President Donald Trump reportedly informed attorney Sidney Powell this week that she will not be given a “special counsel” position to probe her unproven claims on election fraud, and she now claims that she has been cut off from speaking to the president.
Trump dropped the idea of “giving her such a formal portfolio for pursuing her conspiracy theories around voter irregularities and fraud,” The Daily Beast reported. “Asked whether Trump told Powell that she wouldn’t be ‘special counsel,’ Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani — who leads the president’s post-election legal team — told The Daily Beast on Tuesday: ‘Yes,’ adding, ‘she is no longer part of [our] team. She is on her own.'”
Powell later released a statement to Fox News, saying, “I have been blocked by White House counsel and others from seeing or speaking to the President since I raised the public formal findings and even more evidence of foreign interference from Iran and China.”
The news comes after Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani sought to distance himself, the president, and the president’s legal defense team from Powell this week. Giuliani’s remarks came after Powell had repeatedly been sighted at the White House in recent days, including on Friday, when she was accompanied by Lt. General Michael Flynn. The Trump campaign, at the behest of the president, distanced itself from Powell last month after she made unproven claims during a press conference that many of Trump’s frequent defenders were stunned by — including Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh. The Washington Post reported that a Trump campaign official said at the time that Powell was “too crazy” to have Trump’s support.
“Let me say definitely, Sidney Powell was not part of our legal team,” Giuliani said this week. “She hasn’t been for five weeks. She is not a special counsel for the president; she does not speak for the president, nor does she speak for the administration. She speaks for herself.”
Giuliani went on to add that “whatever she is talking about, it’s her own opinions. … I’m not responsible for them, the president isn’t, nor is anybody else on our legal team.”
Fox News contributor Karl Rove unloaded on Powell during a segment on Tuesday, saying:
Ms. Powell has peddled theories that have no basis in fact. The idea that Hugo Chavez from the grave was somehow involved in stealing this year’s election and … she was poured out in courtroom recently where all of her expert witnesses — one of them was so highly prized that he had to have a code name and couldn’t be revealed, she sold him as a highly expert military intelligence analyst. [He] turned out to be a mid-level computer programmer from Dallas who couldn’t even pass the entrance exams from the 305th Intelligence Brigade in intelligence school. He couldn’t even pass the exams and he was her “high-level” advocate. She had another expert who couldn’t tell the difference between election precincts in townships in Minnesota and Michigan and claimed that 151% turnout in Wayne County, Michigan, when any idiot with access to Google and the county election returns could’ve seen that the turnout was 51%, not 151%. What she has done to sort of throw mud on the president through her antics is unbelievable. The president has been so ill-served by this crowd, and she is chief among them.
Karl Rove hits Sydney Powell with a FLAMETHROWER pic.twitter.com/Ae61TECv21
— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) December 22, 2020