Government

Feds Wonder If Kraken Lawyer Sidney Powell Is As Good At Accountanting As She Is At Law

Charity begins at home. Allegedly.

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell has been in some scrapes with Johnny Law lately. Over the summer she got fined $10,000 by the State of Florida for failing to register her charity “Defending the Republic” before soliciting money in the state. And she was part of the team of lawyers ordered to pay legal fees by US District Judge Linda V. Parker in August for filing a facially nonsensical election suit in Michigan. But that’s mere pocket change — $20,000 or $50,000 that can easily be recouped by donations to her 501(c)(4).

According to the Washington Post and the Daily Beast, though, the former federal prosecutor may have gotten herself into some real trouble this time.

The Post reports that a federal grand jury in DC subpoenaed communications and fundraising records from Powell’s charity and her PAC. The article notes that DTR appears to have begun soliciting donations before it actually incorporated, that its mission statement shifted significantly over time, and that at some point the organization was accepting checks made out to Sidney Powell P.C., her law firm.

Meanwhile, DTR appeared to be flush with cash, donating $550,000 to fund the Arizona recount. And Powell’s business paid $1.2 million in cash to buy an office building Alexandria, so clearly there’s money coming in somewhere.

The Daily Beast, which follows all these weirdos on Telegram now that they’ve been booted off Twitter, listened to Lin Wood’s latest round of surreptitiously recorded phone calls. These featured Patrick Byrne, the defenestrated founder of Overstock.com and a major supporter of the Stop the Steal mob, absolutely trashing Powell.

“On April 3rd, Mike Flynn, Joe Flynn, and the other five people that I had hired and built an office around all walked out the door on Sidney and have never spoken a word to her since,” he said, describing his efforts to “stand up” Defending the Republic. “Now you can infer what you want from that.”

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“It shouldn’t be called ‘Defending the Republic,’” Byrne told Wood, complaining that Powell had failed to segregate DTR’s funds from her own. “It should be called ‘Defending the Sidney Powell.’”

Wood himself claimed that Powell had told him she had amassed $7 million and was simply waiting for the paperwork to be finalized so she could start paying herself back for work already undertaken.

“I’m still upset Sidney made the public into her client, which I don’t think should be done. I don’t do that, because that opens the door to self-dealing” said the lawyer who is currently embroiled in a dispute with a teenage former client over money raised in a legal defense fund.

Later Byrne characterized DTR as a “for profit” and claimed that Powell and her cronies were awarding themselves “stock options.”

He also laced into Kraken lawyer Howard Kleinhendler, calling him “Howard Finkelbaum or whatever his name is,” lambasting the attorney for “that terrible filing this spring” in which there was “this terrible sentence that was basically like ‘I’m Sidney Powell, no one should take me seriously anyway.'”

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“Remember how they roasted her back in like March?” he asked.

Maybe like March 23?

“Sidney’s just running this as a scam,” Byrne said at another point, unaware that he was being recorded by someone who would soon put the call on social media.

And that guy may be a loon who thinks Howard Kleinhendler works for Hillary Clinton (yeah, he really said that), but if he can spot problems in DTR’s books, it seems pretty likely that the US Attorneys in DC won’t require forensic accountants to figure it out, too.

But Powell has an answer for that one over on her own Telegram account.

We have always known the more effective we are, the more the false attacks will intensify.  Defending the Republic has and will continue to fight for #WeThePeople who make this country work. Defending the Republic and the PAC will not be diverted from their missions by lies, innuendo and other distractions. We believe in the law, the Rule of Law, and we intend to follow it and work to reinstate and preserve it.

Well, good luck with all that.

Prosecutors demanded records of Sidney Powell’s fundraising groups as part of criminal probe [WaPo]
Feds Are Asking Questions About Sidney Powell and Her Pro-Trump Group [Daily Beast]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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