President Donald Trump had dropped attorney Sidney Powell from his legal team after she filed multiple lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election – all failures – but Trump has now welcomed the conspiracy-focused flamethrower back into the White House to plan further efforts to extends his presidency.
Trump and Powell met in the Oval Office Friday night, ABC News confirmed, and were joined by Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who has publicly urged Trump to take unprecedented steps to get a second term – including declaring martial law and ordering the military to oversee new elections in the battlefields that Trump has lost.
“[Trump] could take military capabilities and he could put them in those states and basically repeat an election in any of those states, ” Flynn said at conservative news outlet Newsmax earlier this week.
Critics voiced their alarm at Friday’s rally, first reported by The New York Times. Noah Bookbinder, who heads the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics watchdog group in Washington, told ABC News that the ideas that emerged during the Oval Office discussions would represent an “abuse of power” and were “wrong and should be condemned.”
“President Trump’s continued efforts to overthrow the election results have done immeasurable damage to the stability of our democracy and to the confidence of the American people in it,” said Bookbinder. “The president who welcomed Michael Flynn to the White House immediately after Flynn proposed that Trump introduce martial law to overturn the election by force, takes the threat to a new level.”
Critics argue that Powell’s return could usher in a dark final chapter to Trump’s presidency, and the prospect has sparked sharp objections from several of Trump’s most trusted advisers, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who otherwise attempted a scorched earth. to contested the election.
And Powell’s re-emergence in Trump’s corner comes at a precarious time for her own career, as many of the goals of her drive to overturn the election are beginning to diminish. Last week, Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado voting machine company that has targeted marginal pro-Trump forces with dark conspiracy theories of a faked election, threatened Powell with legal action if she didn’t retract what it called the “ wild, deliberately baseless. ” and false ‘accusations she has made against them.
Nonetheless, Trump invited Powell to consider the possibility that she would be appointed special counsel and given a high-level security clearance to investigate the 2020 election. The meeting was highly controversial, sources told ABC News, filled with screams and demands from Powell, who called other Trump aides “quitters” for giving up the fight.
The meeting ended with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, White House Attorney Pat Cipollone and other Trump attorneys speaking to the president to make the offer, the sources said. Giuliani, who attended the meeting by phone, was also against the idea, according to sources.
Powell did not immediately respond to ABC News’s request for comment.
Powell’s appeal to Trump appears to be her willingness to investigate debunked, sweeping conspiracy theories that suggest foreign actors conspired with a US deep state to manipulate election machines for former Vice President Joe Biden. During Friday’s rally, a source said, the assembled group was reflecting on an executive order to seize and investigate voting machines nationwide.
That idea had initially been put forward by Giuliani earlier this week, but was soon shot by Cipollone and Meadows. When Powell brought it up Friday night, the two knocked it out again.
“I don’t even know how that would work,” Commissioner Ben Hovland of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) told ABC News. “The voting machines are in most cases owned by the local jurisdictions; they are state and local owned, so I don’t even know how that makes sense.”
Over the past year, Powell has earned a reputation for reaching further than other attorneys would consider. She took up Flynn’s defense after the former national security adviser pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents and was charged in court by a federal judge. Powell devised a new strategy: retract his plea and blame his previous attorney and the FBI for his legal troubles. The tactic was criticized outright, but ended with the Justice Department dropping charges and Trump granting Flynn a full pardon.
Powell was also one of Trump’s most vocal advisers to promote the idea that his 2020 election defeat of over 7 million votes was actually a mirage, the result of a series of forces plotting to steal the election from him. A series of damning court rulings rejected those claims, as did voting technology experts.
As of Saturday, Dominion Voting Machines had not heard from Powell or her legal team about their demand that she withdraw her charges against the company, a Dominion ABC News spokesperson confirmed.
“The revocation request presents Ms. Powell with a simple choice. Retract her false and defamatory claims about the company and its voting systems, or remain open to additional legal action,” the Dominion spokesperson told ABC News earlier week. “This would mean going to court to settle the case.”
Ali Dukakis of ABC News contributed to this report.