Trump Legal Team Apparently Disavows Sidney Powell

Info here. I'll be following up.

Dominion Sidesteps On Fox

A spokesman for Dominion Voting Systems appeared on Fox News today to repeat, pretty much verbatim, the claims Dominion has made on its website about its role in the election. The spokesman on Fox, Michael Steel, is identified as a principal with Hamilton Place Strategies. Hamilton Place's website says, "We understand complex topics, explain issues to target audiences, and persuade critical stakeholders." In other words, it's a PR firm. I'd suggest Dominion needs a crisis management firm instead, but that's just me.

What's interesting here is that Dominion's own executives backed out of testifying at a Pennsylvania House hearing on Friday, but today, they've delegated to a PR flack to make statements that we may reasonably assume Dominion's attorneys advised its executives not to make, as they could either be taken as admissions against interest or statements that could be used to challenge them on cross-examination. I suspect as well that Dominion was nevertheless under pressure to say more in response to the continuing controlversy, and the clearly scripted exchange witn the Fox talking head implies that the controversy isn't going away.

Maria Bartiromo had a good list of questions that ought to be asked of Dominion on her show this morning:

Thee are questions Michael Steel isn't qualified to answer and will at some point need to be posed with Dominion. All Steel did was dismiss legitimate questions like these as "conspiracy theories". It sounds as if Bartiromo is talking with some serious people, and these questins aren't going to go away.

The Kraken, The Golden Mountain, Evidence, And Tucker Carlson

I don't believe I've ever watched more than the briefest excerpts from Tucker Carlson's Fox show. Now and then I watched O'Reilly, and before that, Greta Van Susteren a little more frequently, and I probably liked her best because she wasn't a glamour queen, and she dressed appropriately. Tucker, I'm sure, is headed on that same journey from which news readers do not return.

I checked the web, and the jury is out on whether his hair is natural, although the question I would have is why, if it's natural, he wears it like a toupee. Why go out of your way to look phony? Checking Wikipeida, he's the son of Richard Warner Carlson, an even better-connected media maven, so my guess is he's always had an easy ride, and he wouldn't know authentic if it walked up and shook his hand.

I listened to outtakes from his show on YouTube with his challenges to Sidney Powell to show him "evidence". One thing I noticed is that, although he's 51 years old, he speaks, or actually reads from the teleprompter, in a snotty puerile singsong. I'm not sure why anyone ever watched the guy, but they're right to ditch him now. So the kerfuffle with Sidney Powell on Thursday and Friday nights over whether she has "evidence" is, it seems to me, just evidence of a shallow, entitled guy who's realizing that not everyone just turns over whatever he wants.

I notice commentators, even semi-conservative ones, insist that affadavits aren't "evidence". I've sat in on enough court cases, as a witness, juror, and spectator, to know this simply isn't true. My wife, a retired attorney, sent me a link to this website, which says that affadavits, while considered weak evidence, are in fact used in court, especially when seeking temporary restraining orders, which are exactly what the Trump legal team is seeking in its initial filings.

So an affadavit is exactly what Sidney Powell did, by her account, send Carlson, along with a YouTube video outlining the Trump team's theory of the case. My guess is that Carlson was looking for a much bigger scoop to resuscitate Fox's (and of course, his) ratings, and that's not what he got, so he lashed out on national TV. Powell, an adult, had the overall case in mind, and she wasn't going to telegraph legal strategy by releasng anything prematurely. She has plenty of other platforms to present her case, and she's using them. Carlson hates this, as it puts him behind Newsmax and the others.

The main Trump team, where Powell works, is focused on what seems to be called the "Dominion" strategy, which is that machines, software, and personnel from Dominion Voting Systems actively worked to switch votes from Biden to Trump over the night and early morning of Nov 3-4, in sufficient numbers to invlidate the results of the election. I would say there are two sub-parts to this strategy, one I would call the kraken, the overall plot, and the second I would call the golden mountain, the Frankfurt server that is, among other things, alleged possibly to contain evidence of a 400-plus vote Trump Electoral College victory.

I posted on this possibility last Monday. Since then, leaks have gradually come out that suggest the Larry Johnson version I discussed then is the closest fit to what may have happened. Powell herself has alluded to such a server's existence over the course of the last several days. Yesterday, Emerald Robinson of Newsmax appears to have had independent confirmation that "a piece of hardware has been secured" from Germany.

Dominion updated its home page yesterday to include, among other things, a more specific statement that "There have been no 'raids' of Dominion servers by the U.S. military or otherwise, and Dominion does not have servers in Germany." But the Larry Johnson version does not attribute any specific ownership to the hardware that, through the leaks we've had, was seized, but the Johnson version suggests it/they was/were on US government property in Frankfurt, which is how US authorities could seize it/them.

Powell and Giuliani have referred to "Scytl servers" in Frankfurt. Exactly why they're referring to them that way isn't clear, although they've been consistent in that usage. Scytl's November 13 press release does acknowlege that there were in fact servers owned by Scytl in Frankfurt, but "Servers in Frankfurt were used for a specific project for the European Parliament in 2019. These back-up servers were closed in September 2019." In addition, Scytl says, "The U.S. military has not seized anything related to Scytl in Frankfurt, Barcelona or anywhere else." Neverthless, this wording does seem extremely careful, and the Johnson version implies that, although the US military was involved in the Frankfurt seizure, it did not itself seize the hardware.

Detectives on true crime shows often say that when they get suspects to tell them lies, it's as valuable as a direct confession. I wonder if this is the case here. We'll find out more in coming days and weeks.