Over the weekend, Donald Trump deployed the "he was just the coffee boy" defense for his involvement with Sidney Powell, who pleaded guilty in the election racketeering case in Fulton County, Georgia. According to Trump, Powell was never his lawyer – and he always thought she was "crazy."
But according to a national security expert and legal analysts, his denial that he was involved with Powell might be more about his pardon of retired Gen. Michael Flynn than about the 2020 election.
Marcy Wheeler penned a post on Sunday explaining, "Trump doesn’t just claim that Sidney Powell was never his attorney ...He says she would have been conflicted."
Trump pardoned Flynn on Thanksgiving in 2020 after he confessed and pleaded guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent of Turkey. Powell was involved in representing him.
Both Trump and his office's announcement of Flynn's pardon mention him being "an innocent man," but the pardon paperwork itself doesn't say that, argued Wheeler.
"Plus, the pardon couldn’t have been based on innocence, not entirely, anyway, because Flynn made false statements in the process of reneging off his prior guilty plea to making false statements," Wheeler continued.
"It is quite literally impossible for Flynn to have been innocent of making any unlawful false statements, because the things he said in the process of reneging on his plea deal completely contradicted things he had said under oath earlier. The Flynn pardon was easily the most expansive of any pardons Trump gave... It had to be written that broadly to prevent Judge Sullivan from referring Flynn for perjury before his court.
"The pardon covered not just the lies Flynn told the FBI on January 24, 2017, it also covered claims Flynn made before an EDVA grand jury and in plea colloquies before Sullivan."
She went on to say that the report comes mere days after the Justice Department responded to, "Trump's claim of absolute immunity that argued — among other things — that a presidential pardon given as part of a quid pro quo would be unlawful, and Trump is offering up not just that Sidney Powell wasn’t his attorney in November 2020 when he claimed she was, but that she would have been conflicted — apparently because of her representation of Mike Flynn! — from being his attorney."
On the social media site previously known as Twitter, Wheeler posted that Trump swears Powell wasn't Flynn's lawyer on Nov. 25, 2020, when the pardon was posted.
A screen capture of a Nov. 15 tweet from Trump then circulated, calling Powell part of the "legal effort."
Former New Jersey Senior Deputy Attorney General Michael Bokar said that Trump's denial may have been about Powell being one of his personal attorneys, "thinking of her as someone hired, and later fired, by the corporate organization running Trump's campaign, not by him personally. For criminal liability purposes, this may be a distinction without a difference."
Allison Gill, from the legal podcasts "Mueller, She Wrote" and "Jack: A Special Podcast," noted that Trump's team made a big to-do about dumping Powell from the Trump legal team just two days after she did the presser where Rudy's face melted, and Trump continued to support her claims after they dumped her. We were told Trump dumped her because she was 'too crazy.'"
"But what if he was kicking her off the legal team so he could pardon her client (Flynn) three days later?" Gill pondered. "It's of note that Trump made his 'Powell was conflicted' Truth Social post just a couple days after DoJ mentioned in a filing that corrupt pardons are illegal."
In his filing responding to Trump's claim of "presidential immunity," Jack Smith wrote, "...criminal immunity should not shield the corrupt use of a presidential pardon—which plainly constitutes 'anything of value' for purposes of the federal bribery statute."
Wheeler, Gill explained, walks through a critical timeline with other hypotheticals the Justice Department used in their filing that align with Trump's behavior."
