A Texas appeals court has rejected attorney disciplinary charges against Sidney Powell, a former attorney for Donald Trump.
Trump, Powell and 17 others were charged with election fraud for allegedly trying to manipulate the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia. Powell has taken a plea deal and may have to give evidence against the other defendants.
The appellate court strongly rejected the Texas state bar’s argument that Powell should be disciplined for her role in the election. Writing for the three-judge Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas, Justice Dennise Garcia criticized the state bar for employing “a scattershot approach to the case, which left this court and the trial court with the task of sorting through the argument to determine what issue ha[d] actually been raised.”
Newsweek sought email comment from Powell’s attorney, Robert Holmes, on Friday. The Texas Bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline told Newsweek it had no comment.
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In a ruling on Wednesday, the appeals court said the Texas bar was trying to suggest that Powell’s carelessness in court filings implied she was dishonest.
The court noted that the Texas bar disciplinary rules define fraud to include “conduct having a purpose to deceive and not merely negligent misrepresentation or failure to apprise another of relevant information.”
“Because the rules do not define ‘dishonesty,’ ‘deceit,’ or ‘misrepresentation’, courts have given those terms their ordinary meanings, and have concluded that they generally mean a ‘lack of honesty, probity, or integrity in principle’ and a ‘lack of straightforwardness.’
“We are troubled by the Bar’s implicit suggestion that application of the ordinary meaning of the term dishonesty means the DR [Disciplinary Rules] encompasses imprecise pleadings and carelessly filed exhibits.
“As common sense dictates, and the case law illustrates, dishonesty involves something more than carelessness or inadvertent conduct.”
Powell has had a difficult time since joining the Trump camp just after the 2020 election.
Trump welcomed her with a social media post on November 14, 2020, in which he also welcomed Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and two others as “a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives” to work on “the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS.”
After Trump welcomed her to the team, Powell made a number of unsubstantiated claims at a news conference on November 20. At the press conference, also attended by Giuliani and Ellis, Powell suggested that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favor of Joe Biden.
Three days later, Giuliani and Ellis released a statement distancing Powell from the Trump legal team.
“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and Ellis said in the statement.
Powell reached a deal with prosecutors in Atlanta in October 2023 in which she agreed to cooperate with Georgia’s investigation into tampering in the 2020 presidential election in exchange for a six-year probation sentence, a $6,000 fine and a written apology to Georgia residents.
Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro took a plea deal the next day when he pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents. He will also have to testify against the other defendants. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in the case.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.