Was Sidney Powell Actually Donald Trump's Lawyer? What We Know

After attorney Sidney Powell agreed last Thursday to testify against her co-defendants in the Georgia election tampering case, Donald Trump moved quickly to distance himself from her.

On Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that "despite the Fake News reports to the contrary, and without even reaching out to ask the Trump Campaign, MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS."

Trump publicly welcomed Powell into his team in the post-election period in 2020, when he was contesting Joe Biden's victory.

On November 14, 2020, Trump posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he was welcoming Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and two others as "a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives" to work on "the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS."

Trump posted the welcoming comments just over a week after the 2020 election when he was bringing more lawyers into his team to contest the result.

But within a few days, Powell's claims of election fraud began to worry the Trump team.

Powell made a number of unsubstantiated claims at a news conference on November 20, where she was joined by Giuliani and Ellis. Powell falsely alleged that proof of voting irregularities was located in a server in Germany.

She wrongly claimed that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. This came months after Trump called Biden "a Trojan horse for socialism" during a campaign stop. The attorney also repeated the debunked claim that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favor of Joe Biden.

Three days later, on November 23, 2020, Giuliani and Ellis released a statement distancing Trump's legal team from Powell.

"Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity," Giuliani and Ellis said in the statement.

However, a video has emerged of Powell's video deposition before the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riots, in which she claimed that Trump had appointed her as his special counsel to investigate the election result.

"He had asked me to be special counsel to address the election issues and to collect evidence. He was extremely frustrated with, I would call it, the lack of law enforcement by any of the government agencies who are supposed to act to protect the rule of law and our Republic," she told the committee.

In addition, Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith has alleged in his federal indictment that Trump was publicly backing Powell but was privately expressing the view that her conspiracy theories were "crazy."

The indictment notes that on November 25, 2020, two days after the joint statement from Giuliani and Ellis that Co-Conspirator 3 [Powell] filed a lawsuit against the Governor of Georgia "falsely alleging 'massive election fraud' accomplished through the voting machine company's election software and hardware."

According to Smith's indictment, Trump publicly welcomed Powell's lawsuit despite the fact that he had discussed Powell's "far-fetched public claims regarding the voting machine company in private with advisors, and [Trump] had conceded that they were unsupported and that Co-Conspirator 3 sounded 'crazy.'"

A person close to Trump's legal team told Newsweek that there was a difference between Powell being Trump's private lawyer and an unpaid volunteer lawyer and, that Giuliani and Ellis' November 2020 position was the correct one.

Even if Smith's assertion about Trump's private views is correct, the former president kept Powell in his inner circle and she attended post-election crisis meetings including in the White House.

According to evidence cited in the January 6 committee hearings, Powell co-authored a draft executive order to authorize the National Guard to seize voting machines.

The idea, which might have brought America to a point of mass civil unrest, was discussed with Trump and his team in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020.

Powell's role in this meeting was noted by the report produced by the U.S. House Committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riots.

Powell's draft executive order, allegedly supported at the Oval Office meeting by retired general Michael Flynn, led to a screaming match as White House officials argued that it would lead to the breakdown of law and order and could be a threat to democracy.

Powell reached a deal with prosecutors in Atlanta, Georgia, last Thursday, agreeing to cooperate with the state's investigation into tampering in the 2020 presidential election in exchange for a six-year probation sentence, a $6,000 fine, and a written apology to Georgia residents.

Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro took a plea deal in Georgia on Friday when he pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents. He will also have to testify against other defendants in the case. Another co-defendant, bail bondsman Scott Hall, pleaded guilty in September to five misdemeanor conspiracy charges. That means that three of the 19 indicted in the Georgia case are now cooperating and agreeing to give evidence against the remaining 16, including Donald Trump.