Sidney Powell

Sidney Powell
Born	1955 (age 68–69) Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
Education	University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (BA, JD)
Occupation	Attorney
Years active	1978–present
Website	Official website

Sidney Katherine Powell (born 1955) is an American attorney from North Carolina who served as an Assistant United States Attorney for 10 years before establishing her own private practice in Dallas, Texas. She is best known for successful appellate reversals, for prosecuting Jimmy Chagra in 1979, and for representing General Michael Flynn in 2019 and President Donald Trump in 2020. In the weeks after the 2020 United States presidential election, she joined Trump's legal team to challenge the results.

Early life

Sidney Powell was born in Durham, North Carolina, and grew up in the city of Raleigh. She graduated from Needham Broughton High School and went on to attend the University of North Carolina, where she earned Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctor degrees.

Legal career

From 1978 through 1988, Powell served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas and the Eastern District of Virginia, where she handled civil and criminal trial work. She was appointed Appellate Section Chief for the Western and then the Northern District of Texas.

In 1993 Powell established her own law firm in Dallas, Texas, aimed mostly at federal appellate practice, and practices in the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Federal Circuits, plus representing cases in the United States Supreme Court. Her firm has also handled a number of high-profile class action suits. She has served as lead counsel in more than 500 appeals in the Fifth Circuit courts, resulting in more than 180 published opinions and a reversals rate of approximately 70%.

Powell is a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, where she served as president from 2001-2002.

Notable cases

In 1979 Powell was one of the prosecutors in the trial of Jimmy Chagra, where he was convicted of continuing criminal violations. Chagra was an American drug trafficker implicated in the May 1979 assassination of United States District Judge John H. Wood Jr. in San Antonio, Texas. In the 1970s Chagra was one of the biggest drug traffickers operating out of Las Vegas and El Paso, and according to one observer, he was "the undisputed marijuana kingpin of the Western world." Chagra was released from prison for health reasons in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 9, 2003, and reportedly placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. The story surrounding the assassination of Judge Wood was profiled in an episode of City Confidential. Chagra died of cancer on July 25, 2008.

In 2019 Powell publicly called on General Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty pleas for making false statements to the FBI, and in June 2019 Flynn released his law firm of Covington & Burling and retained Powell to serve as his lead attorney. Powell's appearances on Fox News to discuss the Flynn case were noticed by President Trump, and the two spoke on several occasions. On the same day it was disclosed Flynn had fired his attorneys, Powell sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr requesting the "utmost confidentiality" and argued that Flynn's prosecution was due to "corruption of our beloved government institutions for what appears to be political purposes." Among other things, she requested that Barr appoint an outsider to investigate. Six months later, Barr appointed Jeffrey Jensen to conduct such an investigation. In May 2020, the Justice Department filed a motion with presiding federal judge Emmett Sullivan to drop Flynn's prosecution. Sullivan did not immediately grant the motion, and Powell later requested a writ of mandamus from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to compel Sullivan to drop the case. After an initial ruling in favor of Powell by a three-judge panel of the Court, the case was appealed to the full Court, which denied the mandamus request in an 8-2 ruling, returning the case to Sullivan's court. Powell had argued to the full Court that Sullivan's role was “ministerial,” giving him no discretion but to comply with the Justice Department motion, to which judge Thomas Griffith replied, "It's not ministerial and you know it's not. So it's not ministerial, so that means that the judge has to do some thinking about it, right?" Other judges on the Court also pushed back on Powell’s characterization of a federal judge’s role. Soon after taking the Flynn case, Powell had accused the Justice Department of prosecutorial misconduct against Flynn; in a footnote to a June 2020 court brief, the department described Powell’s allegations as “unfounded and provide no basis for impugning the prosecutors from the D.C. United States Attorney’s Office.”

In November 2020 Powell joined President Donald Trump's legal team challenging the legality of the November presidential election results. Throughout November 4-8, the Trump campaign filed lawsuits in several states over alleged vote harvesting, illegal votes, machine errors, vote dumps and late-counted votes. On November 6, the U.S. Justice Department told prosecutors that federal agents could be sent to ballot counting locations to investigate voter fraud. Days before the 2020 presidential election, Dennis Montgomery, a software designer with a history of making dubious claims, asserted that a government supercomputer program would be used to switch votes from Trump to Biden on voting machines. Powell promoted the theory on Lou Dobbs's Fox Business program two days after the election, and again two days later on Maria Bartiromo's program, claiming to have "evidence that that is exactly what happened." During a subequent appearance on Bartiromo's program, Powell asserted that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were "designed to rig elections," that family members of government officials were paid kickbacks in those states purchasing Dominion products, and linked the situation to the CIA, stating that director Gina Haspel "should be fired immediately." Christopher Krebs, a former Microsoft executive and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), characterized the supercomputer claim as "nonsense" and a "hoax," and the Agency described the 2020 election as "the most secure in American history," with "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised." Asserting that Krebs's analysis was "highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud," Trump fired him by tweet days later.

Writing career

Powell wrote opinion pieces for The New York Observer. She has published two books:

• Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (2014) ISBN 978-1612541495
• Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse (2020) ISBN 978-1594038037

In addition, Powell has published numerous journal articles on law practice. Selected examples include:

• Federal Appellate Practice Guide: Fifth Circuit, Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company (Gabriel and Powell, 1994–99).
• The Appellate Process: Preserving and Protecting the Record for Appeal, ALI/ABA The Appellate Process (1990).
• Federal Appeals in the Fifth Circuit: Tips for the Texas Practitioner, 42 Baylor Law Review No. 1, p. 99 (1990).
• Preparing and Presenting Oral Argument in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 6 Fifth Circuit Reporter No. 4 (February 1989).
• Federal Jurisdiction in Criminal Appeals — Appealable Orders in the Fifth Circuit, 19 Texas Tech Law Review No. 3 (1988).
• Briefwriting for the Fifth Circuit, 4 Fifth Circuit Reporter No. 12, 705 (1987).

Film and media career

Powell has made numerous media appearances both as a political/legal commentator and as a published writer on the subject of law. She has appeared on shows including Lou Dobbs Tonight, Hannity, Shannon Bream’s show, Newsmax TV and One America News, plus various radio shows.

Powell served as producer on the drama Decoding Annie Parker (2013), providing guidance to help bring the film to a commercial release. The film tells the story of Annie Parker and the discovery of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene. The film went on to raise millions of dollars for cancer charities.

Powell also appeared in the cast of The Plot Against the President (2020), a documentary film directed by Amanda Milius and based on the book of the same title by journalist Lee Smith. The film examines circumstances leading up to the 2016 United States Presidential election, the subsequent transition of power, and events that transpired after President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

External links

• Official website