Attorney Sidney Powell claimed on Tuesday that she has been denied access to the president ever since the raucous four-hour meeting that took place at the White House on Friday:
I haven’t met or spoken with the President since Friday night. The President knows this election was stolen but he is not getting the support he, the Constitution, and the Republic deserve. His own people are misleading and undermining him while protecting their own careers and agendas.
The details of that meeting are based on spurious third-party info provided to the New York Times which got major parts of the story wrong. The writers, Maggie Habberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, relied entirely on “two people briefed on the discussion” and on “people briefed on what took place.” These sources were “people familiar with the discussion, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the conversation.”
In other words, the Times’ writers were relying on sources who weren’t at the meeting, who didn’t attend the meeting, who weren’t part of the meeting, but were only “briefed” on the meeting by someone after it took place.
This was all that was needed for the Times to create another anti-Trump screed that attempted to damage the presidency and his advisors, especially and particularly Sidney Powell.
According to the writers, the president “discussed naming Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign unleashed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud.” This was based on information gleaned from “two people briefed on the discussion.”
The Times’ writers, again based on hearsay only, said the meeting involved shouting and concluded that:
Ms. Powell’s ideas were shot down by every other Trump advisor present, all of whom repeatedly pointed out that she had yet to back up her claims with proof….
The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed, which went beyond the special counsel idea, those briefed on the meeting said.
The writers weren’t done with Powell:
Mr. Trump, egged on by supporters like Ms. Powell, has never conceded and, holed up inside the White House, he continues to assert that he actually won — even though the baseless claims by Ms. Powell and others have made of widespread fraud have been thoroughly debunked and even many of Mr. Trump’s closest allies have dismissed as preposterous her tale of an international conspiracy to rig the vote.
How is it, then, that these sleuths from the Times missed the fact that also in attendance was one Patrick Bryne, the former Overstock CEO, and sleuth in his own right? He tweeted on Sunday:
I was in the room when it happened. The raised voices included by own. I can promise you: President Trump is being terribly served by his advisers. They want him to lose and are lying to him. He is surrounded by mendacious mediocrities.
Powell said those officials surrounding and protecting the president are keeping her from talking to the president: “I have been blocked by White House counsel [Cipollone] and others from seeing or speaking to the President since I raised the public formal findings [issue] and even more evidence of the foreign interference from Iran and China in the election.”
In an interview on Newsmax, Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, buried Powell:
Let me say definitively: Sidney Powell is not part of our legal team. She hasn’t been for five weeks. She is not a special counsel for the president. She does not speak for the president, nor does she speak for the administration. She speaks for herself. And she’s a fine woman, a fine lawyer, but whatever she is talking about, it’s her own opinions.
I’m not responsible for them, the president isn’t, nor is anybody else on our legal team.
