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OK, this is yuge!
A second co-defendant in Donald Trump’s RICO indictment for allegedly interfering with the 2020 election in Georgia has pleaded guilty. But not just any defendant. Former Trump attorney Sidney Powell was one of the most visible, publicity-loving members of the ex-president’s legal team. She was basically ex-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani‘s sidekick as they tied up courts at every level with frivolous cases and easily dismissed alleging the fiction that Trump lost his bid for a second term because of illegal voting, made-up ballots and rigged voting machines.
She was also charged with six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties, which, on Thursday, she pleaded guilty to.
From USA Today:
Powell agreed to testify in future trials in exchange for serving six years of probation, a $6,000 fine and paying restitution of $2,700.
Powell is one of 19 co-defendants charged in the case, which alleged a broad racketeering conspiracy. Other portions of the conspiracy included the recruitment of fake presidential electors to vote for Trump despite President Joe Biden winning Georgia, lying about election results to state officials and in court records, and soliciting public officials to violate their oaths of office.
Legal experts said Powell’s agreement to testify against others in the case is “very significant” because she dealt at length with Trump, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others charged in the conspiracy.
“I think it’s very significant because she is one of the people who was closest to Trump in many of these alleged nefarious activities, and as part of the agreement, she must testify truthfully against Trump as well as the other defendants,’ said John Banzhaf, a George Washington University law professor who has been following the case closely. “So it is a major victory for Fani Willis and certainly a major concern for Trump.”
Powell was initially charged with conspiring with bail bondsman Scott Hall, who has also pleaded guilty to the RICO charges against him and others to access election equipment provided by Dominion Voting Systems without authorization. They even hired computer forensics firm SullivanStrickler to send a team to copy software and data from voting machines and computers they were told they couldn’t legally access. Another way of putting that is that they used fraudulent means to prove Dominion’s voting machines were fraudulent, which, of course, they were not.
It’s worth pointing out that conspiring to undermine democracy in order to keep Trump in office after he was legally voted out should not be a misdemeanor and certainly should result in more than less than a year of probation and less than $10,000 in fines. On top of that, Powell won’t even have to call herself a convict officially.
More from USA Today:
Powell’s agreement fell under Georgia’s First Offender Act, which will allow her to “honestly say” she was never convicted of the charges if she successfully completes her probation and is discharged, according to prosecutor Daysha Young. If Powell violates the terms of her first-offender sentence or commits another offense while on probation, her first-offender status could be revoked and she could be resentenced to the maximum, Young said.
Still, legal experts feel that Powell’s plea is a big step toward the prosecutors proving their case against Trump and the other 17 co-defendants considering she was such a major player in his circus-like MAGA games.
“Miss Powell is at the vortex, the center, the hub of the alleged conspiracy,” said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department official who has decades of experience with RICO cases. “She will be a phenomenal witness for the government because she was at strategic meetings, part of important conversations and she was a leader in implementing the scheme to discredit the lawful election of Joe Biden.”
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Rudy Giuliani has been drowning in litigation ever since he took up the daunting task of representing ex-President Donald Trump in his demonstrably false propaganda campaign to steal an election by lying about it being stolen from him. And now, Trump, Giuliani and 17 other defendants have been indicted under Georgia’s RICO statute for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the Peach State illegally.
Well, according to Giuliani’s attorney Robert Costello, the former NYC Mayor and OG Trump stooge is too broke to cover all of his legal fees and he’s been begging Trump help the homie out and pony up some cash.
According to CNN, Giuliani and Costello traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to hold out their hands and beg the ex-president to bail Giuliani out of the situation he’s in because he hopped on board with Trump’s “big lie.” Apparently, Trump initially responded by telling Giuliani to pull himself up by his bootstraps, get a job and stop looking for a handout.
OK, that’s not what he actually said.
From CNN:
Giuliani and Costello traveled to Florida in late April where they had two meetings with Trump to discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, making several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest.
But the former president, who is notoriously strict about dipping into his own coffers, didn’t seem very interested. After Costello made his pitch, Trump verbally agreed to help with some of Giuliani’s legal bills without committing to any specific amount or timeline.
Trump also agreed to stop by two fundraisers for Giuliani, a separate source said.
Another source told CNN that Trump only agreed to cover a small fee from a data vendor hosting Giuliani’s records. And months later, Trump’s Save America PAC paid $340,000 to that vendor, Trustpoint, federal campaign filings show. CNN has now confirmed the payment was intended to settle Giuliani’s outstanding bill with the company.
Giuliani recently admitted that he’s a penguin-faced liar (again, my words, not his) and that he made false statements about election workers he accused of committing election fraud that absolutely did not happen. It must be difficult for him having to use one hand to clean all that egg off his face while slipping his other hand into his former client’s pockets because Giuliani doesn’t even have Trump’s Mcdonald’s money, and it turns out there are financial consequences for jumping on Trump’s delusional bandwagon.
More from CNN:
CNN reported on Tuesday that Giuliani is staring down hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and sanctions amid numerous lawsuits tied to his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
His attorneys have said in court that these legal quagmires have left him effectively out of cash and that he “cannot afford” a potentially $15,000 to $23,000 bill to pay for more discovery-related document searches. He even appears to have responded to some of the money crunch by listing for sale a three-bedroom Manhattan apartment he owns for $6.5 million.
At the Wednesday court hearing in the Smartmatic case, Giuliani attorney Adam Katz said, “These are a lot of bills that he’s not paying. I think this is very humbling for Mr. Giuliani.”
And for the rest of us, it’s just plain hilarious. Karma is a b*tch, ain’t it?
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An FDA tranquilizer has become a popular new street drug in America, causing major concerns as one of its side effects causes flesh rotting in users among other harmful effects.
According to reports, public health officials and law enforcement have seen a spike in usage of the drug xylazine in cities across the country. Commonly known on the streets as “tranq”, xylazine is a tranquilizer that veterinarians use to sedate horses and has been known to cause grave side effects in users such as the tightening of blood vessels leading to abscesses and skin ulcers that if untreated can rot down to the bone.
Worse still is that xylazine has been found by authorities to be coupled with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin. That combination has led to a sharp rise in fatal overdoses recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in three years from 260 in 2018 to 3,480 in 2021. Data compiled shows that xylazine-positive overdose deaths rose tenfold in southern U.S. states since 2020, and sevenfold in western states. Philadelphia and New York City have also seen sharp upticks in overdoses including fatal ones linked to xylazine over the same period of time.
Authorities have expressed concern about tranq’s rise, with Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Dr. Rahul Gupta declaring it an emerging threat in May in a report issued through the White House. “Testing for xylazine is uneven across the United States, which makes it hard to get the national picture,” he said in the report. “Many communities are not even aware of this threat in their backyards.”
Observers have noted that the rise of xylazine combined with fentanyl might be due to the recent crackdowns on fentanyl on the streets. “That’s really driven drug manufacturers to start to integrate xylazine into the supply. It’s cheaper and it also makes the high last longer,” said Maritza Perez Medina, a researcher with the Drug Policy Alliance. Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, opines that “Maybe the products are coming already mixed into the United States,” citing drug-sample data collected by law enforcement in Mexico.
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Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam had a word to say about the news that a grand jury in Manhattan voted Thursday to make Donald Trump the first ex-president in history to be indicted on criminal charges. (Eat your heart out, Richard Nixon!).
And when I say “a word,” I literally mean one word: “Karma.”
OK, so Salaam actually decorated his one-word response with a little set-up by including that Trump never apologized for calling for the Central Park Five’s execution after they were wrongly convicted of the beating and rape of a white female jogger in 1989—a crime for which five Black and brown teens spent years in prison before evidence exonerated them in 2002. Trump not only called for the execution of the boys who had beaten and raped no one, but he spent $85,000 on a full-page ad that ran in all four of New York’s major newspapers calling for the state to restore the death penalty so teenagers who turned out not to be guilty could be executed by the government.
“Mayor [Ed] Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” read an excerpt from the ad. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer… Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will… How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?”
Daaaamn, you would think the Central Park Five had—say—attacked police officers while storming the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to overthrow the government based on thoroughly debunked voter fraud propaganda that was spread by, well, whoever was president of the United States at the time.
Of course, some would argue that Trump can’t be faulted because he had no idea the falsely accused were, indeed, falsely accused. But, as Salaam said, Trump refused to apologize in 2019 for his loud and wrong Black youth death fantasy commercial, because, for whatever reason (*cough* *cough* racism) he still thought they were guilty.
Anyway, a lot of the fine folks on Twitter appreciated Salaam’s cut-to-the-chase response.
Not that anyone would expect an orangey-white nationalist creation like Trump to apologize for what would have been a tragic and murderous miscarriage of justice had he gotten his way. Trump is going to Trump, after all.
Let’s just see what this indictment do.
