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President Donald J. Trump says he wants a lawyer to investigate “electoral theft”, but the president’s main candidate, Sidney Powell, says he was prevented from entering the White House by the president’s own chief of staff.
As Powell and the president discussed the role last Friday at a contentious four-and-a-half-hour meeting in the Oval Office, she says, insiders opposed his appointment, sometimes shouting defiantly at the president. Powell’s official account reveals a White House divided by internal feuds and a growing divide between the president’s most senior staff and his most dedicated outside supporters.
On Saturday morning, Powell says, the president’s senior advisers had refused to give him a Secret Service pass to and from the West Wing. “I have been prevented from speaking or communicating with the president since I left the Oval Office on Friday night,” she says, “apparently by everyone around you.”
During the Zenger interview, conducted on video in a 7th floor suite at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, Powell said he has not had contact with Trump since the December 18 meeting.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declined to comment on the record as to whether any senior officials, including chief of staff Mark R. Meadows, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and House adviser White Pat A. Cipollone, intervened to keep Powell out of the White House. All three attended Friday’s meeting, which evolved into chaos and accusations about who was – or was not – serving Trump’s interests. Powell confirmed that former National Security Advisor, General Michael T. Flynn, accompanied her to the Oval Office.
O’Brien and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph S. Giuliani, participated by telephone. Other auxiliaries entered and left the Oval Office periodically; they could not be identified by Zenger communicating. A message to Giuliani asking for comments was not returned. Asked to confirm Giuliani’s participation, his lawyer Bob Costello said: “I don’t know the answer to that.”
Trump said on Tuesday in a videotaped statement that “he will seek all the legal and constitutional options available to prevent the theft of the presidential election.” He tweeted on Wednesday: “I disagree with anyone who thinks that a strong, fast and fair Special Council is not needed, IMMEDIATELY. This was the most corrupt election in our country’s history and should be examined closely!” Only the United States attorney general can appoint a special attorney, but the president can appoint a special attorney from the White House, who would have more limited powers and protections.
After seeing the huge electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential elections, I disagree with anyone who thinks that a strong, fast and fair Special Council is not needed, IMMEDIATELY. This was the most corrupt election in the history of our country and it must be examined closely!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2020
Does Sidney Powell have this job? “That’s a good question!” she said Zenger Newslaughing. She says she received a verbal offer for the job, but that senior officials in the White House Council Office prevented her from presenting the paperwork to the president to make it official.
Meanwhile, she says, Meadows and others have blocked permission for her to visit the executive mansion or its nearby buildings. Senior officials “threw sand into the gears” of the actions the president asked her to take, she says.
Powell challenged the accuracy of the anonymous reports that appeared in the mainstream media. There was no mention of “martial law” or sending soldiers to seize the ballot boxes, she said, or holding a second round in undecided states. “I can say with certainty,” she said, “that it was not discussed in the Oval Office on Friday night.”
Flynn said his recollection of the meeting coincides with Powell’s. “Nobody talked about martial law, no matter what some reports say,” he said Zenger.
Although not considered for a special advisory role, Powell said the president wanted to nominate her for something less ambitious: a “special” role within the same White House Council Office that was interfering. “I’m not a Robert Mueller-style special lawyer,” she says, but “there was a discussion about me being a special attorney for the White House.”
Such an appointment would give Powell a high-level security clearance and 24-hour access to the White House, and would likely place her in the same office as the White House Council – privileges, she says, some of the men who work near the Oval. want her to have.
“It didn’t happen,” says Powell, “because it looks like it was blocked after Friday night, or undone, or I don’t know what you would call it” by senior White House officials, including, she suggested, Meadows and Cipollone.
Cipollone, Meadows and O’Brien argued vigorously against hiring Powell, she says, and warned of the strongly negative reactions among Washington-based press and members of Congress whose support Trump would need in the coming weeks if he had any hope of reversing the results of the November 3 elections that made former Vice President Joseph R. Biden his waiting successor.
Powell said that intramural brawls waste time that could be spent on investigations and prosecutions. “Sidney is a fantastic defender,” said Flynn. “You know how POTUS says you should never give up, no matter what? This is Sidney. And this is fantastic. We need more like her.”
Powell says his small, privately funded team of lawyers “is still collecting evidence through hoses” and that “thousands and thousands of people have come forward and made sworn statements” about irregularities they say they testified on election day. Powell refused to provide any new evidence of electoral fraud, rather than referring to previously published claims in a folder of material that his team provided to Zenger News two hours before Wednesday’s interview. (You can read it here.)
Powell cited reports from the FBI and the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency in October 2020 warning that Iran-backed hackers were “probably intent on influencing and interfering in the United States elections”. A report was updated on election day, saying that unidentified Iranians infiltrated electoral websites and stole voter registration data, subsequently launching a “mass dissemination of voter intimidation emails to American citizens”.
That same agency issued a statement on November 12 that “[t]The November 3 election was the safest in American history “- apparently undermining Powell’s claims.
A similar federal report also cast doubt. “There is no evidence that any voting system excluded or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” said the executive committee of the Inter-agency Electoral Infrastructure Coordination Council. This panel, formed in 2017 on the grounds that Russia had infiltrated the 2016 election to benefit Trump, includes officials from the Infrastructure Security and Cybersecurity Agency, the US Election Assistance Commission, the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED), the nonprofit Democracy Works and Electronic Registration Information Center and companies whose hardware and software are used in the United States elections.
Powell on Wednesday pointed to a little-known opinion issued on October 11 by federal judge Amy Totenberg, whom she mistakenly referred to as Nina Totenberg – the name of the presenter for National Public Radio. Judge Totenberg, who is part of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, cited the risk of “secret ballot change or operational interference” in touch screen voting devices sold by Dominion Voting Systems if they are not properly audited.
These risks “are not hypothetical or remote in the current circumstances,” wrote Totenberg, adding that machines can “deprive voters of their votes cast” by storing data in unverified digital QR codes, making any potential manipulation invisible to voters “by least until any parts of the system implode due to a breach, failure or crash of the system. “
Powell says these exact types of falls during vote counting have allowed Democratic electoral officials to begin “filling their votes.” [totals] with fraudulent bills “while the Dominion machines were shut down.” We can definitely show that the electoral system has been tampered with, with the help of foreign influence, to turn any number of states “, she says.
Powell did not provide any evidence that the potential fraud that Judge Totenberg identified in October materialized as real fraud in November.
Powell wants Trump to order federal authorities to protect the electronic voting machines in districts with many Republicans and Democrats in undecided states, conduct forensic audits and find out if any of them were connected to the Internet on election day. These Internet connections can allow remote actors to change vote totals in real time.
Banknotes on such machines connected to the Internet, she says, are “invalid”.
As Americans prepared to celebrate Christmas Eve on Thursday, Trump tweeted from his resort at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida: “VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY, IT’S A FACT !!! “
VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY, IT’S A FACT !!!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2020