No, Sidney Powell’s plea deal isn’t going to be rescinded
When political figures find themselves in the throes of the legal system, they often end up being on two very different tracks at once. There’s what they say to their own base in the public forum, in order to get money out of them. And then there’s what they say once they’re in a courtroom or under oath, which ends up going very differently.
To that end, Sidney Powell cut a plea deal in Fulton County last week, in a devastating blow to Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and a number of other remaining defendants. This shouldn’t have been surprising. For as much as Powell likes to run her mouth in public, the reality is that she doesn’t want to go to prison. So of course she cut a deal, and of course she’ll happily send people like Trump to prison in order to keep herself out of prison.
But Sidney Powell is still going to be broke. She’s got the Dominion thing. And she’s going to have a hard time finding work as a disgraced convicted criminal. So even though she’s pleading guilty and giving valuable testimony in the legal world (which is the real world), she’s still out there trying to convince her base to pay her legal fees and such.
To that end, Powell just sent out a newsletter to her base which continued to hype false claims about the 2020 election being stolen. It’s important to understand that the internet is not the real world when it comes to this sort of thing. This newsletter does not mean that Powell is suddenly reneging on her plea deal, or that she’s suddenly going to try to protect Trump.
Nor is DA Fani Willis going to revoke Sidney Powell’s plea deal over something as stupid as a newsletter going out – which given Powell’s notorious sloppiness, may well have been scheduled before she decided to cut a plea and then never edited. Willis might well decide to let Powell know that she has to knock this stuff off in order to keep her deal. But if so, Powell will certainly comply. She’s stupid but she’s not that stupid.
The weird part is that there’s suddenly a lot of hype on both sides about Sidney Powell’s plea deal is supposedly going to be rescinded. Trump supporters are spinning up silly conspiracy theories in their broken minds about how this means Powell is some kind of double agent who’s planning to break her deal at just the right time. And a lot of anti-Trump people are foolishly hoping that Powell’s deal gets rescinded, because they’d (again foolishly) rather see Powell go to prison than see Powell testify against Trump; these folks have lost touch with the reality of the true goal here, which is to put Trump in prison.
But this story is mostly a whole lot of nothing. It’s just a reminder that there’s the real world, where people make pragmatic decisions about trying to stay out of prison and such, and then there’s the world of political punditry where it’s all fantasyland – especially in the ideological space where people like Sidney Powell operate.
