Even fervent Trump lawyer has flipped on fraud claims. That should quiet election deniers | Opinion

Brick by brick, Donald Trump’s house of lies keeps crumbling. Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, one of the primary instigators of election fraud claims, has pleaded guilty to criminal charges from the Georgia election interference case against Trump.

Originally charged with at least seven felony charges, Powell took a deal in Fulton County Superior Court, pleading guilty to six misdemeanors: five counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties and one count of conspiracy to commit theft by taking.

Powell is sentenced to six years of probation, a $6,000 fine, $2,700 in restitution and an order to write an apology letter. Most significantly, she must testify against about a dozen other co-defendants.

After the November 2020 election, Trump refused to accept the results in several key states. Powell was a primary player in originating and spreading the idea that the election results were fraudulent and that a bevy of conspiracies were at play. Trump praised Powell’s involvement in his election claims, tweeting that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives.”

Such claims were red meat for Trump’s MAGA fanbase in North Texas. Heider Garcia, former Tarrant County elections administrator, mentioned Powell’s absurd claims last year in written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani made baseless accusations of voter fraud and manipulation of election results,” Garcia wrote.

The idea of election fraud and conspiracy never held any weight in court, even with Republican-appointed judges — truly the most compelling piece of evidence that the election results were solid and final and that Trump needed to move on. Such claims definitely never held any weight in Texas, especially Tarrant County, but that didn’t stop three Republican leaders — Sheriff Bill Waybourn, County Judge Tim O’Hare and District Attorney Phil Sorrells — from forming a new election fraud unit earlier this year. These actions only sow seeds of doubt about election integrity.

Neither Powell nor Trump ever accepted the results of the election. When Trump’s legal team began losing cases, after court bids in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Georgia, to prevent those states from certifying their vote totals, Powell doubled-down on the claims.

In a November 2020 news conference Powell, alongside Giuliani and Ellis, said that there was a server with evidence of voting irregularities in Germany, created at the behest of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and the software in key states switched votes for Trump to Joe Biden. You cannot make this up.

“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, claiming her bizarre lawsuits were “biblical.”

Soon after that, even the Trump team began to distance from Powell, but it didn’t really stick. Her face and her baseless, insane theories will forever be aligned with the Trump campaign and their efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters.

Powell’s flip may help Trump defenders and his MAGA fanbase, who will claim that she only went back on her conspiracies because she needed the plea deal. But that doesn’t change the fact that Powell turned on Trump nonetheless and that her claims never held up in court from the start.

Powell’s claims led Republican Texans sympathetic to Trump on a wild goose chase of conspiracy theories and election fraud. MAGA voters almost seemed like they wanted to find evidence of fraud to prove Trump right — but there never has been. Election integrity is vital to a thriving democracy, but continually pressing claims of fraud or conspiracy only breeds distrust.

Powell and Trump didn’t care if Texas voters — or any other Republicans — doubted their state’s voting systems so long as it sowed doubt, fear and anxiety. And if it propelled voters to stick with Trump.

This should be the final straw for Republicans still holding on to a shred of hope that Trump actually won in 2020 election and deserves to be commander in chief again. He does not. This proves it.

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