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Sidney Powell’s 'Release the Kraken' Lawsuits Are a Real Mess

Powell said she would "release the Kraken," but what we got was mostly debunked claims with a bunch of spelling mistakes.
Sidney Powell was fired from Trump's legal team last weekend.
Sidney Powell was fired from Trump's legal team last weekend. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Just before midnight on Wednesday, Sidney Powell finally “released the Kraken,” filing lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia that allege “massive electoral fraud” in both states.

But both filings are mainly rehashes of previously debunked claims mixed with some new allegations of voter fraud which are once again not backed up with any real evidence.

Possibly the most egregious part of the lawsuits is the spelling.

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Within the first eight words of the 104-page document detailing allegations concerning Georgia, Powell had spelled the word “district” wrong — twice, and in two different ways.

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Powell and her team also managed to spell the name of one of their key witnesses — his name is William M. Briggs — wrong twice and again in two different ways — Williams M. Briggs and Williams Higgs.

One of the other expert witnesses listed in the lawsuit is Ron Watkins, who has been the administrator of fringe message board 8kun where the anonymous leader of QAnon supposedly posts updates.

The lawsuits are filled with incomplete sentences, groups of words that make little or no sense, and logical fallacies so big you could drive a bus through.

Powell also repeats baseless claims that Trump’s electoral loss was a global conspiracy involving China, Iran, and Venezuela’s long-dead president Hugo Chavez.

Much of the filings are taken up with already debunked claims that Smartmatic and Dominion software and voting machines were rigged to switch votes from Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.

One of the newer allegations in the Georgia filing is a claim from Colorado businessman and right-wing activist Joe Oltmann, who says he infiltrated an “Antifa call” and overheard Eric Coomer, a director at Dominion Voting Systems, allegedly saying: “Don’t worry. Trump won’t win the election, we fixed that.”

But in an interview on YouTube earlier this month, Oltmann revealed that he didn’t record the call or write down exactly what he alleged Coomer said — though he does claim to be a “copious note-taker.”

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The Coomer conspiracy first began bubbling up in the QAnon fever swamp earlier this week and has been slowing making its way through far-right channels in recent days, including a segment on One America News.

Powell’s lack of attention to detail in the filing may be explained by the fact she has had a pretty busy time lately.

Following an unhinged press conference last Thursday as a member of Trump’s legal team — which was in effect a dog whistle to the QAnon community — the Texas lawyer was fired by Trump last weekend.

However, she vowed to continue to fight and promised her supporters she would provide irrefutable evidence of electoral fraud on a grand scale, something she called “releasing the Kraken.”

She may also have been distracted on Wednesday when Trump announced on Twitter that Powell’s most famous client Micheal Flynn — the disgraced former national security advisor — had been pardoned.