As she asked the U.S. Supreme Court this month to overturn President Trump’s election loss, the attorney Sidney Powell cited testimony from a secret witness presented as a former intelligence contractor with insights on a foreign conspiracy to subvert democracy.
Powell told courts that the witness is an expert who could show that overseas corporations helped shift votes to President-elect Joe Biden. The witness’s identity must be concealed from the public, Powell has said, to protect her “reputation, professional career and personal safety.”
The Washington Post identified the witness by determining that portions of her affidavit match, sometimes verbatim, a
blog post that the pro-Trump podcaster Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman published in November 2019. In an interview, Maras-Lindeman confirmed that she wrote the affidavit and said she viewed it as her contribution to a fight against the theft of the election.
“This is everybody’s duty,” she said. “It’s just not fair.”
In a recent civil fraud case, attorneys for the state of North Dakota said that Maras-Lindeman falsely claimed to be a medical doctor and to have both a PhD and an MBA. They said she used multiple aliases and social security numbers and created exaggerated online résumés as part of what they called “a persistent effort . . . to deceive others.”
Powell’s reliance on Maras-Lindeman’s testimony may raise further questions about her judgment and the strength of her arguments at a time when she is becoming an increasingly influential adviser to the president. Trump’s legal team distanced itself from Powell last month after she falsely claimed Republican state officials took bribes to rig the election. But she has visited the White House three times in the past week, once to participate in an Oval Office meeting. Trump has weighed naming Powell a special counsel to investigate the election, according to previous reports.
Maras-Lindeman, 42, served in the Navy for less than a year more than two decades ago and has said she worked later as a government contractor and part-time interpreter. She has identified herself as a “trained cryptolinguist.”
Thompson said in an interview that the case was a “vindictive exercise” and was excessive given the relatively small amounts of money in question. “They took a missile to kill a fly,” he said.
In an interview, Stenehjem — who signed a brief this month asking the Supreme Court to take up a case that sought to overturn the election — dismissed the claim that his investigation was politically motivated and said that anyone working with Maras-Lindeman should “back away” from her.
In a text message, Powell did not directly address questions about Maras-Lindeman’s fraud case and credentials. “I don’t have the same information you do,” she wrote to The Post.
Powell’s lawsuits — litigation she has referred to as “the kraken,” after a Scandinavian mythological sea monster — rely in key respects on a handful of anonymous expert witnesses. Among them is a purported military intelligence expert identified in court filings as “Spyder.”
The Post reported this month that the witness is an I.T. consultant named Joshua Merritt who has never worked in military intelligence. Rather, Merritt spent the bulk of his decade in the Army as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic.
Like Merritt, Maras-Lindeman told The Post she had never spoken directly to Powell or anyone working on her legal team. She said she distributed the affidavit widely to like-minded people and was unaware it had come to Powell’s attention until it appeared as an exhibit in one of her cases.
Maras-Lindeman’s 37-page
affidavit outlines a purported conspiracy by the Canadian company Dominion Voting Systems, which sells voting machines used in some states, and Scytl, a Spain-based firm that provides election software. She claims that votes cast on Dominion machines in key states were hacked as they passed through Scytl tallying systems and rigged in favor of Biden.
“The vote is not safe using these machines not only because of the method used for ballot ‘cleansing’ to maintain anonymity but the EXPOSURE to foreign interference and possible domestic bad actors,” she writes in the affidavit.
Maras-Lindeman told her listeners on Dec. 7 that she was speaking from “the belly of the beast” and that a group of Trump loyalists was working to take action against those who had stolen the president’s victory.
“There are really good people — patriots — gathered, working hard to ensure that they not only get to the bottom of what happened during this election . . . but they’re also seeking to prosecute,” she said.
Maras-Lindeman spent time at Trump’s hotel in downtown Washington and interviewed Patrick Byrne, the millionaire Overstock.com founder and Trump backer
who has said he is funding a team of “cybersleuths” to scrutinize the election. Byrne and Maras-Lindeman told The Post he is not funding her.
In past episodes, Maras-Lindeman has discussed conspiracy theories, including one that baselessly accused high-ranking Democrats of human trafficking centered at a D.C. pizzeria. In an episode last year, she said, “What we realize is that this Pizzagate stuff, this satanic constant abuse of children is an actual real thing.”
Maras-Lindeman, who is of Greek heritage, joined the Navy in December 1996 and spent eight months training in Illinois and Florida as an airman recruit before departing the service in August 1997, according to a Navy record.
In their civil case, North Dakota state attorneys said that Maras-Lindeman created
a profile on Together We Served, an online veteran community, that incorrectly depicted an extensive military career.
She claimed in Weaver’s
documentary that, as an intelligence contractor, she carried out a
notorious 2008 intrusion into the State Department’s passport records on several presidential candidates. In a separate podcast interview, she said that she retrieved the records on direct orders from John O. Brennan, who then led a private security firm implicated in the incident and was later CIA director. “I went and got them,” she said. “He told me to go get them.”
She took a voluntary job teaching Greek at Agia Sophia Academy, a private Greek Orthodox school in Beaverton. Her
archived biography on the school’s website used the title “Dr.” and said she had a PhD. Attorneys for North Dakota later said in a court filing in the fraud case that Maras-Lindeman “is not a doctor and does not possess a PhD from any institution.”
The school’s principal, Christina Blankenstein, said in an email that the school could not vouch for Maras-Lindeman’s professional record because her position was unpaid. Maras-Lindeman worked at the school for between a year and two years, Blankenstein said.
In the interview, Maras-Lindeman said the school must have misunderstood paperwork she gave them saying that she was a PhD candidate.
After she moved to North Dakota, Maras-Lindeman asserted in series of small claims court cases that she was a pediatric oncologist, attorneys for North Dakota said in a court filing. As recently as November 2017, a
website for a purported cancer research organization named “ML Laboratories” referred to her as “Dr. Tore Maras-Lindeman” and said she was its founder.
Maras-Lindeman also used an email address and Twitter handle identifying herself as “Dr. Lindeman.” She told The Post she reserved the accounts so they would be ready for her when she earned a doctoral degree.