CHAPEL HILL — “The special counsel found no collusion by any American in the IRA [Russian] interference,” said U.S. Attorney General William Barr at a press conference for the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-anticipated report on alleged Russian collusion.
That long-awaited report is also the subject of an upcoming ICON Lecture Series taking place on April 29 on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus by Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor-turned-author.
Powell will be giving a talk entitled “Mueller Report meets the Rule of Law” that will include a look at what the report says and what the real picture is. She also says she will “explain how it differs from reality and what is missing.”
“I’ll pull a lot of pieces together for people of things that other people don’t know or don’t talk about,” Powell said of the upcoming lecture and says she will cover what comes to mind as she reads the recently released report.
Powell is no stranger to the inner workings of government and the law. She is a former assistant United States attorney who has acted as the lead counsel in over 500 federal appeals, 350 of them while she was an assistant United States Attorney and appellate section chief in the Western and Northern Districts of Texas.
“I’ve been a federal prosecutor for 10 years under nine different U.S. attorneys from both political parties,” Sidney Powell said in an interview with North State Journal, “and not a one of them would put up for two seconds with what I’ve seen these people do.”
In addition to her vast prosecutorial experience, Powell is a past president of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and the Bar Association of the Fifth Federal Circuit.
Powell is also a member of the American Law Institute and has now turned her attention to books, authoring a book titled “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.” The book digs into “true stories of strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power.”
“Weissman is the lead villain in my book, License to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice,” said Powell. “which I self-published in 2014 because I saw this corrupt cabal of prosecutors break all the rules that I was taught to follow as a young prosecutor and took very seriously.”
“All they cared about was notching in their belts with convictions. They took delight in destroying people’s lives, which is just not what a prosecutor is supposed to do at all.”
Powell, a North Carolina native who was born in Durham and raised in Raleigh, received both her undergraduate and law degrees from UNC Chapel Hill.
The ICON Lecture Series is a nonprofit, Durham-Chapel Hill-based grassroots organization that brings lecturers from all walks of life to the Triangle area on a wide range of topics from national politics to education and personal responsibility to individual freedom. ICON stands for Issues Confronting Our Nation, and the group’s website says it is “committed to free speech, diversity of thought and improving the balance and quality of the Triangle’s political conversation.”
The lecture will be given at the Event Center located on the UNC campus at 200 S Elliott Road. The start time is 7 p.m.
General admission tickets for Powell’s lecture “Mueller Report meets the Rule of Law” can be purchased in advance for around $27.00 and just over $11.00 for students and are available at eventbrite.com. Tickets can also be purchased at the door the night of the event for $30.00.
