After the 2020 presidential election, Sidney Powell tirelessly promoted a baroque conspiracy theory claiming that Donald Trump had been deprived of his rightful victory by a combination of deliberately corrupted voting machines and phony ballot dumps. At first, Powell explicitly did that on behalf of the Trump campaign, joining the "elite strike force team" of lawyers who were determined to reverse Joe Biden's victory. She also pressed her outlandish and unsubstantiated fraud claims in numerous TV appearances and in lawsuits she filed on behalf of aggrieved Republicans. And even after the Trump campaign disassociated itself from Powell on November 22, 2020, the president and representatives such as Rudy Giuliani continued to tell the same basic story.
The fruitless attempts to validate that story included a bizarre incident in which employees of SullivanStrickler, a forensic data firm hired by Powell, copied election software and ballot records at the Board of Elections and Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, on January 7, 2021, the day after Trump supporters enraged by his stolen-election fantasy rioted at the U.S. Capitol. That freelance investigation was the basis for the state criminal charges to which Powell pleaded guilty on Thursday, the day before her election-related racketeering trial was scheduled to begin.
