The Kraken released: Sidney Powell releases pair of lawsuits
The Kraken #TheKraken
A Texas-based lawyer kicked out of Donald Trump’s legal team after spouting wild conspiracy theories at a RNC press conference has released what she termed ‘the Kraken’ – two law suits alleging ‘massive voter fraud’ in the presidential election.
Sidney Powell published a 104-page document detailing allegations about Georgia and a 75-page document looking at Michigan on Wednesday night
In the documents – released online at midnight on the eve of Thanksgiving – she alleged the election had been ‘rigged’ to favor Joe Biden, and that foreign powers were involved.
She tweeted: ‘The #Kraken was just released on #Georgia’, along with a link to her website.
She added: ‘Exhibits to follow. Also #ReleaseTheKraken in #Michigan’
But the filings were riddled with typos, with both misspelling the name of the courts they were being filed in.
In the Georgia filing, the court was named as ‘United States Districct Court, Northern Distrcoict of Georgia’, while the Michigan court was named as the ‘Eastern Distrct of Michigan’.
The maverick lawyer spelled out claims she had previously made at a tumultuous press conference the week before – namely that Georgia was using election machinery designed by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, with the express wish of rigging the vote.
Sidney Powell appeared with the Trump team on Thursday and was dropped by them Sunday
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She claimed in the introduction that the ballots were switched in favor of Biden, and said that Iran and China were also in on the plot.
‘The scheme and artifice to defraud was for the purpose of illegally and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to make certain the election of Joe Biden as the president of the United States,’ the court documents claim.
She said Georgia had been the site of ‘ballot stuffing’ and brought the case against the governor of the state, Brian Kemp; the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger; and four election officials.
The case was brought on behalf of seven plaintiffs.
In the Georgia case, Powell outlines her theory that ‘ballot-stuffing’ was achieved by ‘computer software created and run by domestic and foreign actors’, as she made a number of different allegations of tampering and fraud.
She claimed that voting software companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic altered tallies through their software and hardware.
She said: ‘Smartmatic and Dominion were founded by foreign oligarchs and dictators to ensure computerized ballot-stuffing and vote manipulation to whatever level was needed to make certain Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez never lost another election.’
She continued: ‘A core requirement of the Smartmatic software design was the software’s ability to hide its manipulation of votes from any audit.’
The only evidence for her claims is an apparent whistleblower from a Venezuelan military official.
While it is true that Smartmatic’s founders are from Venezuela, the company said it had very little involvement in the 2020 US election, working only in one county.
Los Angeles used its touchscreen screens, where Biden held 71 per cent of the vote to Trump, 27 per cent, similar to the 2016 result where Clinton received 72 per cent and Trump 23 per cent.
Smartmatic even accused the Venezuelan government of election fraud in 2017 after their systems were allegedly tampered with, and no longer works in the country.
Powell claimed that Dominion is a ‘descendant’ of Smartmatic and has inherited its vote-rigging technologies, even though the two companies are competitors.
Her theory is based on the fact that Smartmatic sold the company Sequoia Voting Systems in 2007 and three years later, Dominion bought its assets.
Sequoia filed for bankruptcy in 2014 and while Dominion could have used its software, it is now 10 years since it purchased the company and the software is likely to be outdated.
Powell wrote: ‘The Dominion system used in Georgia erodes and undermines the reconciliation of the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, such that these figures are permitted to be unreconciled, opening the door to ballot stuffing and fraud.’
But again she finds little evidence that the electoral fraud actually occurred, despite alleging that as many as 96,000 votes were illegally counted in Georgia, which she says would have overturned Biden’s lead of 12,670 votes.
Another theory outlined by Powell is that in Fulton County, ‘election workers falsely claimed a water leak required the facility to close’ at 10pm on November 3.
She says everyone was meant to be evacuated but ‘several election workers remained unsupervised and unchallenged working at the computers for the voting tabulation machines until after 1am.’
This claim has also been made by Trump, and it is true that a water leak briefly caused the county to stop counting votes in the room where the absentee ballots were being processed.
The county has maintained that no votes were damaged by the pipes, and each of the ballots were counted.
However, Georgia’s Secretary of State has opened an investigation into the water leak to see if everything was legitimate, and the state is conducting a recount of its votes, as requested by Trump.
Powell also claimed that Republican representatives were deliberately kept far away during vote counting so they could not see what was taking place – although states have maintained this was necessary for Covid measures and it was the same for Democrats.
In the Michigan case, Powell sued Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, and the Michigan board of state canvassers on behalf of six plaintiffs.
Powell said the case was one of ‘massive election fraud’.
In Michigan, as in Georgia, the case focused on election machines made by a Toronto-based company called Dominion, and a rival Florida-registered firm, Smartmatic.
Powell alleged that the two companies created machines, with the help of Chavez, to rig the vote.
Powell, whose outlandish theory earned a rebuke from the President, has founded a ‘legal defense fund’ under the Internal Revenue Service category 501(c)(4).
The IRS says that 501(c)(4) should normally apply to ‘social welfare organizations’ and community groups like homeowners associations.
It can be used for lobbying activities but the deductions are not tax deductible like those for nonprofits.
The website for The Legal Defense fund says that ‘millions of dollars must be raised to defend the Republic as these lawsuits continue to be filed to ensure victory’ for Trump, even though he has now essentially admitted defeat to Joe Biden by allowing the transition to go ahead.
It is worth noting that even if both Georgia and Pennsylvania flipped to Trump, he would still be short of Biden, with 268 electoral college votes as opposed to Biden’s 270.
Powell on Tuesday night appeared on Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs show to preview the case.
‘The evidence is so overwhelming, it’s almost as though they were so blatant about it they expected us to catch it,’ she told Dobbs.
She was described as a ‘member of President Trump’s legal team’ which is false after they publicly cut ties with her on Sunday.
During the day she tweeted a demand that Trump fire his current advisers and hold a rally in every disputed state.
Powell came to national attention last week with a press conference where she claimed that Venezuela, China, Cuba, George Soros, and the Dominion Voting systems were all involved in a plot to throw the election to Biden.
The claim was a step too far even for the Trump legal team which issued a statement saying that ‘Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own’ and not part of their efforts.
Powell’s claims come after she spent years cultivating Trump’s attention with regular appearances on Fox.
But her appearance on the network last week led to host Tucker Carlson calling her out for her lack of evidence for the new theories.
Carlson stopped short of calling Powell’s claims outlandish – but he did note that she refused repeated invitations to defend them. ‘We invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour,’ Carlson told his prime time audience.
‘But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.’
He said his show approached the subject with an open mind.
‘We did not dismiss any of it. We don’t dismiss anything anymore,’ Carlson said.
‘This may be the single most open minded show on television. We literally do UFO segments.’
He said: ‘She never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.’
Her social media accounts have been flooded with QAnon conspiracy theories and she had been on the President’s radar since representing his disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn.
Now Powell, a 65-year-old mother of one who practices law in Dallas but is from Raleigh, North Carolina, appears to be trying to monetize her infamy.
The website for the Legal Defense Fund appears to have been set up on November 11, a day after she appeared on the Lou Dobbs show on Fox.
Originally it stated that ‘$500,000 must be raised in the next 24 hours’ but it has since been updated to ask for ‘millions’ in donations to stop the certification of ballots in Arizona, Georgia and other states that Biden won. It is already too late – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia have all certified already and all litigation will be redundant by the ‘safe harbor’ deadline of December 8.
The mission of the organization is listed as: ‘To protect and defend the lawful votes of American citizens, ensure election integrity, educate the world on what it means to be a constitutional Republic, and pursue legal action to preserve the vision of our Founders and to maintain this great Republic.’
The website adds: ‘The future of our Republic is at stake. The left, the media, and a complicit Republican Establishment are attempting to steal this election through a staggering voter fraud operation. The time to fight is now.’
The website has a form for credit card payments and suggests that rather than writing checks to The Legal Defense Fund people should make them payable to ‘Sidney Powell’.
The address that is given is a UPS store in West Palm Beach, Florida, which appears to be a PO Box.
According to IRS guidelines a 501(c)(4) normally applies to ‘civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare’.
Examples include a ‘community association that works to improve public service’ by publishing a free community newspaper.
Neighborhood watch patrols could be another option as would an organization that arranges an ‘annual festival of regional customs and traditions’.
The IRS test for a 501(c)(4) organization is that it must be ‘primarily engaged’ in social welfare issues but the language is loose enough to allow organizations like The Legal Defense Fund to operate.
DailyMail.com previously revealed that Powell began her legal career by attending law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, served as a U.S. attorney in Texas, and represented executives at fallen energy giant Enron.
It was her representation of Flynn, who pleaded guilty in a plea deal with the Mueller inquiry to lying to the FBI, which propelled her on to the MAGA stage. Flynn was pardoned by Trump on Wednesday.
It also appears to be the origin of her use of the nickname or slogan The Kraken. She has alternately been The Kraken, or been said to have unleashed The Kraken in the Flynn case – although her attempts to maneuver him out of the guilty plea are currently in limbo.
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