Sidney Katherine Powell (1955-) was an American far-right conspiracy theorist and attorney who was among Donald Trump's chief co-conspirators in his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Biography[]
Sidney Katherine Powell was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1955, and she was raised in Raleigh. She became a lawyer in 1978 and went on to serve as one of the youngest federal prosecutors in the country; Powell served as an assistant US attorney in Texas and Virginia. She established her own law firm in Dallas in 1993, briefly returning to North Carolina to practice in Asheville before moving back to Texas. Powell wrote opinion pieces for right-leaning websites and took part in Robert Mueller's investigation of Donald Trump's ties to Russia in 2017, only to become a leading voice against the Mueller investigation and to call for Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI. Powell claimed that Flynn was framed by a covert "deep state" operation and spread conspiracy theories claiming that communists, globalists, George Soros, Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013), the Clinton Foundation, the CIA, and thousands of Democratic and Republican politicians used voting machines to transfer millions of votes away from Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Both Dominion Voting Systems (which she claimed was invented in Venezuela to facilitate electoral fraud) and Smartmatic sued her for her defamatory statements. On 31 May 2021, at a QAnon event in Dallas, she and Flynn endorsed a coup in the United States in the aftermath of the 2021 Burmese coup d'etat; in August, she was ordered to pay the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit for their expenses in defending against the Dominion lawsuit and was referred to state disciplinary authorities for possible disbarment for ethics violations. On 1 August 2023, she was one of five co-conspirators named in the federal indictment of Trump for his efforts to overturn the election; on 14 August, a Georgia grand jury indicted Powell, Trump, and 17 others on RICO charges. On 19 October 2023, she pled guilty to six misdemeanor charges in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution for her role in attempting to overturn the results in Georgia, agreeing to serve six months' probation and pay a $10,000 fine in exchange for testifying against her co-conspirators.