Trump lawyer Sidney Powell fell for fake theory about captured CIA chief, book claims

The attorney and conspiracy theorist believes voting machines stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump

A November 19, 2020 photo shows Sidney Powell speaking during a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC (AFP via Getty Images)

Attorney and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell reportedly cold-called the Defence Department’s top civilian intelligence official to accuse then-CIA director Gina Haspel of being part of a plot to cover up non-existent election fraud and demand that he send troops to bring her back from a country she was not in at the time.  

The allegations against Ms Powell, one of the attorneys who gained widespread attention in late 2020 for promoting outlandish conspiracy theories purporting to prove that last year’s election was stolen from former president Donald Trump, were laid out in a new book by ABC News Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl.

In Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, Mr Karl reports that Ms Powell, somehow obtained the direct office phone number for Ezra Cohen – a protégé of former national security adviser Michael Flynn who was then the acting undersecretary of defence for intelligence – and made an unsolicited call to his office in late November 2020.

“[CIA Director] Gina Haspel has been hurt and taken into custody in Germany,” Ms Powell reportedly told Mr Cohen, who was shocked to discover that the now-notorious lawyer had been able to obtain a phone number that normally rang with calls from inside the Pentagon or the White House.

“You need to launch a special operations mission to get her,” she demanded.

Ms Powell proceeded to recount an outlandish tale in which Ms Haspel had allegedly been injured while carrying out a CIA-backed mission to seize a computer server from a company called Scytl which figured prominently in conspiracy theories which were then circulating in Mr Trump’s inner circle.

According to Ms Powell, the CIA director was engaged in an effort to cover up how the election had been stolen from Mr Trump with the help of rigged voting machines (she is currently being sued for defamation by multiple voting machine vendors).

After Mr Cohen ended the call, Ms Powell followed up with an email asking him to help her obtain a “letter of marque”, an Age of Sail-era document which governments once issued to armed private ships to allow them to engage in combat as privateers against enemy ships in time of war.

According to Article One, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution, only Congress can issue such a document, and none have been issued since the War of 1812.

Ms Powell’s bizarre request came at a time when Mr Trump and his allies were becoming more and more desperate in their attempts to find reason to overturn the 2020 election. Earlier that month, she appeared at a now-infamous press conference at Republican Nationa Committee headquarters alongside former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to declare that the voting machines in contested states such as Michigan had been designed using software developed on orders from deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez with the aim of stealing elections.

Such allegations formed the core of a lawsuit she would later file in a Michigan court in hopes of overturning the election results, but a federal judge rejected the suit and later imposed sanctions on her and the other attorneys involved.