She was best known for prosecuting high-profile drug smuggler Jimmy Chagra and, as private counsel, defending Merrill Lynch executives in proceedings related to the Enron scandal.
In August 2021, Michigan federal judge Linda Vivienne Parker formally sanctioned Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers for their frivolous suit seeking to overturn Trump's election loss.
Sidney Katherine Powell was born on May 1, 1955[2][3] in Durham, North Carolina, grew up in the city of Raleigh, and knew from an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer.
[16] 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[17] 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.
However, due to numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct, Attorney General Eric Holder moved to dismiss the indictment prior to sentencing, effectively vacating the conviction.
[4] On the same day this was disclosed, Powell sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr requesting the "utmost confidentiality" and argued that Flynn's prosecution was due to "corruption of our beloved government institutions for what appears to be political purposes".
[4][31][32] 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.
[45] However, the affidavit's conclusion was erroneous since it compared the Michigan vote tallies against population data from Minnesota (whose respective abbreviations are MI and MN, a possible source of the error).
[47] After Giuliani's segment ended, Powell took the lectern and alleged, without evidence, that an international communist plot to rig the 2020 election had been engineered by Cuba, China, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and antifa.
[38] She also repeated a conspiracy theory[53]—spread by Congressman Louie Gohmert, OANN and others[54]—that election results showing a landslide victory for Trump had been transmitted to the German office of the Spanish electronic voting firm Scytl, after which a company server was supposedly seized in a raid by the United States Army.
[58] Jonathan Karl, former ABC News chief White House correspondent for the duration of the Trump presidency, wrote in his November 2021 book, Betrayal, that 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.
[62] Powell additionally alleged that fraud had cost Doug Collins the nonpartisan blanket primary against incumbent Kelly Loeffler in the Senate race in Georgia.
[79] Trump ally Bernard Kerik testified to the January 6 committee that Michael Flynn associate Phil Waldron originated the idea of a military seizure of voting machines.
[80] Powell, who had previously called on the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces,[81] joined an Oval Office meeting on December 18, with Giuliani, Flynn, and Pat Cipollone.
[94] Powell's lawsuits cited an anonymous witness, referred to as "Spyder" or "Spider", who alleged that American voting systems were "certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China".
Maras-Lindeman had served in the Navy for less than a year over two decades earlier, and in a November 2018 civil suit the attorney general of North Dakota accused her of misappropriating funds for personal use from a charitable event she tried to organize.
[100][101] On December 9, U.S. district judge Diane Humetewa dismissed the case due to plaintiffs' lack of legal standing, and ruled that the allegations of impropriety were "sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence", instead being "largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections".
The judge singled out the fraud allegations being put forth, writing that they "fail in their particularity and plausibility" and that there would be "extreme, and entirely unprecedented" harm to Arizona's more than 3 million voters to entertain Powell's lawsuit "at this late date".
[105] U.S. district judge Timothy Batten issued a temporary restraining order on November 29 that voting machines in Georgia's Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee counties were to preserve their data, after Wood had argued to retain "this information on a very limited basis".
In his affidavit, Watkins stated that his reading of an online user guide for Dominion Voting Systems software led him to conclude that election fraud might be "within the realm of possibility".
[118] In August 2022, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis sought to have Powell testify before a special grand jury seated for the investigation into possible illegal election interference.
[128] U.S. district judge Linda V. Parker denied the requested relief on December 7, stating that the plaintiffs had only offered "theories, conjecture, and speculation" of potential vote switching.
Furthermore, Parker wrote that the relief requested would "greatly harm the public interest" and felt that the plaintiffs' motive for filing the case was not to win, but rather to shake "people's faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government".
[116][117] The city of Detroit has called for sanctions against the plaintiffs in the case as well as their counsel, requesting that Powell and the other attorneys be disbarred for "trying to use this court's processes to validate their conspiracy theories".
[155] A scheduling order filed March 1, 2022, for Dominion's suit against Powell and parallel lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani and My Pillow, Inc., calls for depositions and pretrial motions through September 2023.
[162] Venezuelan businessman Majed Khalil sued Powell, Fox News, and Lou Dobbs for $250 million in December 2021, alleging they had falsely implicated him in rigging Dominion and Smartmatic machines.
[172][173] 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 Powell had indeed violated Texas's attorney code of conduct.
[176] In November 2021, The Washington Post reported that the preceding September federal prosecutors had issued a subpoena for the financial records of groups Powell had formed, including Defending the Republic, which was registered as a social welfare organization, and a political action committee by the same name.
[189] The Atlantic echoed these concerns, with journalist David A. Graham comparing the relationship between Powell's plea and the other figures charged in the Georgia racketeering case to the prisoner's dilemma.
[192] Powell has written opinion pieces for The New York Observer, The Daily Caller, The Hill, National Review,[19] Fox News, and media organizations and conservative content producers.