Sidney Powell may have pleaded guilty to interfering in the 2020 presidential election, but she still seems to think President Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.
On her social media accounts, Powell has continued to push claims that the 2020 election was rigged and that prosecutors in Georgia who brought the criminal case against her are politically motivated. The newsletter published by her dark money group has shared articles arguing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis “extorted” her guilty plea.
Is this part of their overall defense, that they didn’t “know” that Trump lost and they truly “believed” the election had been stolen? It feels like alot of what prosecutors are trying to prove is intent, that Trump actually knew he had lost. It just seems so silly though, like, “Oh, the President of the United States of America, who has access to the CIA, FBI, NSA, and who probably has more information available to him than any other human on Earth, was somehow so deluded that he didn’t actually know he had lost, even though there was absolutely no evidence to the contrary.”
Why is it that ignorance is no excuse for everyone else who doesn’t have access to teams of legal experts, but somehow the head of the Executive branch is allowed to just not know that what they did was illegal and we have to jump through hoops to prove what they did or didn’t know at the time?
You’re conflating things here. The law for fraud requires the intent to deceive to get what you want. If you believe that what you said was truthful, then it can’t be fraud. If you lied to get what you want, and then claimed that you didn’t know that was against the law, that would be “ignorance is no excuse for the law.” This is exactly why it’s a good legal strategy because, as you point out, its so hard to prove intent.