If lawyer Sidney Powell's silly defense against defamation stands — professional decency is in trouble

© 2021 Peter Free

 

24 March 2021

 

 

Lying, as American culture's currently most defining trait . . .

 

. . . paved the way for the following:

 

 

Legal representatives for Sidney Powell [see here], a lawyer aligned with former President Donald Trump who filed numerous lawsuits promoting his quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election on the false basis of election fraud, responded to a lawsuit against her this week by suggesting her allegedly defamatory words shouldn’t be taken as serious by “reasonable people.”

 

Dominion Voting Systems, an electronic voting hardware company, is accusing Powell of knowingly making several false claims about the integrity of their products by wrongly suggesting votes from their machines in the 2020 election were switched from Trump to President Joe Biden.

 

Lawyers for Powell, responding to the lawsuit . . . argue that she was merely sharing her opinion about the company, not articulating ideas that she believed were absolute fact, so that the public could draw “their own conclusions” about the matter.

 

They further stated, in their legal brief defending Powell, that her words couldn’t possibly do any financial harm to Dominion since they were not believable.

 

© 2021 Sarah Silbiger, Powell Legal Defense: “Reasonable People” Wouldn’t Believe Election Fraud Claims, TruthOut (23 March 2021)

 

 

In other words

 

According to Powell, everyone knows that attorneys are liars.

 

And, as a result, no one should ever believe them.

 

Evidently, as a matter of societal principle.

 

 

That, it seems to me, is a dangerous precedent to set

 

Yet Powell, scared moral-cretin that she seems to be, is asking her (inferably desperate) defense team to create it.

 

 

The moral? — Sidney Powell's egregious vacuity is making another run at taking America down

 

When professional standards collapse, the culture that they exist in goes with them.

 

Thus, had I influence with Texas's licensing Bar, I would try to see to it that Powell was memorably cautioned.

 

Somebody's 'gotta' make an ethical stand, before we're all swooshed down the Cosmic Effluent.