After Powell pleads guilty in Georgia, Trump claims she was ‘never’ his attorney, despite past ties

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump claimed Sidney Powell was “never” his attorney in a social media post Sunday, three days after she pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case.

Despite Trump’s claims, Powell was briefly an official member of Trump’s legal team in 2020, and Trump stayed in contact with her on election-related matters even after she was ousted from his campaign.

“Sidney Powell was one of millions and millions of people who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!!! MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS. In fact, she would have been conflicted,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Powell comes after she agreed to cooperate with Fulton County prosecutors and testify against her co-defendants in the case, potentially including Trump.

Trump publicly announced on November 15, 2020, that he “added” Powell to his “truly great team” of lawyers working on the election. She participated in a notorious Trump campaign press conference, alongside fellow Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, where she peddled unfounded conspiracy theories about an international vote-rigging plot to flip millions of votes from Trump to Joe Biden.

The Trump campaign soon dropped her from the legal team and insisted that she was “practicing law on her own.”

She went on to file frivolous lawsuits across the country, in hopes of overturning the results. One federal judge later said Powell’s actions were “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”

And she met with Trump on multiple occasions, including a December 2020 White House meeting where he considered naming her as a special counsel to look for voter fraud. This was the infamous meeting where there was discussion of declaring martial law and ordering the military to seize voting machines.

As Powell’s trial approached in Georgia, she similarly tried to distance herself from Trump. Her attorneys said she “did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign” because she never signed an “engagement agreement” to be their attorney. Her name was never on any court filings from the Trump campaign, Powell’s lawyers pointed out.

In her guilty plea, Powell admitted her role in the January 2021 breach of election systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia.

With the help of local GOP officials, a group of Trump supporters accessed and copied information from the county’s election systems in hopes of somehow proving that the election was rigged against Trump. They did this after Trump declined to sign an executive order directing the Pentagon to seize voting machines.