Former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell may be forced to lie in court due to a plea bargain she accepted in exchange for escaping a racketeering conspiracy case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia, according to a lawyer for one of the co-defendants.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged Ms. Powell, President Trump and 17 others with a racketeering conspiracy and other crimes for their efforts to challenge the 2020 election results in Georgia. M. Powell was only accused of taking part in one part of the sprawling case, allegedly having a data forensics company, SullivanStrickler, copy data from election machines and computers in Coffee County, Georgia, without authorization on Jan. 7, 2021. The data was meant to be examined for evidence of election fraud.
Ms. Powell’s lawyer, Brian Rafferty, had vehemently denied her involvement both in the Coffee County incident as well as the alleged broader conspiracy.
The new accusation still maintains that Ms. Powell conspired to have the data firm access the voting machine data without authorization. But Mr. Rafferty previously argued that this was false, and there was no evidence of it.
He acknowledged that “Defending the Republic Inc., a non-profit Ms. Powell founded, paid a bill from SullivanStrickler,” but he added that it did so only upon the company’s “threat to post information publicly online after its technicians apparently collected data from Coffee County machines.”
Harvey Silverglate, lawyer for John Eastman, one of the co-defendants, said he believes Ms. Powell is, in fact, innocent and was merely trying to escape a wrongful conviction based on “unfair” law.
“This is how prosecutors operate. They charge, they overcharge, including charging innocent people,” he told The Epoch Times.
The conspiracy law is construed in such a way that people can be saddled with hefty sentences based on a little more than an association, he argued, especially in a “super-conspiracy” case like this—a “gigantic racketeering case, with huge penalties.”
“It’s much more difficult to beat conspiracy cases than substantive criminal cases. And the reason is that if the government can convince a jury that you were involved with these people in a conspiracy, rather than in a lawful undertaking, anything any member of that conspiracy did, you are responsible for,” he said.
“That’s why conspiracy law is so unfair.”
Ms. Powell not only agreed to six years of probation and a fine but also to write an apology letter to the people of Georgia and testify for the prosecutors against the other defendants. She’s also barred from talking to the media until the conclusion of the trial, which will be split into at least two separate trials and will likely take many months, if not years, to complete.
The big question is what Ms. Powell will say when called to testify, Mr. Silverglate noted.
“Is she going to tell the truth, or is she going to say something to satisfy Fani Willis?”
It may be impossible to square Ms. Powell’s admissions in the guilty plea with Mr. Rafferty’s previous assertions, but she wouldn’t have to do so, Mr. Silverglate explained.
“That’s the whole point. She can say that she was lying previously, and now she’s telling the truth, which, of course, would not be the truth,” he said.
Moreover, the agreement effectively compels Ms. Powell to align her testimony with the version of events as pleaded, he argued.
“They probably already have, I’m sure, interviewed her and probably done so under oath. So if she changes her testimony from what she told the prosecutors in order to get the plea deal, she'd be indicted for perjury.”
Among criminal defense attorneys, he said, this is referred to as the difference between making a witness “sing” and making him “compose” for the prosecutors.
“You understand that the whole system is corrupt? That if I made a deal like that with a witness, I would be indicted for subornation of perjury, witness bribery, but prosecutors do it every day, and they do it with complete impunity?” he said.
Tricky Conspiracy
Conspiracy charges are peculiar in that they don’t require defendants to actually do the underlying crime or even to do something substantial to complete it. Prosecutors only need to prove, at least circumstantially, that there was an agreement between at least two people to do something illegal, and at least one of them did any “overt act” in furtherance of the conspiracy.An overt act could be minor and innocuous by itself. Ms. Willis has alleged, for instance, that texting somebody the address of an airport was an “overt act” because, allegedly, it was done with the knowledge that it would help arrange for somebody to be picked up from the airport, who would then proceed to participate in accessing the election machines in Coffee County, which was allegedly done with the knowledge that it wasn’t properly authorized.
In the Trump case, Ms. Willis alleged that many of the underlying crimes were not just contemplated, but, in fact, completed, including lying to public officers, soliciting public officers to violate their oath of office, and influencing a witness. The alleged crimes, however, rely on proving that the defendants had a criminal intent—that they knew they were doing something untoward.
Proving criminal intent could be challenging, several lawyers previously told The Epoch Times. But as Mr. Silverglate acknowledged, a prosecutor can build the case backward—ascribe criminal intent to the alleged acts, bring the indictment, and then use the threat of a lengthy and expensive trial and possible conviction to turn some of the targets into witnesses that would then affirm the prosecutor’s version of events.
In this quest for potential witnesses, the prosecutor would have an incentive to charge as many as possible, leading to the danger of overcharging, he suggested.
“Anybody who dealt with anybody who actually committed a crime, even if they did not share in the criminal aspect of the conspiracy, they can get lassoed in. Because they met with these people, they planned with these people, and it’s very difficult to separate out in a conspiracy,” he said.
