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The “Crazy” Kraken Conspirator

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Sidney Powell is undoubtedly co-conspirator 3 in Trump’s January 6 indictment.

Co-Conspirator 3, an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded “crazy.” Nonetheless, the Defendant embraced and publicly amplified Co-Conspirator 3’s disinformation.

But her role — as described — is actually very limited. Just one paragraph describes her actions:

20. On November 16, 2020, on the Defendant’s behalf, his executive assistant sent Co-Conspirator 3 and others a document containing bullet points critical of a certain voting machine company, writing, “See attached – Please include as is, or almost as is, in lawsuit.” Co-Conspirator 3 responded nine minutes later, writing, “IT MUST GO IN ALL SUITS IN GA AND PA IMMEDIATELY WITH A FRAUD CLAIM THAT REQUIRES THE ENTIRE ELECTION TO BE SET ASIDE in those states and machines impounded for non-partisan professional inspection.” On November 25, Co-Conspirator 3 filed a lawsuit against the Governor of Georgia falsely alleging “massive election fraud” accomplished through the voting machine company’s election software and hardware. Before the lawsuit was even filed, the Defendant retweeted a post promoting it. The Defendant did this despite the fact that when he had discussed Co-Conspirator 3’s far-fetched public claims regarding the voting machine company in private with advisors, the Defendant had conceded that they were unsupported and that Co-Conspirator 3 sounded “crazy.” Co-Conspirator 3’s Georgia lawsuit was dismissed on December 7.

Go back and look! Her most famous role — when she got cleared into the White House and told Trump he should make her Special Counsel and seize the voting machines — doesn’t appear at all. Indeed, my greatest disappointment with the indictment is that it doesn’t explain one of the enduring mysteries of January 6: what led Trump to adopt January 6 as his plan shortly after that meeting.

It describes Trump’s December 19 tweet — the tweet that triggered thousands of MAGAts to start planning a trip to DC — but not what led up to it.

Curse you, Jack Smith!!!

What a remarkable structure, then, for including Sidney Powell in this indictment.

From the description of Powell at the beginning, it makes it sound like she is in there as proof that Trump knew his claims were false: In November, he declared her crazy. But he nevertheless kept magnifying her craziness.

That would almost help prove that Trump knew she was a liar when he used her propaganda.

But paragraph 20 says something different: It says that on November 16, on a date she was still ostensibly on Rudy’s team, Trump fed her the Dominion voting machine false claims and told her — Trump told Powell, not vice versa — to include the Dominion claims.

The false claims about Dominion, according to this, came from Trump.

And then, after Rudy and Jenna Ellis publicly separated themselves from her, Powell submitted the first of a number of lawsuits that would rely on the Dominion claim.

And when called on her crazy, Sidney Powell claimed that, “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”

It’s not just Trump who thinks she’s crazy, she thinks she’s crazy.

But once she filed that lawsuit, on November 25, Trump boosted it.

That’s all pretty interesting timing given something else that was occurring at the very same time. At a time when they were both together in South Carolina plotting how to steal the election for Trump, Trump pardoned Mike Flynn.

The same crazy that went into Sidney Powell’s election disinformation went into her claims about Flynn. If Trump thought she was crazy, he should never have pardoned Flynn.

It gets still more interesting from there — including to where Powell funded at least some of the Oath Keepers’ defense — including, possibly, Kelly Meggs’ attorney, Stan Woodward.

You get the idea.

Even without her plan to seize the voting machines on December 18, even without Flynn’s call for martial law in the days leading up to it, the timeline laid out in the indictment — where Trump gave Powell the Dominion claims, then decided she was crazy, then pardoned her client based off her crazy claims — sure piles up some interesting implications in what are just two paragraphs of a 130-paragraph indictment.

Where’s Rudy?

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There’s an interesting passage in this Daily Beast article, one of several articles in the last day describing the snowballing madness in the Oval Office. For the last day or so, Rudy Giuliani has gone missing.

Meanwhile, Trump, whose rhetoric helped incite the Jan. 6 rioting, is increasingly cut off from once-loyal senior officials, some of whom have resigned in recent days. Instead, the president is focused on managing the fallout, both legally and reputationally, from the attack and the deaths that resulted from it. Even the president’s personal attorney and close confidant, Rudy Giuliani, has been somewhat absent in the last 24 hours, caught up with his own personal problems, including the New York Bar Association’s move to open an inquiry into his removal from its membership, according to one individual with direct knowledge of the situation. [my emphasis]

It doesn’t actually make sense that the Bar Association challenge is that pressing a problem. It’ll go forward regardless of what he does, and it’s not actually the legally meaningful challenge to his bar membership (though a NY State Senator’s request to the state courts could be). Aside from some ill-fated appearances in voter fraud cases, though, Rudy’s not actually practicing courts anymore so much as influence-peddling.

Which may explain two graver threats to Rudy. Last Friday, Dominion Voting Systems sued Sidney Powell for $1.3 billion. Dominion has said they plan to follow up that lawsuit with others, potentially targeting Wood, the media that magnified Powell’s claims (including Fox, OANN, and Epoch Times), and Rudy himself.

Meanwhile, yesterday Treasury sanctioned Rudy’s buddies from Ukraine. The statement on the designation includes a shout-out to meetings involving Rudy (and implicating Devin Nunes and other Republican lawmakers).

Since at least 2019, Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine.

Former Ukrainian Government officials Konstantin Kulyk, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, Andriy Telizhenko, and current Ukraine Member of Parliament Oleksandr Dubinsky have publicly appeared or affiliated themselves with Derkach through the coordinated dissemination and promotion of fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations involving a U.S. political candidate. They have made repeated public statements to advance disinformation narratives that U.S. government officials have engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine. These efforts are consistent with and in support of Derkach’s efforts, acting as an agent of the Russian intelligence services, to influence the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.

Kulyk, a former prosecutor for the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, formed an alliance with Derkach to spread false accusations of international corruption. Onyshchenko, a fugitive from Ukrainian justice due to charges of corruption, provided edited audio tape copies of purported audio recordings of conversations between former Ukrainian and U.S. officials, which Derkach released between May and July 2020 to discredit U.S. officials and influence the U.S. elections. Telizhenko, a former low-level Ukrainian diplomat, orchestrated meetings between Derkach and U.S. persons to help propagate false claims concerning corruption in Ukraine. Dubinsky, who serves alongside Derkach in Ukraine’s parliament, joined Derkach in press conferences designed to perpetuate these and other false narratives and denigrate U.S. presidential candidates and their families.

Kulyk, Onyshchenko, Telizhenko, and Dubinsky are being designated pursuant to E.O. 13848 for having directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign influence in a United States election.

Effectively, the sanctions make it clear — Rudy’s denials notwithstanding — that the people whose dirt he has been peddling for years was disinformation seeded by Russia.

And that couldn’t come at a worse time.

For years, Rudy as been operating as if he had impunity. And he probably did, as it has become clear for some time that Trump would pardon him.

Except now that Trump’s incitement of sedition has complicated pardoning his troubles away, Trump has started wailing that if he’s not allowed to self-pardon, then no one else can have a pardon either.

The President had been warned, David, by some of his lawyers that if he goes ahead and pardons himself, he could be more vulnerable to civil lawsuits, including from some of those injured in the Capitol riot because a self-pardon would be seen as an admission that he did something wrong that he would need to be pardoned for. The President is angry. He has not taken that well. And I am told that he is now saying that he doesn’t want to see pardons for anybody. So the attitude seems to be, if I can’t get a pardon, then nobody else should get one either.

This actually isn’t a bad legal decision. It has always been true that if Trump pardoned his co-conspirators of stuff they’ve protected him on so far, then they could be forced to testify against him. This was, at least, he and his co-conspirators all go down together.

But that would be a very bad thing for Mr. Giuliani, because he has been wracking up crimes with abandon, with the apparent belief that they would all be wiped away before January 20.

It’s unclear whether that has driven Rudy away … or whether he’s making a belated attempt to clean up his exposure.