60 Facts About Sidney Powell

Sidney Katherine Powell was born on 1955 and is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and conspiracy theorist who attempted to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, which led the State Bar of Texas to seek sanctions against her, including possible disbarment.

Sidney Powell represented executives in the Enron scandal and, in 2019, defended retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn in United States v Flynn.

In 2020, Sidney Powell joined the legal team of then-President Donald Trump in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Sidney Powell continued filing election lawsuits independently in district courts, and ultimately lost four federal lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

Sidney Powell claimed that Flynn was framed by a covert "deep state" operation, and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Sidney Powell 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.

In February 2023, a Texas judge dismissed a petition brought by the State Bar of Texas that alleged Sidney Powell had "violated legal ethics rules" with her work on Trump's 2020 election reversal efforts.

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.

Sidney Powell graduated from Needham Broughton High School and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts.

Sidney Powell began her legal career as one of the youngest federal prosecutors in the US.

From 1978 through 1988, Sidney 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.

Sidney Powell was appointed Appellate Section Chief for the Western District of Texas and then the Northern District of Texas.

Sidney Powell established her own law firm in 1993 in Dallas, Texas.

Sidney Powell was acquitted of involvement in the assassination but convicted on other charges.

Sidney Powell later admitted to his role in the conspiracy to murder the judge.

Sidney Powell was an outspoken critic of the Enron Task Force prosecutions, and accused prosecutor Andrew Weissmann of overreach.

In "Licensed to Lie," Powell contended that prosecutors in the corruption trial of US 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.

Sullivan did not immediately grant the motion; Sidney Powell later requested a writ of mandamus from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to compel Sullivan to drop the case.

Sidney Powell has been described as a proponent of conspiracy theories about Flynn, namely that he was framed by members of the "deep state" who were trying to eject President Donald Trump from office.

Sidney Powell promoted the conspiracy theory on Lou Dobbs Tonight on November 6, and again on November 8th, 2020, on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business program,.

Precisely how Sidney Powell gained prominence in the legal team is unknown, even to some campaign officials.

Sidney Powell alleged that Dominion Voting Systems "can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden".

Jonathan Karl, former ABC News chief White House correspondent for the duration of the Trump presidency, wrote in his November 2021 book, Betrayal, that Sidney Powell told Defense Department official Ezra Cohen-Watnick that CIA director Gina Haspel had been injured and detained in Germany while attempting to retrieve the alleged server and destroy the purported evidence.

Sidney Powell asked Cohen-Watnick, who previously worked under Flynn in the government, to launch a special operations mission to physically seize Haspel and compel her to confess.

Sidney Powell additionally alleged that fraud had cost Doug Collins the nonpartisan blanket primary against incumbent Kelly Loeffler in the Senate race in Georgia.

Sidney Powell claimed the Democratic Party had used rigged Dominion machines to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, and that Sanders learned of this but "sold out".

Sidney Powell said she would "blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" court filing.

Sidney Powell suggested that candidates "paid to have the system rigged to work for them".

Sidney Powell had previously called on the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces.

In May 2021, Sidney Powell continued to express the hope that the election result would be reversed.

Sidney Powell spoke at a QAnon conference in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend, where she falsely asserted Trump "can simply be reinstated, that a new Inauguration Day is set", eliciting cheers from the crowd.

Sidney Powell was subpoenaed in January 2022 to testify before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

Sidney Powell sued to block release of her phone records.

Sources described Sidney Powell's election-related filings as filled with significant "sloppy mistakes".

Sidney Powell's Michigan filing had numerous formatting errors and misidentified one of her experts.

Sidney Powell presented an affidavit from an individual she described as a former intelligence contractor with knowledge of a foreign conspiracy to subvert democracy, who Sidney Powell said needed to remain anonymous to protect their "reputation, professional career and personal safety".

That month, Sidney Powell filed an emergency petition with the United States Supreme Court seeking an extraordinary writ of mandamus for intervention in the case.

Sidney Powell appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to expand the restraining order.

The panel indicated that the original lawsuit, in which Sidney Powell sought to have voting machines inspected, was "considerably delayed" by the appeal.

Batten stated that the relief sought by Sidney Powell was impossible to grant.

Sidney Powell appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, which denied a motion to expedite the case.

Sidney Powell dropped the lawsuit on January 19,2021, one day before Biden's inauguration.

Sidney Powell was involved in arranging for the collection of data from election systems and voting machines at the county's elections office in rural Coffee County in January 2021.

Sidney Powell has filed an appeal of the decision in the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, as well as the US Supreme Court, which denied a motion for expedited review of the case.

Sidney Powell then applied for a writ of mandamus from the US Supreme Court, which rejected her petition on March 1,2021, to end the lawsuit; Sidney Powell said the court's decision "completes the implosion of each of our three branches of government into the rubble of a sinkhole of corruption".

Furthermore, the lawyers claimed that Dominion could not prove that Sidney Powell took action with "actual malice", because "she believed the allegations then and she believes them now".

In January 2020, Sidney Powell denied knowledge of QAnon or Q; later that year, she retweeted major QAnon accounts and catchphrases and appeared on QAnon shows on YouTube.

In May 2021, Sidney Powell was a keynote speaker at what was essentially a QAnon conference in Dallas, Texas.

On March 1,2022, the State Bar of Texas' Commission for Lawyer Discipline submitted in court a disciplinary petition against Sidney Powell alleging that she had violated several rules of professional conduct, such as those about making false statements to a tribunal, using evidence known to be false, and engaging in dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.

On February 23,2023, judge Andrea Bouressa of the 471st District Court, dismissed the petition, on the grounds of the commission failing to meet the burden of proof that Sidney Powell had indeed violated the Texas' attorney code of conduct.

In November 2020, Sidney Powell established Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic, a 501 nonprofit organization with stated purpose to collect funds to help prosecute fraud in US elections.

Sidney Powell launched Restore the Republic, a super PAC, in January 2021.

In November 2021, The Washington Post reported that the preceding September federal prosecutors had issued a subpoena for the financial records of groups Sidney Powell had formed, including Defending the Republic, which was registered as a social welfare organization, and a political action committee by the same name.

All left the organization in April 2021 after Sidney Powell refused to allow it to be audited.

Sidney Powell has written opinion pieces for The New York Observer, The Daily Caller, The Hill, National Review, Fox News, and media organizations and conservative content producers.

Sidney Powell has a son from a marriage that ended in divorce "decades ago".

Sidney Powell has participated in volunteer work for women's shelters and other charities.

Sidney Powell was not recalled as "being a staunch conservative or even very political" by people who interacted with her in those organizations.

Sidney Powell served as executive producer on the 2013 drama Decoding Annie Parker, providing guidance to help bring the film to a commercial release.

Sidney Powell oversaw fundraising screenings for the film that raised approximately $1 million for breast cancer charities.