Donald Trump's Inner Circle Has Been Punctured

She suggested sending in the military to seize voting machines. She used her own non-profit to copy those same machines. She said at a packed press conference that the Marxist government of Venezuela was helping rig the 2020 election.

But attorney Sidney Powell has now struck a deal with Georgia prosecutors in which she admitted that she conspired to interfere with the state's election results. It's news that could have devastating consequences for former President Donald Trump.

So far, those who have taken pleas in the election fraud cases have been low-level Republican functionaries. Michigan native, James Renner, who, like Powell, took a plea deal, was a retiree who certified the election for Trump in the basement of the Republican Party. Police then physically blocked his group of would-be certifiers from taking their newly created certifications into the Michigan Capitol building.

Scott Hall in Georgia was an obscure bail bondsman who took a plea and admitted that Powell was directing him to interfere with voting machines in Georgia.

Powell, in contrast to the other two, was a high-level attorney who had meetings with the president in the White House and had been one of his closest advisers after the election. If Trump has secrets, Powell might know them, so her decision to cooperate will be of interest not just to Georgia prosecutors but Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith as he knits together a federal case against Trump for alleged election tampering across America.

It was Powell who wrote several drafts of an executive order that would have suspended normal law and authorized 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 suggested that Trump order the U.S. military to seize voting machines in key states, according to the report produced by the U.S. House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Her idea, 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.

A month earlier, Powell held a defiant post-election press conference in which she suggested that the software for U.S. voting machines had been developed by Venezuela at the direction of its Marxist former leader, Hugo Chavez, who died seven years earlier.

All of the heated stolen-election rhetoric allegedly added to the fervid atmosphere among Trump supporters, leading to the January 6 riot in which Trump supporters invaded to try to stop certification of the election.

The following day, January 7, surveillance footage showed data experts from SullivanStrickler, a firm that specializes in "imaging," or making exact copies, of electronic devices, arrive at the Coffee County election office in southwest Georgia.

As attorney Joyce Vance pointed out in her Civil Discourse blog on the Substack website, the SullivanStrickler team imaged almost every component of the election systems, including ballot scanners, the server used to count votes, thumb drives and flash memory cards.

According to Georgia prosecutors, Powell organized the data breach, though she argued she did nothing wrong "because it was her non-profit company that paid the forensics experts and there had been prior authorization from local officials," Vance said.