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Sidney Powell: Corrupt Lawfare Prosecutors Epitomize What’s Broken in America

By John Zmirak Published on April 3, 2025

If Donald Trump’s counterrevolution of sanity, common sense, and Natural Law is to succeed, he will have to name, shame, and break a long list of people — cossetted members of privileged elites who treat the law as a plaything and our courts as cudgels. So says former prosecutor, author, and election-integrity hero Sidney Powell, who graciously answered The Stream’s questions this week on politicized prosecutors.

Such federal inquisitors are in the news again. President Trump called several out by name when announcing his executive order stripping politicized law firms of security clearances and federal contracts last month:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, America’s nerdiest heartthrob, is now going after a law firm that tried to reverse Trump’s order removing Venezuelan gangsters from the country:

Since I’ve read Sidney Powell’s explosive book Licensed to Lie, I decided to interview her about the way some are abusing prosecutorial authority to go after conservatives and Christians. I’ve known Powell for a decade, and permanently lost my Twitter account for speaking up on her behalf when Dominion and the legal establishment tried to crush her for calling out 2020 election fraud.

The Stream: You wrote extensively about politicized federal prosecutors in your book, Licensed to Lie. Can you recap for us what you discovered ?

Sidney Powell: Prosecutors get away with all kinds of abuses — overcharging, hiding evidence of innocence, putting on perjured testimony. To this day, prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from lawsuits against them — even when they intentionally violate the law. The Department of Justice does nothing to discipline them. Neither do bar associations. Meanwhile, police officers who have no time to deliberate over their actions have only qualified immunity from suit.

Congress needs to eliminate absolute immunity for prosecutors who have intentionally suppressed favorable evidence or sponsored knowingly false testimony. It should require the termination of any prosecutor found to have hidden evidence of the defendant’s innocence or sponsored false testimony. DOJ and prosecutors must take these problems far more seriously. Overcharging can be stopped by a DOJ policy, and it should be. Five counts is enough to charge against most anyone unless there are truly multiple victims and multiple crimes — not one set of facts for which they can find 10 different statutes to charge for essentially the same conduct.

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TS: What was Andrew Weissmann’s role in the lawfare that paralyzed the first Trump administration and targeted Gen. Mike Flynn — whom you so ably defended in court?

SP: I strongly suspect that Weissmann was very active behind the scenes, with his former cohorts on the Enron Task Force, to craft much of the lawfare against Trump in his first term — and likely now. Since 2004, one or more members of the Enron Task Force have been in very high government positions. Katherine Ruemmler was Obama’s White House counsel. Loretta Lynch brought Leslie Caldwell and Weissmann back into the DOJ. Weissmann’s fingerprints were all over the the Russia collusion hoax, including the phony Steele Dossier, and of course, Weissman joined Mueller’s Special Counsel operation. As soon as Weissmann joined Mueller’s team, I knew its credo would be “the end justifies the means.” I realized it was highly likely that General Flynn had been framed. Lisa Monaco followed Weissmann into the FBI as general counsel, then became DOJ number two under Merrick Garland. She likely ran all the ops against Trump through the Biden administration.

TS: Did Weissmann play any role in the January 6 witch hunt?

SP: The January 6 hunt and terrorist tactics and abuses heaped on the J6 defendants certainly comes out of the Weissmann playbook — regardless of whether he played a consulting role.

TS: What will Trump’s scrutiny of these politicized prosecutors now accomplish?

SP: As far as I know, Trump and the DOJ have done nothing to address these abuses. Much more needs to be done. Trump’s scrutiny will not matter unless DOJ takes action.

TS: What should citizens know about the abuses of federal prosecutorial authority? Has Trump taken the steps needed to curb it systemically?

SP: Robert H. Jackson best described the power and duties of the federal prosecutor. It cannot be said better. I encourage everyone to read it. These passages are the most important:

There is a most important reason why the prosecutor should have, as nearly as possible, a detached and impartial view of all groups in his community. Law enforcement is not automatic. It isn’t blind. One of the greatest difficulties of the position of prosecutor is that he must pick his cases, because no prosecutor can even investigate all of the eases in which he receives complaints. …

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm –in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense — that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. [emphases added]

TS: How are you doing in your own defensive battle against lawfare?

SP: We have beaten down multiple federal lawsuits filed against me. We won three rulings in two actions brought consecutively by the Texas Bar. Another bar seems to have finally dropped its effort. We’re still dealing with the Michigan Bar, then Dominion and Smartmatic, which have separate multibillion-dollar suits against me in federal court in D.C. Both cases are specious but have cost tens of millions to defend.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.