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Sidney Powell Tells Religious-Right Activists Trump Can Use Emergency Powers to Postpone Inauguration

Attorney Sidney Powell (Image from livestream of Jan. 3, 2021 "election integrity" prayer call.)

Sidney Powell, an attorney and QAnon heroine who has fought relentlessly and unsuccessfully to get courts to take her conspiracy theories about the 2020 election seriously, was the featured guest on a religious-right “prayer call” Sunday night on which she that President Donald Trump possesses “national emergency powers” to delay the inauguration of the next president. Powell encouraged participants to immediately start “bombarding” state legislators with a demand that they “decertify or decide to stay their electoral slates” Monday so that “it doesn’t even get to Congress on the 6th.”

Powell appeared on the 20th “Global Prayer Call for Election Integrity,” which has been hosted regularly since the Nov. 3 election by religious-right activists Jim Garlow and Mario Bramnick. Right-wing pundit Eric Metaxas, who emceed the ecumenical festival of extremism on the National Mall Dec. 12, is a regular on the calls.

Powell baselessly claimed that because there was foreign interference in the election from the Chinese Communist Party and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the president can use national emergency powers to postpone the inauguration. And even before that, she asserted, Trump or Vice President Mike Pence could “stay” congressional action to certify the Electoral College vote.

On Sunday’s call, Powell repeated her conspiracy theories about Dominion election software and an “algorithm” she says weighted some Biden votes at 1.26 and Trump votes at .74. She claimed that similar Dominion shenanigans had been going on for years and probably explained Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory over Trump in 2016.

“So, anybody that's saying there's no evidence is not looking at the evidence and is either willfully blind, corrupted by the Chinese Communist Party, blackmailed by the Chinese Communist Party, or has some kind of skeleton in their closet that somebody else is holding over them,” Powell claimed. “There’s no other logical, rational excuse for any intelligent person not to see the blatant fraud here.”

“They took the two worst candidates in the history of the republic probably and crammed them up our nose with fraud,” she claimed.

Asked by Bramnick what Powell’s strategy is given that “time does not seem to be on our side,” Powell decried “institutional failure of our government,” including the U.S. Supreme Court not acting more quickly on the four cases she said she has pending there.

Powell called it “shocking” that judges have not accepted her cases, saying that “the corruption is far wider and deeper than any one of us would have ever imagined” and suggesting that some of the judges who have rejected her team’s claims may have been threatened or intimidated. She said some Republican officials may have benefitted from machine fraud over the years.

When Garlow asked if there would be any constitutional way to address fraud that might be proven after a new president was inaugurated, Powell said no, insisting, “We have to be able to fix this now. And the inauguration can be postponed if necessary, but the fraud cannot be allowed to stand now.”

Asked about the plan by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to create a commission that would have 10 days to investigate fraud, Powell said she was not very familiar with the Cruz plan and would oppose a commission made up of politicians. “We need computer and cyber experts,” she said, adding that 10 days would be enough time to do “a substantial forensic audit in multiple states on multiple machines.”

Powell complained that “there’s massive pressure to ignore all of this, and just, ‘move on’ and never have a free country again.”

Before Powell left the call, one activist prayed for her, describing the election fight as “a spiritual battle with angels and demons warring over America” in her request for God to surround Powell with “warring angels.”

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