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Since his 2025 inauguration, President Donald Trump has granted executive clemency to more than 1,600 people, many of whom were serving prison time for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. That number makes the just over 200 signed executive orders seem quaint by comparison. On Sunday, a prominent Dallas attorney was one of the latest beneficiaries of the president’s penchant for pardons.
Sidney Powell, whom The New York Times described in a headline as “The Lawyer Behind Wild Voting Conspiracy Theories,” was one of 77 Trump allies accused of trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. She, along with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among others, received pardons that are considered largely symbolic at this time, as no one from the new list has been convicted of a federal crime. What these pardons will prevent, however, is rather concrete, as future administrations will be unable to bring these charges against Powell and the others.
In a statement provided to The New York Times, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said those who were pardoned are “great Americans” and claimed they had been “put through hell by the Biden administration for challenging an election.”
Powell, a former federal prosecutor in Texas in the late 1970s, has promoted conspiracy theories since the first Trump administration. She represented former Army lieutenant general and noted conspiracy theory peddler Michael Flynn in 2020 when he was accused of making false statements to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian government.
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Powell, along with Giuliani, was a leading legal voice in the effort to challenge the results of the 2020 election, which saw Trump lose to former President Joe Biden. Among the many claims Powell has made regarding the 2020 election, the manipulation of voting machines, accusations of foreign interference and allegations that so-called “deep state” forces such as QAnon have worked to stop Trump’s progress have made headlines. Throughout 2021, Powell became a regular on conservative television talk shows, including The Rush Limbaugh Show, where she claimed that some of the voting machines used in the United States “had been designed to rig elections for the former ruler of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013.”
In 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor charges of attempting to alter the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. As part of her plea deal, she agreed to six years of probation and to testify against other defendants in the case. Trump’s pardon does not apply to the Georgia plea deal.
Powell’s legal troubles and lack of success in turning over the 2020 election haven’t seemed to stop her from voicing her extreme views or weaken her fealty to the president. Her actively updated social media is filled with pro-Trump, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and yes, voter fraud-related rhetoric.
On Sunday, prior to the news of her pardon breaking, she retweeted an X post stating, “Antonio Gracias found (20M) dead people on Social Security, (2.4M) Illegals were issued SS numbers. Elon ~ there was a massive program to ultimately change the voting map of the U.S. People cannot be rewarded when they come here illegally.”
