Surprise: Trump Pretends He Barely Knows Sidney Powell After She Pleads Guilty and Agrees to Testify Against Codefendants

When Donald Trump was president, he had a go-to defense when his associates were accused of wrongdoing, when people accused him of wrongdoing, or when someone he knew did something he didn’t like: claim to have never met them. Did this mean he’d actually never met them? No, of course not; it was just something he said, even if there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For example, after writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual abuse and defamation, he insisted he had no idea who she was, which might have been a little more believable if there wasn’t a literal photo of the two of them (which he later mistook for a photo of his second wife). When the nomination of toilet entrepreneur Matthew Whitaker for attorney general hit the skids, the then president told reporters, “I don’t know Matt Whitaker,” despite calling him “a great guy” a month prior and literally saying the words, “I know Matt Whitaker.” He did the same thing when it came to an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani’s, despite numerous photos and at least one video of the two of them; he did it with George Conway and retired generals; and he even once did it with Vladimir Putin.

In other words, it should not surprise a single solitary person to hear that now that one of his coup-plotting lawyers has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election case and agreed to testify against her codefendants, Trump is claiming to barely know her.

Per CNN:

Former President Donald Trump claimed Sidney Powell was “never” his attorney in a social media post Sunday, three days after she pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case. Despite Trump’s claims, Powell was briefly an official member of Trump’s legal team in 2020, and Trump stayed in contact with her on election-related matters even after she was ousted from his campaign.

“Sidney Powell was one of millions and millions of people who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!!! MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS. In fact, she would have been conflicted,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Powell comes after she agreed to cooperate with Fulton County prosecutors and testify against her co-defendants in the case, potentially including Trump. Trump publicly announced on November 15, 2020, that he “added” Powell to his “truly great team” of lawyers working on the election.

As CNN notes, Powell participated in a wild press conference, which was hyped in advance by Trump, in which she tied what she claimed was massive election fraud to Hugo Chavez. And despite the campaign attempting to distance itself from her after that, she was in the Oval Office soon after, as The Washington Post reports:

…a month later, Powell gained access to the White House and an audience with Trump. Late on a Friday night a week before Christmas, Powell and a handful of others, including [former national security adviser Mike] Flynn, urged the president to take extreme measures to unearth evidence of fraud and reverse his defeat, according to the testimony of people present. As the Dec. 18, 2020, meeting unfolded, first in the Oval Office and then in the White House residence, an aide described it in a text message as “UNHINGED.”

During the hours-long discussion, people present later said, Trump weighed seizing voting machines from key counties, deploying the National Guard to potentially rerun the election and appointing Powell as a special counsel to investigate the election. “There was a proposal made by Sidney to become special counsel,” Bernard Kerik, a former New York Police Department commissioner and close ally of Giuliani, said in a deposition taken by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In a deposition with the panel, Powell said Trump “asked me to be special counsel to address the election issues and to collect evidence.”

Powell is unlikely to be the only attorney Trump claims to have never had a professional relationship with, or perhaps even known. Last week, former attorney Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty in the Georgia case, which legal expert Norman Eisen and writer Joshua Kolb have suggested may be even worse news for the ex-president, as Chesebro “provided the legal bedrock of the coup attempt.” (Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the Georgia charges.)