(Headline USA) The Trump campaign’s legal team moved to distance itself Sunday from attorney Sidney Powell after a tumultuous several days in which Powell unspooled complex conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” court filing.
“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement.
Powell responded in a statement obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
“I agree with the statement today,” she said. “I will represent #WeThePeople and seek the Truth. I intend to expose all the fraud and let the chips fall where they may. We will not allow the foundations of this great Republic to be destroyed by abject fraud.”
Trump had heralded Powell’s role as one of his lawyers, tweeting on November 14 that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
But the terse Sunday evening statement 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 said in a later interview that Carlson’s team was rude and demanding, and that she did send an affidavit and other evidence.
Powell made headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by Giuliani and Ellis, she 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 been switched in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.
In a subsequent interview with Newsmax, 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 reelection 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 court filing she hoped to submit this week involving the state would be “biblical.”
The status of that lawsuit was unclear Sunday night.
Chris Krebs, who was recently fired by Trump as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, tweeted Sunday night that “any claims of vote count manipulation” in Georgia “were nonsense from day 1” since the systems in the state had paper records that were validated in the recount.
Powell, a former federal prosecutor, took over last year as the lead lawyer for Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
She has supported a Justice Department motion to dismiss the Flynn prosecution, a request that remains pending before U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan.
Flynn tweeted a statement on Sunday in support of Powell.
“She understands the WH press release & agrees with it,” Flynn said. “She is staying the course to prove the massive deliberate election fraud that robbed #WeThePeople of our votes for President Trump & other Republican candidates.”
Adapted from reporting by Associated Press.
