Sidney Powell Popular Books

Sidney Powell Biography & Facts

Sidney Katherine Powell (born May 1, 1955) is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and conspiracy theorist who attempted to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. In August 2023, she was indicted along with Donald Trump and eighteen others in the prosecution related to the 2020 election in Georgia, arising from the attempt by the former president and his allies to subvert the election outcome in Georgia and other key states lost by Trump. In October 2023, as part of an agreement with Georgia prosecutors, she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties. She was sentenced to six years of probation and agreed to testify against the other defendants. Powell began her career as an assistant United States attorney in the Western District of Texas. During her tenure, she prosecuted Jimmy Chagra, who was implicated in the May 1979 assassination of United States district judge John H. Wood Jr. In 2003 she represented James Brown, a Merrill Lynch executive involved in the Enron scandal; a decade later she wrote Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice to denounce the judicial corruption she perceived in Brown's trial. In 2019, Powell defended retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn in United States v. Flynn. She claimed that Flynn was framed by a covert "deep state" operation, and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. In 2020, Powell joined the legal team of then-President Trump in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. She alleged that a secret international cabal involving communists, "globalists", George Soros, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), the Clinton Foundation, the CIA, and thousands of Democratic and Republican officials—including then-Trump ally and Georgia governor Brian Kemp—used voting machines to transfer millions of votes away from Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Powell continued filing election lawsuits independently in district courts, and ultimately lost four federal lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. After several interviews in which Powell spread election fraud lies, Trump's legal team distanced itself from her, though she continued to meet with the president in the White House. After she accused the election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic of engaging in a conspiracy to rig the election, both companies sued her for defamation. In August 2021, Michigan federal judge Linda Vivienne Parker formally sanctioned Texas conspiracy theorist L. Lin Wood, Powell, and seven other pro-Trump lawyers for their suit seeking to overturn Trump's election loss. She determined the nine attorneys had participated in "a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process ... by filing baseless and frivolous lawsuits in order to undermine public confidence in the democratic process". The judge ordered them to pay the state of Michigan and the City of Detroit for their expenses in defending against the lawsuit. The court also referred Powell and the other lawyers to state disciplinary authorities for possible disbarment for ethics violations. The State Bar of Texas' Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline brought a disciplinary action against Powell, alleging that she violated the rules of professional conduct governing lawyers; that proceeding is pending. Early life and education Sidney Katherine Powell was born in Durham, North Carolina, grew up in the city of Raleigh, and knew from an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer. She graduated from Needham Broughton High School and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts. At the age of 19, she was accepted into the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she graduated in 1978 with a Juris Doctor degree. She began her legal career as one of the youngest federal prosecutors in the U.S. Career From 1978 through 1988, Powell was an assistant United States attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas and the Eastern District of Virginia, where she handled civil and criminal trial work. She was appointed Appellate Section Chief for the Western District of Texas and then the Northern District of Texas. Powell established her own law firm in 1993 in Dallas, Texas. Around 2002, she began to practice in Asheville, North Carolina, but moved back to Texas later. Prosecution for assassination of Judge John H. Wood Powell was one of the prosecutors in the 1979 trial of Jimmy Chagra who was accused in the assassination of John H. Wood Jr., a federal judge from Texas. He was acquitted of involvement in the assassination but convicted on other charges. He later admitted to his role in the conspiracy to murder the judge. Advocacy for Enron In the 2000s Powell represented firms and executives involved in the Enron scandal, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and former Merrill Lynch executive Jim Brown. She was an outspoken critic of the Enron Task Force prosecutions, and accused prosecutor Andrew Weissmann of overreach. After that, Powell wrote extensively about prosecutorial abuses in the 2014 book Licensed to Lie. The book was noticed by then-Senator Orrin Hatch, who described it as "powerful". Post-conviction defense of Ted Stevens In Licensed to Lie, Powell contended that prosecutors in the corruption trial of U.S. senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, held in 2008, before federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, intentionally withheld "Brady material" they should have disclosed to the defense and that they returned Rocky Williams, a terminally ill witness, to Alaska, ostensibly so that his testimony would not exonerate Stevens. The senator was subsequently convicted of seven felony counts of corruption for failing to annually declare gifts from VECO owner Bill Allen. However, due to numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct, Attorney General Eric Holder moved to dismiss the indictment prior to sentencing, effectively vacating the conviction. Post-conviction defense of Michael Flynn After publishing her first book, Powell continued writing opinion pieces for right-leaning websites. In 2017, Weissmann joined Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation, reviving interest in Licensed to Lie from Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity. Using her status as a former federal prosecutor, Powell became a leading voice against the Mueller investigation; in a February 2018 op-ed, Powell wrote that retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn should "withdraw his guilty plea" for making false statements to the FBI, alleging "egregious government misconduct". Powell's appearances on Fox News to discuss the Flynn case were noticed by President Donald Trump, and the two spoke on several occasions. To raise money for Flynn's defense, Powell spoke.... Discover the Sidney Powell popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sidney Powell books.