The Kraken has cracked

Lawyer Sidney Powell, who famously vowed to unleash a mythical sea monster of litigation to prove that Donald Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election, has now struck a deal with Georgia prosecutors, admitting she conspired to wrongly interfere with the state’s election results.

Her guilty plea Thursday culminates a three-year journey in which she pursued baseless and often outlandish theories in the weeks before a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. Along the way, Powell was part of several key events in the state and federal indictments against Trump for his conduct in the 2020 election, and now becomes a potential witness against him.

She’s the second person to take a plea after bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall pleaded guilty last month.

“Sidney Powell was part of Trump’s inner circle at various points in the criminal conspiracy, particularly as Trump became more desperate in the final weeks of his presidency,” Bradley P. Moss, a Washington-based national security attorney who opposes Trump, said in an email. “Her testimony, more than peripheral players like Scott Hall, will provide first-person insight into those critical moments in her part of the larger conspiracy. Powell’s role is only one prong but, as dominoes continue to fall, it is likely those other prongs will also be corroborated by Trump’s other co-defendants.”

Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead attorney in the Georgia case, expressed confidence about Powell’s plea. “Assuming truthful testimony in the Fulton County case, it will be favourable to my overall defence strategy,” he said.

Powell, 68, served as a federal prosecutor before becoming a high-profile defence attorney in Dallas. She was a well-known critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

She rose in Trump’s orbit, thanks to her representation of Michael Flynn, the retired general who has become a star on the far right. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts during the 2016 transition period as he was entering Trump’s administration as national security adviser.

Powell fought to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea and, after the Justice Department dropped the prosecution in May 2020, repeatedly argued that the judge in the case could not contest the government’s decision and had no choice but to dismiss the matter. Trump ultimately pardoned Flynn in the final weeks of his presidency.

By then, Powell was attacking the integrity of the 2020 election.

Trump’s former attorney general said the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud that could change the election result. An Associated Press review published in December 2021 tallied every potential case of voter fraud in six battleground states and found fewer than 475, nowhere near the margin required to affect any results.

But, in a Fox Business interview that November, Powell declared: “I’m going to release the Kraken.” Her comment quickly became notorious, and her reference to the mythical sea monster only heightened the fantastical nature of the effort.

Trump’s campaign legal team distanced itself from her after an outlandish news conference days later. She took the stage after an appearance from Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani as dark streaks of what appeared to be hair dye streamed down his face. She launched into a theory about election software having been created in Venezuela “at the direction of Hugo Chavez” — the Venezuelan president who died in 2013.

Powell also claimed in a different interview that she would “blow up Georgia” with a “biblical” election lawsuit.

She filed suits in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, all states that went for Biden in 2020. They recycled debunked claims about fraud and were riddled with typos and factual mistakes, leading to mocking on social media.