Remember Sidney Powell, former Trump lawyer and the one who would release the Kraken upon Trump’s adversaries?
Now she’s being sued and her defense team’s strategy is … She was just kidding!
Sidney Powell argued Monday that she couldn’t be sued for defamation for repeatedly promoting false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being rigged because “no reasonable person would” believe that her comments “were truly statements of fact.”
In the months after the election, the Texas-based attorney became one of the most public faces of a campaign to discredit President Joe Biden’s win. Vowing to “release the Kraken,” she pushed the lie that the election was stolen from former president Donald Trump. In numerous TV and public appearances, as well as in court, Powell spread conspiracy theories that two voting equipment companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, were part of a Democrat-backed scheme to “steal” the election by rigging voting systems to flip votes for Trump to Biden, count ballots more than once, and fabricate votes for Biden.
Now facing billion-dollar lawsuits from both companies and having lost all of her court cases challenging the election, Powell is on the defensive. On Monday, her legal team filed a motion to dismiss Dominion’s $1.3 billion-lawsuit, or at least to move it from the federal district court in Washington, DC, to Texas. They argued that the election fraud narrative that Powell had spent months touting as grounds to undo the presidential election was “hyperbole” and political speech entitled to protection under the First Amendment.
Even if Powell’s statements were presentations of fact that could be proven as true or false, her lawyers wrote, “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” [BuzzFeed News]
While everyone and their brother is laughing over this ludicrous defense, it’s worth noting this classic bit of farce is of a piece with Trump himself.
After all, she did pronounce her outré claims at official Trump Campaign press conferences, and she was taken seriously by a certain segment of the American electorate.
And now they’ve been, in essence, called fools.
This is more than reminiscent of the January 6th insurrectionists being written off as members of BLM or antifa, because people who’ve run out of usefulness are being shoveled under the bus, while Powell & Trump frantically cover their asses.
This isn’t just Trump, either. Falwell at Liberty University has been tossed aside. Republicans in states that voted Democratic in 2016 and 2018 were thrown away by Trump because they lived in the wrong State. If you’re a Republican who endorsed Biden, not only will Trump hate on you, so will the entire current Republican base.
This extreme private sector behavior is another reason that people who are running for elective seats, and have no training in the public sector, should be summarily ignored by voters. Applying a foreign moral system in the public sector is deeply unfair and unjust.
Powell is simply applying her moral system, acquired in the private sector from conservative sources, in the public sector. This general behavior should not be shocking.
