Will the Kraken be released at last?

Trump is threatened by two sudden plea deals

Former Trump activist Sydney Powell took the long way ‘round to a guilty plea lodged on Thursday in a Georgia election interference case.  A day later Kenneth Chesebro, who was charged in a related conspiracy, pleaded guilty to one felony. He and Powell both agreed, as part of their deals, to testify in other cases in which Trump and his associates, including Rudy Giuliani, are alleged to have messed with the 2020 election. This is very bad news for Trump and others who find themselves facing prosecution for their attempt to deny Joe Biden his victory.

Although less famous than Powell, Chesebro helped plan a scheme that sent slates of so-called alternate electors to Washington to muck-up the ceremonial certification of the election result. In the end, these fake electors were never admitted to the Electoral College session. Afterwards, nineteen schemers, including Chesebro, were charged with conspiracy and other offenses tied to the plot in Georgia. He will serve five years’ probation for his role.

As part of her avoid-going-to-jail deal, Powell has admitted to playing a role in the attempted theft of voter machine data in rural Coffee County, Georgia. Her decision, and Chesebro’s will increase the likelihood that others will flip.  

In a cast of characters worthy of a Looney Tunes cartoon -- think Rudy Giuliani’s press conference in front of a porn store --  Powell distinguished herself as something special. She filed several failing lawsuits challenging the 2020 election result and gained national attention in a bizarre media appearance where she claimed to possess incontrovertible evidence of fraud and would soon “release the Kraken”  of proof.

For the unaware, the Kraken is a mythological monster that supposedly inhabits the sea between Norway and Iceland.  In the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, in which the gods of Mt. Olympus do battle, the cry, “Release the Kraken!” was offered by a leading character. The quote is so obscure that it inspired a storm of jokes and ridicule on social media.

Before she issued her battle cry, Powell alleged that Trump had lost the election due to fraud that was “organized and conducted with the help of Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media companies, and even the media companies.”

Powell issued these kinds of charges at press conferences and on Right-wing press outlets like the TV channel Newsmax. On that network, she falsely alleged that the chief of security for the Dominion voting machine company, Eric Coomer, had admitted to rigging the election for Biden. (Coomer sued Newsmax, which chose to settle his claim rather than go to trial.)  After making false allegations of fraud on Fox News, Powell sent one network anchor “proof” in the form of a memo authored by a  woman who said she gains insights when in a “semi-conscious” state and that the wind talks to her.  

"Who am I? And how do I know all of this?” wrote Powell’s source. “I've had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl…I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live."

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Powell began her effort to undermine voter confidence with allegations of fraud two weeks after Biden swamped Trump by 7 million votes and an Electoral College score of 306 to 232. Like many true believers, she couldn’t accept Trump’s defeat and instead threw herself into the task of developing, chasing, and disseminating wacky claims of crimes committed by pro-Biden forces. She outlined her involvement with others in Trump’s orbit when she was deposed by the Congressional committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, pro-Trump attack on the US Capitol. (I was, with Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the panel.)  

The interview took place on a Saturday in May 2022 and was conducted by staff attorneys who were polite but so tough that Powell felt it was better to claim faulty memory to a significant number of their questions. When she was asked for the source of her various suspicions, she often cited hyper-partisan media like Fox News, a propaganda video called Fraction Magic, and the fully discredited film, 2000 Mules, which advanced the false notion that 2,000 people were paid to use tactics like stuffing ballot boxes to aid the Biden ticket.

In her testimony, Powell detailed the conspiracy theories about how voting machines had been rigged to overcount Biden's votes and undercount ballots cast for Trump.  She also said that in a great many places the voting machine manufacturer Dominion, which became a bogeyman for conspiracy theorists, was actually in charge of ballot counting.  In a small spasm of disinformation, Powell said, “I think there was actually a Nigerian running one of the elections, a Nigerian citizen running one of the elections for Dominion in Georgia, and I -- I don't really understand how that happens.”

More significantly, Powell told the January 6^th committee that she had attended White House meetings where, in one telling exchange, Trump discussed the idea that she be part of a team that would seize voting machines. A draft memo supporting this idea called for Trump to order the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to grab them. The draft named Coffee County as a site of apparent irregularities. (This order was never issued but the discussion seems to implicate Trump in the Georgia case.)

The one element that might save Trump is Powell’s profile as the woman who listened to a source who heard the wind speak.  Her transformation from a somewhat ordinary lawyer into a conspiracy theorist with a national presence could provide Trump’s attorneys with the means to attack her credibility.  But then again, she may have documentary proof and the support of other witnesses. Indeed, Chesebro is in a position to testify wherever Powell appears. Together they could at last release the Kraken.