At Last, the Kraken Has Landed!
With RICO and other indictments, Trump’s eccentric consigliera Sidney Powell finally got her Kraken in Georgia, but not the way she promised or intended
Today one of the strangest events in American political history came full circle with the announcement by Georgia that it’s indicting former President Donald Trump and 18 co-conspirators on charges relating to the 2020 election in that state. The nearly hundred-page indictment involves charges that are more commonly associated with mobsters than politicians, including alleged violation of the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Influence Act. No matter what happens when this case comes to court, we’re now in the unprecedented situation where a former president is facing dozens of charges, including serious felonies, in two states as well as at the federal level.
New York’s indictment of Trump relating to business fraud allegedly committed before his presidency, announced in April, appears almost trivial compared to Georgia’s charges. The Justice Department’s indictment of the former president this summer relating to his mishandling of classified information, which was recently updated, is a grave matter for Trump, since the evidence of his guilt appears overwhelming. Although the seriousness of the new DoJ charges against Trump relating to the January 6, 2021 riot-cum-insurrection at the Capitol can be debated, it was already clear that the former president will spend 2024 mired in back-to-back trials in several jurisdictions as he is ostensibly running for reelection.
Then comes Georgia. In many ways, these just-announced charges represent the most serious threat yet to the former president legally as well as politically. It’s not every day that you hear the former commander-in-chief referred to as the head of “a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result,” as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis stated late last night as she announced the indictments. Few terms have excited Trumpophobes in recent years more than RICO, and now it’s finally happened. For liberals who need to see the former president clad in an orange jumpsuit before they die – a Trump mugshot seems imminent by this week’s end, destined to become an iconic image for the ages – that dream at last seems to be coming true, or at least distinctly possible.
The indictment of 18 co-conspirators demonstrates that Georgia is taking this case seriously, with the intent to go to trial, perhaps flipping some of those defendants as cooperating witnesses along the way, while the fact that no future Republican president can pardon Trump for convictions at the state level must send chills down MAGA spines. That prospect raises the distinct possibility that the former president, who recently turned 77, really might “die in jail” as some have put it.
Among the co-conspirators are several lawyers who had to know that their shenanigans to subvert Georgia election law were criminal. The best-known among them is Rudy Giuliani, the onetime hard-charging DoJ prosecutor and former New York mayor turned all-purpose Trump toady. It’s been an epic fall for the man hailed as “America’s Mayor” after 9/11, only to transform into a Bloody Mary-fueled punchline. But there are no laughs in the Giuliani camp today. Since he’s two years older than Trump, he, too, might die in jail thanks to these charges.
Less famous than Giuliani, yet well known to longtime readers of this newsletter, is Sidney Powell, the eccentric lawyer turned conspiracy theorist who, for a brief period after the November 2020 vote, inexplicably became President Trump’s on-call consigliera for election matters, with catastrophic consequences for the White House and the country. Powell is facing six conspiracy-related charges as well as violation of Georgia’s RICO law.
In many ways, Powell bears greater blame for this disaster than anybody but President Trump, since it was her bizarre ideas which propelled the White House to engage in the criminal enterprise that aimed to overturn election results in Georgia. While Trump is responsible for his choices as the Big Boss in the Oval Office, there can be no doubt that Powell’s toxically crazy theories provided a framework for the crimes which led to Georgia’s prosecution.
Since nearly three years have elapsed since Sidney Powell changed American history, it’s worth reminding just how bonkers she and her ideas actually were. She entered the president’s orbit immediately after the November 2020 election, gaining entry to the Oval Office thanks to her previous advocacy for Mike Flynn, the aberrant retired 3-star general who flamed out after just three weeks as Trump’s national security adviser, thanks to his too-cozy ties to Moscow.
Powell offered Team Trump a wacky unified field theory of how the election had been stolen from them which despite (or perhaps because of) its wild improbability made it rocket fuel for the MAGA faithful. In Powell’s telling, Democrats stole the election with secret help from China, Cuba, Venezuela, its long-dead dictator Hugo Chávez, George Soros, plus Antifa (of course), with the connivance of Dominion Voting Systems. Fox News recently agreed to pay Dominion a whopping $787 million in damages for its reporting of such Powell-derived crackpottery as “news,” which indicates its veracity.
There was never any evidence to prove any of Powell’s outlandish claims, amid ample proof that it was all made up, yet her theories fleetingly gained traction on the Trump-loving Right. She repeatedly claimed that proof for her assertions was in-bound, predicting “Biblical” revelations, asserting that Team Trump would imminently “release the Kraken.” All would be revealed.
Of course, nothing was revealed. The Kraken, Powell claimed, was driven by an Army insider source, “a former electronic intelligence analyst under 305th Military Intelligence with experience gathering SAM missile system electronic intelligence, the Dominion software was accessed by agents acting on behalf of China and Iran in order to monitor and manipulate elections, including the most recent US general election in 2020.” To the surprise of nobody paying attention, literally zero of Powell’s Kraken claims turned out to be true. Her outlandish account betrayed basic misunderstandings of how the Army, military intelligence, counting elections, or really anything, actually works.
It didn’t take long for it all to fall apart, as reported by this newsletter, including the non-existence of any Kraken. Powell’s super-secret intelligence source turned out to a former Army vehicle mechanic who possessed no intelligence experience whatsoever. Before long even Fox News had enough of Powell, denouncing her and her nonsense on air, but by then the damage was done. As Top Secret Umbra explained this bizarre situation at the end of November 2020, at which point Powell had already been pushed out of the White House:
Following the lead of Trump’s kinda-lawyer-but-not-really Sidney Powell, the serial fabulist who alleges that a vast international communist conspiracy electronically shifted seven million votes from Biden to Trump, MAGA legions now assert that the Deep State is at literal war with itself over this greatest of all political scandals. This includes the remarkable claim that Frankfurt, Germany witnessed a lethal firefight between DIA (Good Deep State) and CIA (Bad Deep State) operatives over possession of the latter’s top secret server farm which contained proof of the “stolen election.” The resulting six dead were covered up as the CIA officer killed “in Somalia” and the five Army soldiers killed in a “helicopter crash in Egypt.” If you believe any of this, I have a chupacabra to sell you, and I’ll throw in the Brooklyn Bridge for free.
Over little more than a couple weeks of frenetically conspiratorial activity, Sidney Powell earned an ignominious place in the history books as the figure who made Donald J. Trump even more unhinged than he was already. The stage for the plot to overturn the 2020 election in the state of Georgia, a key component of the MAGA effort to win a race that they believed had been stolen from President Trump, was set by Powell and her strange, completely invented theories.
Crazy people seldom make history like this, but sometimes it happens. Months after the Georgia plot, Powell admitted in a federal court filing that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.” Did Powell always know that her esoteric Krakenism was sheer bullshit, invented to stir up MAGA rubes and raise funds for Trump – or did she come to that realization after it all fell apart? That’s an important question, one that we can hope will be answered in her upcoming Georgia trial. It’s also worthwhile uncovering how deep her connection to Mike Flynn went regarding the 2020 election plot, since that raises uncomfortable questions about the Intelligence Community and those weird, allegedly criminal happenings.
When she was pushed out of the White House after a couple tumultuous weeks, accompanied by an Oval Office denial that she was the president’s attorney, Powell retorted that the fight was anything but over, promising the arrival of “Kraken On Steroids.” That finally happened in Georgia this week, albeit not in the manner which Sidney Powell intended.