus now. Collecting evidence and preparing the case are my top priorities.”
Carlson opened up the segment by referring to the “bombshell at the center of today’s press conference. That was delivered by former prosecutor Sidney Powell, who has also served as General Mike Flynn’s lawyer.”
For more than a week, he noted, “Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story: This election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software in order to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The other day on television, Powell said of Trump that when the fraud is finally uncovered I think we’ll find that he had at least 80 million votes. In other words, rigged software stole about 7 million votes in this election.”
Carlson then ran a clip from the press conference, in which Powell said of voting machine technology, “One of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the county to take a percentage of votes and flipped them from President Trump to President Biden.” She claimed that votes for Trump were “so overwhelming… that it broke the algorithm.”
Carlson noted that Powell has “been saying similar things for days.”
He said his show texted her. “What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history. Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries old system of self government.”
“We took Sidney Powell seriously. We had no intention of fighting with her; we’ve always respected her work,” said Carlson. “We simply wanted to see the details.”
He invited Powell on his show. “I would have given her the whole hour. I would have given her the whole week actually and listened quietly the entire time at rapt attention,” said Carlson.
However, he claimed, “she never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
He said the show “checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority. They told us Powell has never given them any evidence either. Nor did she provide any today.”
Powell’s Amazon.com biography says she was an Assistant United States Attorney “in three judicial districts under 9 United States Attorneys from both political parties. She represented the United States in 350 criminal appeals, and represented private parties in another 150, all resulting in more than 180 published decisions.”
The bio continues that she “was the youngest Assistant U.S. Attorney when she began practicing. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and the past president of the Bar Association for the Fifth Federal Circuit and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.”
Her website says she “established her firm, dedicated to federal appellate practice, in 1993. She is now practicing in the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Federal Circuits, and the United States Supreme Court.”
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