JUST GIVING THE DEPLORABLES WHAT THEY WANT:

A day after major news organizations declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential race, a Sunday-morning guest on Fox News was holding forth on exotic and baseless claims of election fraud -- allegedly deceased voters, ballots supposedly lacking an option to vote for Donald Trump, an "affidavit" from a postal worker claiming to have postdated mail-in ballots -- when host Maria Bartiromo pressed for more details.

"Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software," Bartiromo said on the Nov. 8, 2020, broadcast. "I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that."

The guest was Sidney Powell, a Texas-based lawyer who would soon be ambiguously connected to the Trump legal team mustered to challenge the election results. She stared stiffly into the lights of a satellite TV studio but answered without hesitation.

"That's putting it mildly," Powell replied. "The computer glitches could not and should not have happened at all. That's where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist."

It was the first of a dozen appearances Powell would make on Fox programs over the next month in which she helped inject far-fetched and debunked claims of widespread fraud into the mainstream -- and which are now at the heart of Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, court documents show.

These appearances helped elevate a once-obscure lawyer to a marquee player in Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election -- and helped keep her claims of fraud on the forefront for millions of loyal Fox viewers, including Trump himself. Powell would continue to appear on Fox for weeks after Dominion protested that it had been unfairly smeared, and as Fox News executives privately agonized that these on-air falsehoods created a problem for the network, according to newly released internal communications and testimony.

She would even appear on Fox programs after a Fox Corp. senior vice president said he had privately begged the White House to disavow Powell.

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