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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Sidney Powell knows that sometimes you gotta fake it ’til you make it. Maybe the guy interviewing you says he’d really like to have a Special Counsel to investigate a non-existent scheme by China (or Venezuela, or Iran, or Italy) to steal the election. Maybe he even says it oughta be you! Maybe he takes your draft proposal to have the US military seize all the voting machines and says it seems like a great idea.

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Well, obviously you don’t wait for the paperwork to come through when you’ve got an election to overturn. You march right into HR and tell them to set you up with a phone and office space ASAP!

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And according to The Guardian, that’s exactly what Powell did after that infamous meeting with Trump on December 18, 2020. That day, she and Mike Flynn threw Kraken lawyer Emily Newman and the Overstock weirdo Patrick Byrne into an SUV limo and raced to the White House, where they got waved in over Mark Meadows’s objections. There they presented Trump with their plan to have the National Guard seize all the voting machines, make Powell Special Counsel, and appoint Flynn “field marshal” to implement the plan on the ground.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and every other government lawyer said the whole thing was bullshit, with Cipollone pointing out that Powell didn’t even have a security clearance. Even Rudy Giuliani is reported to have said that they “would all end up in prison” if they had tried to seize the machines. Ultimately, Trump never signed the order.

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And yet!

Powell told associates she believed Trump made a decision to authorize her to be a special counsel of some nature. The following day, she called the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, saying she needed office space and a security clearance as the new special counsel.

Meadows did not refute Powell’s claim but told her he was working on logistics, and then called Giuliani to tell him Powell was trying to secure another audience with Trump. Giuliani told Meadows that Trump had barred Powell from the White House.

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My “Special Counsel of Some Nature” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my “Special Counsel of Some Nature” shirt.

Did she really think she had been verbally appointed special counsel? Or did she think she could just muscle her way through it and get forgiven (or pardoned) later when she’d subverted democracy?

In any event, the stratagem seems to have failed on both counts. She showed up at the White House the following two days, and even managed to gain access to the complex — A+ security! — but failed to get another audience with the president.

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And Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20, in accordance with the rule of law.

Revealed: Trump reviewed draft order that authorized voting machines to be seized [Guardian]
Michael Flynn Is Still at War [NYT]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

Donald Trump, Election Law, Government, Sidney Powell