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Sidney Powell speaks during a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. on November 19, 2020.
One reporter said the plea shows the prosecution is "working... up the proverbial food chain when it comes to flipping lower-level defendants and trying to get to the king at the top."
Disgraced attorney Sidney Powell—a key legal architect of former U.S. President Donald Trump's effort to rig the 2020 presidential contest—pleaded guilty Thursday to reduced charges in the Georgia election interference case, a move that came just one day before jury selection in her trial would have started.
Powell, Trump, and 17 others were charged in August by Democratic Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with violations of Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for allegedly participating in a sprawling "criminal enterprise" aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election results in the state.
Trump faces 13 criminal charges in the case, one of four state and federal cases in which the 2024 GOP presidential front-runner is charged with a combined 91 counts.
According to The Associated Press, Powell, who is 68 years old, will serve six years of probation, pay a $6,000 fine, and write an apology letter to the state and people of Georgia. Critically, she must also testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials.
Powell is the second defendant in the Georgia case to take a plea deal. Last month, bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.
Jury selection in the trial of Powell co-defendant Kenneth Cheseboro, who is allegedly behind the Trump fake electors plot, is set to start Friday.
Powell, a prolific purveyor of Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, claimed that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a plot to rig its voting machines to switch large numbers of votes from Trump to President Joe Biden.
In December 2020, Powell, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne allegedly presented a draft executive order to Trump involving the seizure of voting machines by armed private contractors. She was also accused of involvement in arranging the illegal collection of data from election systems and voting machines at the Coffee County, Georgia elections office in January 2021.
Powell also associated herself with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles including Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks are involved in an international child sex-trafficking ring.
Once described by Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis as part of an "elite strike force" working to prove the former president's stolen election claim, Powell was later sidelined after peddling baseless claims of vote hacking involving Venezuela, Cuba, and "communist money."
"She was too crazy even for the president," one unnamed Trump official told The Washington Post in November 2020.
Reacting to Powell's plea deal, MSNBC's Katie Phang said that "it is the communications between her and Donald Trump that are really kind of working your way up the proverbial food chain when it comes to flipping lower-level defendants and trying to get to the king at the top."
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Disgraced attorney Sidney Powell—a key legal architect of former U.S. President Donald Trump's effort to rig the 2020 presidential contest—pleaded guilty Thursday to reduced charges in the Georgia election interference case, a move that came just one day before jury selection in her trial would have started.
Powell, Trump, and 17 others were charged in August by Democratic Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with violations of Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for allegedly participating in a sprawling "criminal enterprise" aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election results in the state.
Trump faces 13 criminal charges in the case, one of four state and federal cases in which the 2024 GOP presidential front-runner is charged with a combined 91 counts.
According to The Associated Press, Powell, who is 68 years old, will serve six years of probation, pay a $6,000 fine, and write an apology letter to the state and people of Georgia. Critically, she must also testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials.
Powell is the second defendant in the Georgia case to take a plea deal. Last month, bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.
Jury selection in the trial of Powell co-defendant Kenneth Cheseboro, who is allegedly behind the Trump fake electors plot, is set to start Friday.
Powell, a prolific purveyor of Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, claimed that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a plot to rig its voting machines to switch large numbers of votes from Trump to President Joe Biden.
In December 2020, Powell, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne allegedly presented a draft executive order to Trump involving the seizure of voting machines by armed private contractors. She was also accused of involvement in arranging the illegal collection of data from election systems and voting machines at the Coffee County, Georgia elections office in January 2021.
Powell also associated herself with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles including Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks are involved in an international child sex-trafficking ring.
Once described by Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis as part of an "elite strike force" working to prove the former president's stolen election claim, Powell was later sidelined after peddling baseless claims of vote hacking involving Venezuela, Cuba, and "communist money."
"She was too crazy even for the president," one unnamed Trump official told The Washington Post in November 2020.
Reacting to Powell's plea deal, MSNBC's Katie Phang said that "it is the communications between her and Donald Trump that are really kind of working your way up the proverbial food chain when it comes to flipping lower-level defendants and trying to get to the king at the top."
Disgraced attorney Sidney Powell—a key legal architect of former U.S. President Donald Trump's effort to rig the 2020 presidential contest—pleaded guilty Thursday to reduced charges in the Georgia election interference case, a move that came just one day before jury selection in her trial would have started.
Powell, Trump, and 17 others were charged in August by Democratic Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with violations of Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for allegedly participating in a sprawling "criminal enterprise" aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election results in the state.
Trump faces 13 criminal charges in the case, one of four state and federal cases in which the 2024 GOP presidential front-runner is charged with a combined 91 counts.
According to The Associated Press, Powell, who is 68 years old, will serve six years of probation, pay a $6,000 fine, and write an apology letter to the state and people of Georgia. Critically, she must also testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials.
Powell is the second defendant in the Georgia case to take a plea deal. Last month, bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.
Jury selection in the trial of Powell co-defendant Kenneth Cheseboro, who is allegedly behind the Trump fake electors plot, is set to start Friday.
Powell, a prolific purveyor of Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, claimed that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a plot to rig its voting machines to switch large numbers of votes from Trump to President Joe Biden.
In December 2020, Powell, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne allegedly presented a draft executive order to Trump involving the seizure of voting machines by armed private contractors. She was also accused of involvement in arranging the illegal collection of data from election systems and voting machines at the Coffee County, Georgia elections office in January 2021.
Powell also associated herself with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles including Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks are involved in an international child sex-trafficking ring.
Once described by Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis as part of an "elite strike force" working to prove the former president's stolen election claim, Powell was later sidelined after peddling baseless claims of vote hacking involving Venezuela, Cuba, and "communist money."
"She was too crazy even for the president," one unnamed Trump official told The Washington Post in November 2020.
Reacting to Powell's plea deal, MSNBC's Katie Phang said that "it is the communications between her and Donald Trump that are really kind of working your way up the proverbial food chain when it comes to flipping lower-level defendants and trying to get to the king at the top."
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
The White House is "circulating" a plan to transform a substantially depopulated Gaza into US President Donald Trump's vision of a high-tech "Riviera of the Middle East" brimming with private investment and replete with artificial intelligence-powered "smart cities."
That's according a 38-page prospectus for a proposed Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation (GREAT) Trust obtained by The Washington Post and published in a report on Sunday. Parts of the proposal were previously reported by the Financial Times.
"Gaza can transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Gulf Cooperation Council] investments," the prospectus states.
However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to "genocide packaged as real estate."
Here comes the Gaza Network State.A plan to turn Gaza into a privately-developed “gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” with “AI-powered smart cities” and “Trump Riviera” resortgift link:wapo.st/4g2eATo
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— Gil Durán (@gilduran.com) August 31, 2025 at 10:18 AM
The GREAT Trust was drafted by some of the same Israelis behind the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose aid distribution points in Gaza have been the sites of deliberate massacres and other incidents in which thousands of aid-seeking Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
According to the Post, financial modeling for the GREAT Trust proposal "was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group"—which played a key role in creating GHF. BCG told the Post that the firm did not approve work on the trust plan, and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently terminated.
The GREAT Trust envisions "a US-led multirlateral custodianship" lasting a decade or longer and leading to "a reformed Palestinian self-governance after Gaza is "demilitarized and de-radicalized."
Josh Paul—a former US State Department official who resigned in October 2023 over the Biden administration's decision to sell more arms to Israel as it waged a war on Gaza increasingly viewed by experts as genocidal—told Democracy Now! last week that Trump's plan for Gaza is "essentially a new form of colonialism, a transition from Israeli colonialism to corporate" colonialism.
The GREAT Trust contains two proposals for Gaza's more than 2 million Palestinians. Under one plan, approximately 75% of Gaza's population would remain in the strip during its transformation. The second proposal involves up to 500,000 Gazans relocating to third countries, 75% of them permanently.
The prospectus does not say how many Palestinians would leave Gaza under the relocation option. Those who choose to permanently relocate to other unspecified countries would each receive $5,000 plus four years of subsidized rent and subsidized food for a year.
The GREAT Trust allocates $6 billion for temporary housing for Palestinians who remain in Gaza and $5 billion for those who relocate.
The proposal projects huge profits for investors—nearly four times the return on investment and annual revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade. The project would be a boon for companies ranging from builders including Saudi bin Laden Group, infrastructure specialists like IKEA, the mercenary firm Academi (formerly Blackwater), US military contractor CACI—which last year was found liable for torturing Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, tech firms such as Amazon, and hoteliers Mandarin Oriental and IHG Hotels and Resorts.
Central to the plan are 10 "megaprojects," including half a dozen "smart cities," a regional logistics hub to be build over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah, a central highway named after Saudi Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states feature prominently in the proposal as investors—large-scale solar and desalinization plants, a US data safe haven, an "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone," and "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands" similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai.
In addition to "massive" financial gains for private US investors, the GREAT Trust lists strategic benefits for the United States that would enable it to "strengthen" its "hold in the east Mediterranean and secure US industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf."
Earlier this year, Trump said the US would "take over" Gaza, American real estate developers would "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" atop its ruins after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal exclave. The president called for the "voluntary" transfer of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of whose leaders vehemently rejected the plan.
"Voluntary emigration" is widely considered a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given Palestinians' general unwillingness to leave their homeland.
According to a May survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, nearly half of Gazans expressed a willingness to apply for Israeli assistance to relocate to other countries. However, many Gazans say they would never leave the strip, where most inhabitants are descendants of survivors of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. Some are actual Nakba survivors.
"I'm staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now," one Gazan man told the Post. "But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland."
The Post report follows a meeting last Wednesday at the White House, where Trump, senior administration officials, and invited guests including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, investor and real estate developer Jared Kushner—who is also the president's son-in-law—and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer discussed Gaza's future.
While Dermer reportedly claimed that Israel does not seek to permanently occupy Gaza, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—have said they will conquer the entire strip and keep at least large parts of it.
"We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said. "On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
The Israel Knesset also recently hosted a conference called "The Gaza Riviera–from vision to reality" where participants openly discussed the occupation and ethnic cleansing of the strip.
The publication of the GREAT Trust comes as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza City amid a growing engineered famine that has killed at least hundreds of Palestinians and is starving hundreds of thousands of more. Israel's 696-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 233,200 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures are seen as a likely undercount by experts.
Their "astonishing, powerful op-ed," said one professor, "drives home what we are losing and what's already been lost."
Nearly every living former director or acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from the past half-century took to the pages of The New York Times on Monday to jointly argue that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "is endangering every American's health."
"Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the CDC, the world's preeminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations," Drs. William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle Walensky, and Mandy Cohen highlighted.
What RFK Jr. "has done to the CDC and to our nation's public health system over the past several months—culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC director days ago—is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced," the nine former agency leaders wrote.
Known for spreading misinformation about vaccines and a series of scandals, Kennedy was a controversial figure long before President Donald Trump chose him to lead HHS—a decision that Senate Republicans affirmed in February. However, in the wake of Monarez's ouster, fresh calls for him to resign or be fired have mounted.
This is powerful. Nine former CDC leaders just came together to defend SCIENCE.Maybe it’s time we LISTEN TO THEM—not the loud voices spreading MISINFORMATION.Science saves lives. Lies cost themwww.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
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— Krutika Kuppalli, MD FIDSA (@krutikakuppalli.bsky.social) September 1, 2025 at 10:35 AM
As the ex-directors detailed:
Secretary Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence, and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he's focused on unproven "treatments" while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill-prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of US support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez—which led to the resignations of top CDC officials—adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.
Monarez was nominated by Trump, and was confirmed by Senate Republicans in late July. As the op-ed authors noted, she was forced out by RFK Jr. just weeks later, after she reportedly refused "to rubber-stamp his dangerous and unfounded vaccine recommendations or heed his demand to fire senior CDC staff members."
"These are not typical requests from a health secretary to a CDC director," they wrote. "Not even close. None of us would have agreed to the secretary's demands, and we applaud Dr. Monarez for standing up for the agency and the health of our communities."
After Monarez's exit, Trump tapped Jim O'Neill, an RFK Jr. aide and biotech investor, as the CDC's interim director. Critics including Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen's health research group, warn that "unlike Susan Monarez, O'Neill is likely to rubber-stamp dangerous vaccine recommendations from HHS Secretary Kennedy's handpicked appointees to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and obey orders to fire CDC public health experts with scientific integrity."
The agency's former directors didn't address O'Neill, but they wrote: "To those on the CDC staff who continue to perform their jobs heroically in the face of the excruciating circumstances, we offer our sincere thanks and appreciation. Their ongoing dedication is a model for all of us. But it's clear that the agency is hurting badly."
"We have a message for the rest of the nation as well: This is a time to rally to protect the health of every American," they continued. The experts called on Congress to "exercise its oversight authority over HHS," and state and local governments to "fill funding gaps where they can." They also urged philanthropy, the private sector, medical groups, and physicians to boost investments, "continue to stand up for science and truth," and support patients "with sound guidance and empathy."
Doctors, researchers, journalists, and others called their "must-read" piece "extraordinary" and "important."
"Just an astonishing, powerful op-ed that drives home what we are losing and what's already been lost," said University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman. "We are so incredibly fortunate to live with the advances [of] modern medicine and health science. Destroying and stymying it is just unforgivable."
"This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires," said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler.
Although US President Donald Trump's administration likes to boast that he puts "American workers first," several news reports published on Monday document the president's attacks on the rights of working people and labor unions.
As longtime labor reporter Steven Greenhouse explained in The Guardian, Trump throughout his second term has "taken dozens of actions that hurt workers, often by cutting their pay or making their jobs more dangerous."
Among other things, Greenhouse cited Trump's decision to halt a regulation intended to protect coal miners from lung disease, as well as his decision to strip a million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, told Greenhouse that Trump's actions amount to a "big betrayal" of his promises to look out for US workers during the 2024 presidential campaign.
"His attacks on unions are coming fast and furious," she said. "He talks a good game of being for working people, but he's doing the absolute opposite. This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires."
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, similarly told Greenhouse that Trump has been "absolutely, brazenly anti-worker," and she cited him ripping away an increase in the minimum wage for federal contractors that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden as a prime example.
"The minimum wage is incredibly popular," she said. "He just took away the minimum wage from hundreds of thousands of workers. That blew my mind."
NPR published its own Labor Day report that zeroed in on how the president is "decimating" federal employee unions by issuing March and August executive orders stripping them of the power to collectively bargain for better working conditions.
So far, nine federal agencies have canceled their union contracts as a result of the orders, which are based on a provision in federal law that gives the president the power to terminate collective bargaining at agencies that are primarily involved with national security.
The Trump administration has embraced a maximalist interpretation of this power and has demanded the end of collective bargaining at departments that aren't primarily known as national security agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Weather Service.
However, Trump's attacks on organized labor haven't completely intimidated government workers from joining unions. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the Trump administration's cuts to the National Park Service earlier this year inspired hundreds of workers at the California-based Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon national parks to unionize.
Although labor organizers had been trying unsuccessfully for years to get park workers to sign on, that changed when the Trump administration took a hatchet to parks' budgets and enacted mass layoffs.
"More than 97% of employees at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks who cast ballots voted to unionize, with results certified last week," wrote the Los Angeles Times. "More than 600 staffers—including interpretive park rangers, biologists, firefighters, and fee collectors—are now represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees."
Even so, many workers who succeed in forming unions may no longer get their grievances heard given the state of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
As documented by Timothy Noah in The New Republic, the NLRB is now "hanging by a thread" in the wake of a court ruling that declared the board's structure to be unconstitutional because it barred the president from being able to fire NLRB administrative judges at will.
"The ruling doesn't shut down the NLRB entirely because it applies only to cases in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, where the 5th Circuit has jurisdiction," Noah explained. "But Jennifer Abruzzo, who was President Joe Biden's NLRB general counsel, told me that the decision will 'open the floodgates for employers to forum-shop and seek to get injunctions' in those three states."
Noah noted that this lawsuit was brought in part by SpaceX owner and one-time Trump ally Elon Musk, and he accused the Trump NLRB of waging a "half-hearted" fight against Musk's attack on workers' rights.
Thanks to Trump and Musk's actions, Noah concluded, American oligarchs "can toast the NLRB's imminent destruction."