Was Sidney Powell’s Conspiracy Theory Too Crazy Even for Donald Trump?

If you have been watching Sidney Powell on TV recently, you might surmise that her sudden departure from the Trump campaign’s legal team reflects skepticism about her increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories. But with the possible exception of Powell’s claim that Dominion Voting Systems bribed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, as part of the scheme that supposedly enabled Joe Biden to steal the election, the president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have eagerly embraced her story of switched votes and fabricated ballots.

Here is how Giuliani introduced Powell, who was presented as a member of the “elite strike force team…working on behalf of the President and the campaign,” during the bizarre press conference he held last week:

Now I’m going to ask Sidney Powell to describe to you what we can describe about another totally outrageous situation. I don’t think most Americans know that our ballots get calculated, many of them, outside the United States and are completely open to hacking, completely open to change, and it’s being done by a company that specializes in voter fraud. I’ll let Sidney describe that to you.

Powell then spun a tale involving deceased Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez; billionaire Democrat George Soros; Lord Malloch-Brown, whom she described as “Mr. Soros’ number two person in the U.K.”; the Clinton Foundation; “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections”; and election software designed to facilitate cheating via “an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.” By Powell’s account, “we might never have uncovered [this scheme] had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.”

Because of that unanticipated problem, Powell said, Democrats resorted to a secondary plan involving “mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated, some [of which] were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots for Mr. Biden.” But for these machinations, she averred, it would be clear that “President Trump won by a landslide.”

Powell’s story dovetailed with Giuliani’s unsubstantiated claim that “thousands and thousands” of fraudulent Biden ballots arrived in the middle of the night at the TCF Center in Detroit, where they supposedly were needed to assure that the former vice president carried Michigan. “This corr