Sydney Powell, attorney for President Donald Trump, conducts a news conference on Thursday, November 19, 2020. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Yet, for anyone who’s tracked Powell’s public pronouncements in recent years, the outlandish claims and winks toward QAnon conspiracy theories came as no surprise.Exactly a year before Thursday’s press conference, Powell appeared on a QAnon YouTube show and praised the host's support for her other client, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, as “huge and extremely helpful.”The appearance on the YouTube show was not the first time Powell had publicly backed QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump is secretly battling the deep state while trying to uncover a cannibalistic Satanic child sex-trafficking network operated by Democrats and the Hollywood elite.
She has retweeted major QAnon accounts, including that of Tracey Diaz, identified by NBC as one of the three people who helped take QAnon from the obscure 4chan message board to a more mainstream audience.She has also tweeted “#TheStormIsComing” and “#TheStorm,” phrases regularly used by QAnon supporters.Prior to becoming one of Trump’s main conspiracy pushers, Powell was most famous as a lawyer for Flynn, who himself is a significant figure within the QAnon mythos.Flynn, who QAnon recently helped to get to 1 million Twitter followers, has signed copies of his book with the #WWG1WGA hashtag, has the QAnon-linked #DigitalSoldiers and #TakeTheOath hashtags in his Twitter bio, and most blatantly, he posted a video of himself and his family on Independence Day pledging allegiance to the movement by reciting the QAnon oath.
Advertisement
Unsurprisingly, the QAnon community didn’t take Carlson’s rejection of Powell very well: