- Attorney Sidney Powell was presented by reporters leaving the White House on Sunday.
- Powell was there to advocate for an executive order from which voting machines would be seized and tested, the Times said.
- It is unclear whether President Donald Trump supports the idea. But during a meeting on Friday, he discussed Powell’s name as a special adviser to investigate voter fraud.
- Powell has been spreading baseless conspiracy theories about elections for months, with judges dismissing his legal challenges in the war-torn states.
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Attorney Sidney Powell was seen leaving the White House on Sunday to advocate for an executive order there that would allow ballot machines to be collected and inspected. The New York Times reports from Maggie Haberman.
CNN White House correspondent Jeremy Diamond Said He saw Powell walking out of the White House’s residential side, although he told her he had not met with President Donald Trump.
It’s not clear if the president is interested in Powell’s executive order pitch, but Heberman said the president’s staff told him it was not a legally valid option.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The Times had earlier reported that the idea of assembling voting machines came up during a tense meeting at the White House on Friday, in which Powell was also present and clashed with Trump’s advisers.
During that meeting, Trump discussed naming Powell as a special adviser to investigate voter fraud, although most of his advisers did not support the idea.
The suggestion changed last month, when Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis distanced themselves from Powell, saying he “practices the law himself” and is not part of the campaign team.
Powell has pushed election conspiracy theories for months. One of his central claims is that the software used in some state elections was used to “flip” the vote for Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. There is no such evidence, and the company behind the software, Dominion Voting Systems, is threatening to sue for defamation if it does not withdraw its allegations.
Powell made the claim about voting software in one of the election campaigns in the major swing states won by Biden, and sought to reverse the result in those states.
His claims of releasing “Kraken” were accompanied by a judge in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan, who said the allegations “sadly sought relevant or credible evidence.”
A small but growing number of Republicans have acknowledged that Trump lost the election, with some just formally announcing Biden’s victory after last week’s Electoral Rally College Ledge vote.
But the president has refused to admit and has continued to make baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. Trump’s campaign and allies have suffered a legal defeat in an attempt to rig the election, including a decision to reject Texas’ bid to overturn the Supreme Court’s results.
The latest election challenge to the campaign, filed Sunday, is the U.S. The Supreme Court is asked to conduct more than 110,000 mail-in ballot cases under state law.
