The cacophonous clacking you just heard was the sound of falling dominoes.
Now that serial MAGA liar Sidney Powell has brightened our dark week by pleading guilty to election interference charges in the Georgia coup case – getting off easy in exchange for potentially devastating testimony – perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the mob boss entertains us with a social media missive like this:
“I never met someone by that name, Sidney Poitier, though some people say he was a star, his big film was ‘To Sir With Love,’ and people do say ‘Sir’ to me all the time, with love, but the fake news says there’s a woman with a strongly similar name, and I never met her either, though some people say she was in a room with me, and if so I don’t know her, but if maybe I may have known her she was only a 2 and so I wouldn’t have dated her…”
Or maybe he just greeted the news of Powell’s flip by painting an impromptu Jackson Pollock with a bottle of ketchup.
Whatever. The bottom line is that Powell, as you may remember, was a key nutcase lawyer in the inner circle during the weeks following Trump’s decisive loss in 2020, most notably in the now-infamous Dec. 18 White House meeting where she reportedly proposed that Trump use the military to seize voting machines. Trump toyed with the idea of making her a special prosecutor to investigate (non-existent) voter fraud – inspired, no doubt, by her willingness to spew insane lies, like the one about how millions of Trump votes had been awarded to Biden thanks to software created in Venezuela “at the direction of Hugo Chavez”…the Venezuelan leader who, at that time, was seven years dead.
As the federal indictment in the Washington election-subversion case clearly states, “The Defendant (Trump) embraced and publicly amplified Co-Conspirator 3’s disinformation.” Powell has not been indicted in that particular case, but it’s widely known that she’s Co-Conspirator 3.
Metaphorically and literally, for many weeks at the tail end of ’20, Powell was in the room where it happened. Clearly she has much to sing about, or else the Georgia prosecutors wouldn’t have cut her such a sweetheart deal (pleading guilty to six misdemeanor counts, paying a few small fines, writing a letter of apology to the state). Back in 2020 she’d vowed to expose a mountain of voter fraud evidence (she’d “release the kraken,” a reference to a mythical sea monster) – but now, with her kraken under pressure on the eve of her Georgia criminal trial, and having apparently decided that she didn’t want to go to jail for Trump, telling the truth under oath about Trump and his gang now seems the better option.
She was supposed to go on trial today with another Trump flunky, Kenneth Chesebro, but now, lo and behold, attorney Chesebro – inspired by Powell, or terrified of going on trial alone, or both – has suddenly decided that he too is happy to cop a plea. And so he did, this morning, confessing his felonious guilt in conspiring to help overturn the Georgia results, and promising to testify truthfully in the Georgia criminal trial that will feature Trump. Clackety clack go the dominoes.
Granted, these major developments in the multi-pronged pursuit of justice will likely make zero difference in the court of public opinion; millions of Americans of the MAGA persuasion don’t follow the news, or don’t care, or simply view the coup probes as some kind of lib conspiracy. Powell is already taking heat today on the loony right for being a “traitor” and a “bitch” from the same kind of people who probably think it’s great that Jim Jordan’s House Republican foes are getting death threats. Our civic space has been woefully polluted, and for that we can thank rank opportunists like Powell.
It’s nice that she has now copped to the error of her ways, but the damage she abetted as a Trump propagandist, serving up snake oil for the MAGAts, cannot be erased. She relentlessly lied that Biden’s election was the “greatest crime of the century,” that Democrats had “developed a computer system to alter votes electronically,” that the Dominion voting machine company had “an algorithm that probably ran all over the country…to flip votes,” that some voting irregularities originated in Germany, and that Biden’s win in Georgia was bogus – a fake claim she sought to buttress by conspiring to swipe voter data from a Georgia county office. (Before she pleaded guilty yesterday, she was charged with a cybercrime).
This isn’t the first time that Powell has walked back her lies. Two years ago, after the Dominion machine company named her in a defamation suit, she publicly admitted – get ready, this is a beaut – that “no reasonable person would conclude that (her) statements were truly statements of fact.” But now, by copping a plea in a Georgia criminal court, she’s essentially compelled to dish on the conspirator-in-chief and the other hack lawyers who sought to undermine democracy.
There’s still a long way to go – the road to justice seems endless – but surely we can be grateful that the courts are still a place where facts matter and the the enablers of fascism can be squeezed to ‘fess up.