We knew Sidney Powell was in trouble when Tucker Carlson demanded proof of the election fraud she alleged and she wouldn’t offer it.

That was on November 19, 2020. “We asked the Trump campaign attorney for proof of her bombshell claims,” Carlson said. “She gave us nothing.” A few days earlier, he had said in later-revealed text messages, “Sidney Powell is lying.”

Powell had made numerous appearances on Fox and elsewhere after the 2020 election, promising to “release the kraken” of evidence that the presidential election had been stolen — that Donald Trump had actually prevailed over Joe Biden.

Among other things, in Carlson’s words in 2020, “Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story: This election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software in order to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.” According to Powell, the software “was designed to rig elections.”

Tucker wanted evidence because he, like millions more of us, was on Trump’s side and really didn’t want Biden to be president.

“I never say anything I can’t prove,” Powell insisted. But Carlson said, “She never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests.” In fact, “She got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

A few days later, Team Trump separated from Powell. Carlson is also now gone from Fox, which also settled a massive defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems over claims like Powell’s.

Powell still faces a defamation suit from Dominion. But she took a plea deal in Georgia yesterday, pleading guilty to six misdemeanor counts in exchange for six years of probation, $10,000 in restitution and fines, a public letter of apology to the citizens of Georgia, and truthful testimony in the trials of her co-defendants. She was one of 19 people, including Trump, indicted in the Peach State by overzealous partisan hack and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in August. Willis says Team Trump tried to overturn election results in Georgia, which Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes.

So, why did Powell cop a plea? Perhaps because she didn’t have much of a choice. Faced with seven felonies, Powell could have lost her law license and spent years behind bars for even one guilty verdict. She couldn’t risk that, even if it was unlikely Willis would be able to prove her case in court. Other than a charge for illegally accessing voting equipment in Coffee County, Powell’s guilty pleas weren’t for Willis’s charges — and notably not the RICO charge on which the whole thing hinges.

Legal analyst Margot Cleveland argues that “Willis basically extorted a guilty plea from Powell.” She explains, “That the Fulton County prosecutor settled for these misdemeanor charges when Powell faced seven major felony counts — including an expansive RICO conspiracy count — confirms the criminal justice system was weaponized to get Trump.”

The Wall Street Journal says Willis’s effort “to pit defendants against each other” is “a hallmark of racketeering, or RICO, cases.” Of course, it is preposterous that Willis is using RICO to criminalize a political campaign’s efforts through every legal avenue to win an election.

It’s so preposterous that the plea deal signals that Willis’s case “is a dud,” says former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. “If these were serious prosecutions, we would not be seeing probation sentences,” he explains. “If Willis truly believed in her ballyhooed RICO charge … she’d induce her cooperators to plead guilty to the RICO charge and explain, in the plea allocution, what they did, particularly in conjunction with Donald Trump, that makes them guilty. Willis is not doing that.”

We’ve argued basically two things all along:

First, Trump and his team made outlandish claims they could never prove, thus missing the real threat to election integrity — bulk-mail ballots. Worse, they have undermined the credibility of any conservative who legitimately questions election processes, as the Leftmedia convinces Americans to lump all of it together under “election denial.”

Second, Trump’s election challenges were all via legal avenues, and Democrats have grossly overreached in their persecution of Trump and his cohorts. They’ve done so out of both Trump Derangement Syndrome and a desire to elevate him to become the GOP nominee again in 2024, believing they can beat him yet again. With four indictments on 91 counts so far, they are making a mockery of justice in the name of “saving democracy.”

Unfortunately, the Democrats’ clown show still presents a real problem for Republicans in future election cycles.