No wonder Sidney Powell flipped

I remember the precise moment, back in August, when I decided that Sidney Powell would likely be the first big name to flip in the Fulton County criminal probe. It was when her former close ally Rudy Giuliani tried to set up his own criminal defense strategy by calling Powell a “crackpot.”

At the time, I wrote this: “when Powell sees that Giuliani is trying to scapegoat her for the whole thing, will this make her more likely to try to cut a deal against Giuliani?” It’s taken a couple months, but the answer has turned out to be a resounding yes. Powell did in fact cut a deal yesterday against Giuliani, Donald Trump, and the entire gang.

The kicker is that there was no reason for Giuliani to have said this back in August. If he and Trump were planning to go into trial and argue that Sidney Powell was the driving force behind the whole criminal conspiracy, the last thing they should have done was announce it in advance. You’d keep that kind of thing close to the vest for as long as possible, so that Powell wouldn’t have known she was going to be scapegoated, and thus wouldn’t be motivated to flip first.

But Rudy is at a stage of dementia where he can’t stop running his mouth about his own secret plans, so of course he spilled the beans about how they were all going to try to pin it on Sidney Powell. Not long after Rudy’s “crackpot” remark, Powell filed for a speedy trial. She apparently wanted to get an answer very quickly on whether she was going to be able to get the charges dismissed on technicalities, and once the judge dismissed the last of those on Wednesday, she cut a deal the next day.

Given that Rudy Giuliani’s mouth appears to have motivated Sidney Powell to flip, and that her testimony will increase the already very high odds that the rest of the Fulton County defendants will be convicted, Rudy Giuliani may have literally talked his way into prison. These people are complete idiots. And now Rudy has little option but to cut a deal of his own. Of course he’d get a less lenient deal than Powell, because he convinced Powell to flip first and take the best deal off the table.