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I Guess Donald Trump No Longer Wants To Release the Kraken

Attorney Sidney Powell speaks to the press about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election

Donald Trump appears to have severed ties with Sidney Powell, one of the attorneys on his legal team that has been filing baseless lawsuits trying to prove the presidential election (but somehow not any of the down-ballot races?) was overrun with fraud. What they lack in evidence they’ve tried to make up for in conspiracy theories and weird tweets.

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In addition to being a part of last week’s truly bizarre press conference in which the team claimed George Soros, Antifa, and deceased former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez all had a role in corrupting the election, Powell has been tweeting increasingly vile fact-free conspiracies about voter fraud. She has accused Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp of accepting bribes from a voting machine company. She threatened to bring a “biblical” lawsuit against the state and told the conservative outlet Newsmax, “Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up.”

This is the same woman who has repeatedly promised to “release the Kraken” of evidence proving all of these theories. But in addition to not knowing what a Kraken is, she has failed to produce any proof at all to back up any of her wild claims.

Powell’s removal came in the form of a statement from Trump’s personal lawyer and world’s worst handkerchief user Rudy Giuliani and his campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” the statement reads. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

In short:

Powell responded with her own statement, according to Politicosaying, “I agree with the statement today. I will represent #WeThePeople and seek the Truth,” she said. “I intend to expose all the fraud and let the chips fall where they may. We will not allow the foundations of this great Republic to be destroyed by abject fraud or our votes for President Trump and other Republicans to be stolen by foreign interests or anyone else.”

In another version of the statement that appears to have been emailed to supporters, Powell says she agrees with Giuliani’s declaration that she is not Trump’s lawyer because she “never signed a retainer agreement or sent the President or the campaign a bill for my expenses or fees.” Which indicates that Powell hasn’t been getting paid for her work but also maybe isn’t bound to attorney-client privilege if she was never officially hired?

In yet another version issued to CBS News, Powell ended with the hashtag #KrakenOnSteroids.

Powell’s statements over the last few weeks have become so outrageous that some Republican lawmakers have tried to distance themselves from her claims. She’s too extreme even for Tucker Carlson, who said that his crew asked her to provide his show with evidence to back up her accusations and in response to his many “polite requests,” he says she “got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

When you’re too extreme for Tucker Carlson and Rudy Giuliani, it’s probably time to take stock of some of your life choices.

(via Politico, HuffPost, image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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