After he lost the 2020 presidential election, former President Donald Trump embraced conspiracy theories espoused by attorney Sidney Powell, who herself got them from a woman who claims she has the ability to speak with the wind.
However, Rolling Stone now reports that Trump privately “sneered at the ridiculousness” of Powell’s ideas, which involved the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez designing voting machines that would be used to steal an American election seven years after his death in 2013.
And what’s more, special counsel Jack Smith’s office has been pressing sources for their memories of Trump’s mockery of Powell, whom he reportedly secretly believed to be “crazy.”
“The special counsel’s continuing interest in incidents where Trump either seemed to know – or was told by his own aides — that his election conspiracy theories were baseless suggests that prosecutors are likely preparing to demonstrate that Trump’s attempts to overturn the election weren’t the result of a reasonable or good faith belief in conspiracy theories but instead willful disregard of the facts,” writes Rolling Stone. “Demonstrating that Trump knew he was misleading the public could be a crucial evidentiary hurdle in any attempt to prove Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”
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In December 2020, Powell and former national security adviser Mike Flynn gave Trump a presentation about Dominion Voting Systems machines and made the case that he should order the military to seize the machines.
This led to a massive fight with White House lawyers, who argued that such a move would not only be politically flammable but also illegal.
