Former President Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted Tuesday morning. Not coincidentally, Team Trump attorney Sidney “Kraken” Powell told the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” conference in Dallas this weekend that the courts could overturn the election, saying, “It should be that [Trump] can simply be reinstated, that a new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House and President Trump should be moved back in.”
At the same conference, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was represented by Powell after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador, told a cheering crowd that the military should carry out a coup to put Trump back into power. (Note: Flynn is now back-pedaling and gaslighting, claiming that he never expressed support for a coup. Unfortunately for him, he’s on video telling a cheering crowd that a Myanmar-style coup “should” happen here.)
Powell, who is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for making what the company says are false and defamatory claims about its voting machines, told the assembled “patriots” at the Dallas conference that Trump could have invoked emergency authority to stay in office because, she claimed, there was foreign interference in the presidential election.
What is giving Trump, Powell, and so-called Stop the Steal activists hope of Trump’s reinstatement is apparently the farcical “audit” being carried out in Maricopa County, Arizona, by Cyber Ninjas, a company run by stolen-election conspiracy theorists hired by Republican state Senate president Karen Fann. Republicans in other states are launching copycat efforts to hunt down evidence of the fraud they claim was responsible for Trump’s defeat—despite former Attorney General Bill Barr’s declaration that the Justice Department under Trump found no such evidence.
Powell’s nonprofit Defending the Republic contracted with one of Cyber Ninjas’ subcontractors, Wake TSI, to “audit” the election in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, at the request of state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Tucson Sentinel reported last week. Mastriano, who has used his office to promote Trump’s stolen-election claims, is positioning himself to run for governor.
Over the weekend, Powell also appeared on “Gun Freedom Radio” where she stated, “Trump was elected president again whether anyone likes it or not.”
“They’ve made it into a communist, fascist state, and they’re working toward that end every day,” Powell said about alleged “weaponized” operatives working in the federal government. But she claimed that people like her are making progress through efforts like the Arizona audit. Calling the lawsuits against her “baseless” and “laughable” attempts to intimidate her, Powell quoted her fellow lawyer and conspiracy theorist Lin Wood, who she said likes to cite a Bible verse that reads, “Every lie will be revealed.”
In addition to her celebrity on the right for pushing stolen-election conspiracy theories, Powell has become a heroine to the QAnon movement. When she was interviewed on stage at the For God & Country conference, she sat in front of a logo that included the QAnon slogan “WWG1WGA,” which stands for “Where we go one we go all.” But on “Gun Freedom Radio,” she pretended not to understand anything about the QAnon movement, saying, “I don’t even know what that is,” later adding that “it couldn’t be more harmless from everything I know about it.”
Powell’s claims—like those of Flynn and Wood—are regularly trumpeted in exclamation point-emblazoned style by the Steve Bannon-affiliated Populist Press, which positions itself as a hard-right alternative to the Drudge Report and relentlessly pushes right-wing claims about the election being stolen. Populist Press’s multiple-per-day email blasts are identified as coming from “TRUMP WAR” and regularly include links to stories about Powell. On Sunday, Populist Press made its top story a link to Gateway Pundit’s story about Powell’s “For God & Country” remarks about Trump being “reinstated.” Another TRUMP WAR email on Sunday included in its subject line, “The proof is out and Trump will be back in office soon.”
