The crazy, incompetent Trump legal team
BBC (“Sidney Powell: Trump team cuts ties with lawyer who peddled bizarre fraud claims“):
The Trump campaign has distanced itself from a lawyer who made dramatic claims of voter fraud at several media events.
Sidney Powell claimed without evidence last week that electronic voting systems had switched millions of votes to President-elect Joe Biden, and said he won due to “communist money”.
President Trump has refused to concede the election, making unsubstantiated claims of widespread electoral fraud.
[…]
On Sunday, the Trump campaign issued a statement saying Ms Powell was “practising law on her own” and was “not a member of the Trump legal team”.
“She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,” Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in the statement.
In a statement released to CBS, Ms Powell said she understood the statement issued by Mr Giuliani and Ms Ellis, and that she would soon be filing a lawsuit over her unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud.
A tweet from President Trump earlier this month explicitly named her as part of the team, referring to her as one of his “wonderful lawyers and representatives” .
Both Mr Giuliani and Ms Ellis had attended the Thursday news conference alongside Ms Powell, where she said, without providing evidence, that electronic voting systems switched millions of ballots to Mr Biden, and that he also won thanks to “communist money”.
The Guardian (“Trump campaign cuts ties with attorney Sidney Powell after bizarre election fraud claims“) adds:
The statement hints at chaos in a legal team that has lost case after case in its efforts to overturn the results of the 3 November election. Law firms have withdrawn from cases, and in the latest setback, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.
“This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.
It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.
The statement on Powell was the latest sign of wariness over her approach even within some conservative circles. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show last week that his team had asked Powell for evidence to support her claims, but that Powell had provided none.
Powell made headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by Giuliani and Ellis, she incorrectly suggested that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities was located in Germany, that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favour of Biden.
However, her contributions that day were largely overshadowed by Giuliani’s hair dye malfunction.
In a subsequent interview with Newsmax on Saturday, she appeared to accuse Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state of being part of a conspiracy involving a voting-system contract award that she contends harmed Trump’s re-election bid.
“Georgia’s 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,” she said, later adding that a lawsuit she planned to file against the state would be “biblical”.
When you’re too craven and out-there for Rudy Giuliani, you’ve clearly gone too far. But this is yet more evidence that the Trump gambit is more kook than coup; it would be positively comical were it not so insidious.
Like Steven Taylor, I simultaneously believe this simply has no chance at success and an outrageous assault on democracy.
