Legal Warfare, the 2020 Election and Sidney Powell - Part Two
Part Two of the breakdown of legal attacks on conservative attorney Sidney Powell
(This series of articles originally ran at Stream.org as a five part series. See Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five. The articles are modified here and presented in three parts. I originally planned to present the series in two parts here, but the material is too voluminous for two parts and will be offered in three parts instead.)
The first article of this series provided background on who Sidney Powell is, an overview of the law fare attacks on her (Michigan sanctions, bar complaints, defamation suits and Georgia indictment) and covered some of the issues with the 2020 Presidential Election in Michigan. The election irregularities in Michigan were covered to put the Michigan federal court’s sanctions in context. This article, Part Two in this series, covers these sanctions against Powell and her co-counsel by a federal judge in Michigan.
Federal Court Sanctions Powell and Co-Counsel
In August 2021, a federal judge in Michigan sanctioned Sidney Powell, along with multiple other attorneys on the Plaintiff’s legal team challenging the Michigan 2020 Presidential election results. The original sanctions order may be found here. Ultimately, the Court ordered Powell and the other attorneys to pay $175,000.00 in attorney fees and costs. Despite the affidavits of over half a dozen experts and dozens of lay witnesses in support of the allegations of the Michigan election lawsuit, amounting to more than 500 pages of exhibits, Powell and her co-counsel were sanctioned without the Court hearing from a single live witness. No direct or cross-examination of the witnesses whose testimony formed the basis of the lawsuit took place at the sanctions hearing. The Court heard argument only and, quoting Ms. Powell, “. . . simply railed on counsel according to the judge’s predetermined narrative that seemed crafted by counsel for the City of Detroit.”
The City of Detroit was not a named Defendant in the suit; rather, Detroit intervened in the suit. Detroit literally filed a motion with the court asking if it could become party to the case. It then moved for sanctions. Over $153,000.00 of the sanctions awarded by the court were awarded to the City of Detroit to supposedly reimburse it for the attorney fees and costs it incurred in the litigation it joined on its own. Unreal. Further, counsel for the City of Detroit in the case was one of the original attorney advisors with The 65 Project, a group seeking to destroy all the attorneys who challenged the 2020 election. One might reasonably conclude the City of Detroit joined the suit for the sole purpose of seeking sanctions.
In her ruling on the sanctions, the federal judge made the following shocking statement:
What an unbelievable statement, particularly in light of the host of issues with the 2020 election in Michigan. Importantly, the Federal Court did not decide “. . . whether there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election in the State of Michigan,” stating the resolution of that question was “never appropriately before” the Court at all. How comforting. While the effort undertaken by Powell and her co-counsel proved to be unsuccessful, to many people, she and her team tried to restore the faith of the people in our Republic and the judicial process.
Voluminous Evidence did not matter
Sidney Powell, and her co-counsel, marshalled an incredible amount of evidence in a very short time for the purpose, as Ms. Powell informed me, of “first seeking a preliminary injunction to secure voting machines for forensic inspection to put to rest for the entire country once and for all whether the election was stolen or fair.” As noted previously, Powell and company filed election suits in four states in the weeks following the November 3, 2020 election. The complaint filed in Federal Court in Michigan was originally filed on November 25, 2020, literally 22 days after the election. The complaint included affidavits and analysis from seven expert witnesses, along with three dozen or so affidavits of poll watchers, elections observers and other lay witnesses. Each of the four election challenges filed by Powell and company contained similar evidence in support. As Powell told me, “The primary and initial goal of the litigation, usually ignored, was to secure the voting machines for a professional, non-partisan inspection. Yet, no court allowed a witness to testify.”
Abuse of Poll Watchers Ignored
Furthermore, the affidavits presented with the Michigan complaint paint a very hostile (and unconstitutional) environment in Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan for Republican election observers. These affidavits document intimidation, threats, harassment, bullying and other misconduct by Detroit election workers against Republican poll watchers. As the Court of Appeal noted in its review of the sanctions order, the “the intimidation and harassment alleged in these affidavits was potentially criminal,” citing Michigan Compiled Laws §168.734, and should not have been disregarded by the trial court (emphasis added). Yet, not only did the federal judge disregard these startling affidavits, she sanctioned counsel for presenting the claims, even at the pleading stage when everything alleged in the suit should have been viewed as true.
Imagine if Democrats went to Federal Court with three dozen affidavits verifying intimidation, threats and harassment of Democrat poll watchers by Republican election workers. The United States Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and all manner of other federal, state and local law enforcement assets would be brought to bear immediately. You better believe a federal fudge would not disregard any such claims or sanction the lawyers bringing them if the claims were brought by Democrats on behalf of Democrats.
Dominion Voting Systems in Michigan
Additionally, the Michigan election suit challenged the use of Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Michigan and, as the complaint alleges, the probability these systems allowed for the State’s vote to be compromised. Powell and her co-counsel were sanctioned for making these claims as well. The Court chastised counsel for supposedly failing to understand the particular Dominion systems used in certain Michigan counties, finding the systems complained of by Plaintiffs were largely not used in Michigan. Yet, Verified Voting confirms Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan used both Dominion ImageCast Precinct optical scanners and ImageCast X BMD (ballot marking devices), the very systems at issue in the Georgia litigation referenced below.
Readers may recall, the Dominion Voting Systems are used statewide in Georgia. A legal challenge in Georgia to the use of the Dominion Voting Systems Ballot Marking Devices and Scanning and Tabulating hardware and software has been in litigation for several years. In October 2020, after early voting for the 2020 Presidential Election already began, the federal judge presiding over the case issued a critical preliminary decision in the case. The Court denied the plaintiff’s request to stop the use of the Dominion equipment, in large part because preventing the use of the equipment so close to the date of the election would throw the election into disarray. In her order, again issued in October 2020, nearly one month before Election Day, U.S. District Court Judge Totenberg in Georgia observed:
And at the very least, the Court cannot fathom why, post-election, the State and Dominion would not at least be moving toward consideration of the software upgrade option Dominion originally promised, allowing voters to cast ballots that are solely counted based on their voting designations and not on an unencrypted, humanly unverifiable QR code that can be subject to external manipulation and does not allow proper voter verification and ballot vote auditing. (Emphasis added.)
The Court noted testing conducted by Professor Alex Halderman, one of the cyber security experts who evaluated the Dominion ICX systems in September 2020, “. . . indicated the practical feasibility through a cyber attack of causing the swapping or deletion of specific vote cast and the compromise of the system through different cyber attack strategies. . ..”
Further, as Prof. Halderman observed in his Declaration filed in the case in September 2021:
My July 1, 2021, expert report describes numerous security vulnerabilities in Georgia’s Dominion ICX BMDs. These include flaws that would allow attackers to install malicious software on the ICX, either with temporary physical access (such as that of voters in the polling place) or remotely from election management systems.
He went on to note the Dominion ICX issues affect other States, including Michigan:
Clearly, Prof. Halderman opines the very same unreliable systems used in Georgia are also used in Michigan. Sidney Powell and her co-counsel should not be subjected to sanctions for similar observations.
The issues with the reliability of Dominion’s software were not limited to Georgia. The State of Texas repeatedly rejected the use of Dominion Voting Systems software for Texas elections due to the vulnerabilities identified by Texas elections officials. The Michigan election challenge filed by Sidney Powell and her co-counsel specifically reference this fact and included the Texas Secretary of State’s decision as an exhibit.
Nevertheless, the facts and circumstances surrounding this election, which was plagued with unprecedented anomalies and mathematical impossibilities, coupled with the mass of evidence submitted along with the Michigan complaint itself (keeping in mind that lawyers are not required to attach any evidence to a complaint or petition at all) would ordinarily be sufficient to defeat any sanctions. Furthermore, the notion an attorney (or several attorneys) could be sanctioned over $175,000.00 without the Court hearing from a single witness is hard to fathom. That is precisely what happened here. Yet, the errors in the trial court were only partially corrected by the Court of Appeals.
The effort to sanction Sidney Powell in Michigan was one of many attacks on her. The next article in this series will cover the bar or ethics complaints and defamation suits filed against her.
(My new book Fake News Exposed: 25 of the Worst Media Lies about Conservatives, Guns, COVID and Everything Else is out at Amazon. You may also pick up a copy of one of my other books at Amazon as well.)