PODCAST: Proof of Coup, Ep. 3—Sidney Powell
This NotebookLM podcast covers groundbreaking congressional January 6 testimony Donald Trump doesn’t even want you to know exists. But not only does it exist, it’s now a podcast. Podcast audio within.
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Introduction to the Podcast
One of the most consistent lies Donald Trump tells about the January 6 insurrection is also one of the most esoteric: that all the evidence compiled by the House January 6 Committee was destroyed. It wasn’t, of course—the entirety of it is available for free to the public here—so why is Trump so invested in ensuring no voter ever reads it?
As a January 6 historian and the author of the fully sourced book Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection (Substack, 2022)—the fourth book in the New York Times-bestselling Proof Series—I can answer that question. I had to spend six months doing deep dives into January 6-related congressional testimony while writing Proof of Coup, so I know what’s in the testimony that Mr. Trump doesn’t want voters to know.
What I found in the testimony is horrifying beyond belief. Horrifying for two reasons: because it reveals that January 6 isn’t at all what we thought it was, and because major media has repeated Trump and his allies’ false claims that all congressional testimony about January 6 was destroyed—repeated it thousands of times, without comment—but has issued major breaking news reports on House January 6 Committee testimony that’s contained in transcripts rather than during live televised congressional hearings precisely never.
So sit back and listen to an unproofed, unedited NotebookLM podcast detailing what a series of critical figures inside the Trump administration—the importance of their congressional testimony having been curated by a January 6 historian—have to tell us about one of the darkest days in American history.
You can be certain that almost nothing in this podcast is anything you’ve heard before.
Proof of Coup, Ep. 3: Sidney Powell
Curator’s Note: Disgraced Donald Trump lawyer Sidney Powell comes in for slightly more generous treatment by this podcast than you might expect—but only because, at the time of her congressional testimony, we didn’t yet know that she knew she was lying to America about voter fraud and she hadn’t yet been indicted and convicted in Georgia as a key member of Trump’s 2020 election-theft plot. This episode therefore must be listened to both against this new, absolutely critical context and for its many unstated subtext(s): (1) Powell never identified a single scrap of evidence for any of her bizarre election-theft theories; (2) she developed her theories before the election and then merely spent the post-election period unsuccessfully trying to substantiate them; (3) the team she compiled to try to advance her conspiracy-theorizing madness was only a “dream team” (as once referenced in the podcast) in a sarcastic sense, as it was filled with crackpots and hacks who shared Powell’s fringe-right delusions; (4) to try to prove these delusions correct Powell was willing to engage in dangerous, radical acts—including criminal ones—that this podcast does not delve into (for instance, by asking Trump to sign two executive orders giving her unprecedented federal power to seize state-owned voting machines around the country, a prelude to martial law); and (5) even after the January 6 insurrection, her compatriot, drug addict-turned-pillow salesman Michael Lindell, was photographed entering the White House with a plan literally in hand that amounted to an execution of the Waldron Plot Powell, Lindell, Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne, Peter Navarro, and other “Team Kraken” members were involved with: using a false declaration of foreign election interference in U.S. voting machines to nullify the 2020 U.S. presidential election, unilaterally cancel Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, and force a “re-running” of the election under rules set by Trump and his allies, including new “White House Special Counsel” Sidney Powell.
What this NotebookLM podcast does do quite well, however, is circumscribe just how crazy everyone in Washington thought Powell was—and how dubious her supposed “sources” were, and how very incapable she was of ever producing any of the evidence she claimed she could or would—all of which only sets in higher relief the decision then-president Trump made on December 18, 2020 in a heated Oval Office meeting to effectively put Powell in charge of America’s elections and whether or not he would declare martial law and end American democracy. That plot was eventually blocked by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and, of all people, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who prevented Powell from even being allowed back into the White House. But the fact that they had to go to such extraordinary lengths to stop Trump from placing a veritable madwoman atop American democracy only underscores that there would be no such Adults in the Room in a second Trump administration.
The podcast also underlines, sometimes explicitly and sometimes only via inference, additional key facts: Powell had no background in election law (a discrete specialty in the legal profession) and therefore no business play-acting as an election expert in the midst of Civil War-like domestic political tensions; the team she assembled included may have included cranks like her who had in the past achieved some measure of minor success in their own specializations, but were not then and are not now deemed serious players in either U.S. politics or the American legal community; her access to Trump—and indeed her status first as his lawyer, and then as his specially designated White House Special Counsel—was shocking to the actually serious policy-makers and attorneys in the Trump White House; and her insistence on the idea that she was an isolated hero in the post-election period only underscores how profoundly delusional she was and is.
Taken with the aforementioned grains of salt, this podcast gives us a good overview of the place of Sidney Powell in the madness that followed the 2020 U.S. presidential election. But this is also only the beginning of the full story Proof of Coup is weaving, and will continue to tell in upcoming episodes.
The podcast is below.