Am I missing something about Sidney Powell?

[Tommy_Carcetti]

Prior to this week, the way the Trumpists had talked her up they seemed to have been insisting she was one of the preeminent legal minds of our age. Like she was the second coming of Clarence Darrow or something.

I literally had never heard of her before she took over representing Michael Flynn, and she immediately set off all sort of batshit crazy hack alarms.

Was she supposed have been somebody before all this? Seriously? Did I miss something here?

[sboatcar]

1. She was a DA for awhile in Texas, but otherwise there was nothing remarkable about her.

[marble falls]

2. She may not be smart but she is intellegent ...

Early life

Sidney Katherine Powell was born into a working-class family in Durham, North Carolina, grew up in the city of Raleigh,[15] and knew from an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer. She graduated from Needham Broughton High School and went on to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts.[6] At the age of 19, she was accepted into the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she graduated in 1978 with a Juris Doctor degree.[16] She began her legal career as the youngest assistant United States attorney in the US.[17]
Legal career

From 1978 through 1988, Powell served as an assistant United States attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas and the Eastern District of Virginia, where she handled civil and criminal trial work. She was appointed Appellate Section Chief for the Western District of Texas and then the Northern District of Texas.[2]

In 1993, Powell established her own law firm in Dallas, Texas, aimed mostly at federal appellate practice, including in the United States Supreme Court.[2] Her firm has also handled a number of high-profile class action suits. She has served as lead counsel in more than 500 appeals in the Fifth Circuit courts, resulting in more than 180 published opinions.[2][18][19]

Powell also writes and teaches in the area of federal appellate law practice, including work for the Attorney General’s Advocacy Institute of the United States Department of Justice.[17] She is a member of the American Law Institute[20] and a fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, where she served as president from 2001 to 2002.[2][21][22] She also served as president and governor of the Bar Association of the Fifth Federal Circuit.[2][18][23][24]

Notable cases
Assassination of Judge John H. Wood

In 1979, Powell was one of the prosecutors in the trial of Jimmy Chagra, in which he was convicted of continuing criminal violations.[2] Chagra was an American drug trafficker implicated in the May 1979 assassination of United States district judge John H. Wood Jr. in San Antonio, Texas. In the 1970s, Chagra was one of the biggest drug traffickers operating out of Las Vegas and El Paso, and according to one observer, Chagra was "the undisputed marijuana kingpin of the Western world."[25] Carl Pierce, a co-worker who headed up the drug trafficking unit, described it as a period when drug traffickers were "trying to kill our witnesses, assassinate our prosecutors." According to Pierce, there were times when the government attorneys had to wear bulletproof vests and be escorted by federal marshals.[6] Chagra was released from prison in Atlanta, Georgia for health reasons on December 9, 2003, and reportedly placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. He died of cancer on July 25, 2008.[26]
Enron scandal

Powell spent nearly a decade in the 2000s representing firms and executives involved in the Enron scandal, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and former Merrill Lynch executive Jim Brown.[5] Enron's financial misconduct was exposed in October 2001, leading to the bankruptcy of Enron and the de facto dissolution of Arthur Andersen, one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world, because of audit failures.[27] Chief executives of Enron were indicted for a variety of charges and some were later convicted and sentenced to prison. Arthur Andersen was found guilty of illegally destroying relevant documents, which voided its license to audit public companies and effectively closed the firm. The ruling was overturned at the U.S. Supreme Court, but Arthur Andersen had already ceased operating. As a result of the scandal, new regulations and legislation were enacted to expand the accuracy of financial reporting for public companies.[28] Some convictions were overturned on appeal due to legal reasons including prosecutorial misconduct. After this experience, Powell went on to write extensively about prosecutorial abuses.[6]



Do not think of this as an endorsement. Think of it as "know your enemy". I think she's in the running for "Queen of the Whackados".

[obamanut2012]

3. Very well known as an Enron attorney

[Caliman73]

4. This may be overly broad, but here is my two cents.

Powell was not a slouch as an attorney, but her claim to fame was defending the firms involved in the Enron scandal.

Conservatives believe that they have an ordainment from god to be in charge. They typically have the money and the power behind them. They have a need to use hyperbolic language when describing their attributes, in order to bolster their claims.

Gulianni was a pretty powerful guy who garnered respect some time ago. Now he is a joke, but Right wingers need him to be old powerhouse Rudy so they say he is playing 10 dimensional chess, when he is obviously losing his mind.

Powell is the same. She seems to have turned into a crackpot, but you know, conservatives can't abide crackpots so instead of actually hiring the best people, they try to hide the defects and create these sterling images of obviously tarnished people.

[Bev54]

5. She was a Fox news pundit lawyer

That is her claim to fame, like most of the rest of the Trump legal team. I don't watch Fox so I too, did not know her before Flynn.