'I'm crazy': How an email to Sidney Powell from a 'ghost' pushed Fox News' 2020 election lies: report

10 March 2023

'I'm going to stop this interview': Sidney Powell gets spooked by a reporter's brutal grilling

An "unhinged" email sent to former Trump attorney Sidney Powell has become the focus in Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, The Daily Beast reports.

Justin Baraganoa, reporter at The Daily Beast, tweeted screenshots of the email, saying, "Here's the batsh*t email sent to Sidney Powell that she forwarded to Maria Bartiromo as proof that Dominion voting machines were flipping votes. The writer talks about being 'internally decapitated' and how 'The Wind tells me I'm a ghost.'"

According to The Daily Beast, less than a week after the 2020 election, and "hours after" President Joe Biden was declared winner,"cactus artist," Marlene Bourne, sent Powell, Fox host Lou Dobbs, and conservative activist Tom Fitton an email laying out the case against Dominion as she saw it."

Bourne asserted, "Dominion machines used software to convert 3 percent of all votes for Donald Trump into votes for Biden," and because she "had seen Powell defending Trump online," she also "thought the lawyer would be the perfect person for her theories."

Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News host, indicated "in a deposition" the message was absurd.

"It's kooky, absolutely," she said, also referring to the email as "nonsense" that is "inherently unreliable."

The Daily Beast reports:

But the ideas' origin is even more "kooky" than Bartiromo might realize. In an interview with The Daily Beast, the woman behind that email—a Minnesota artist named Marlene Bourne—said that she based her now nationally prominent ideas about election fraud on a wide variety of sources, including hidden messages she detects in films, song lyrics she hears on the radio, and overheard conversations she hears while in line at the supermarket checkout.

Per The Daily Beast, Bourne said in the email she was "convinced that late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered while being hunted for sport," leading Dominion wondering "how Fox could allow obviously fake claims from a total stranger with no credentials to make it on the air."

She wrote, "Justice Scalia wasn't accidentally shot during a hunting trip. He was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp. A club for members of the Mega-Group, during a weeklong human hunting expedition. NEVER accept an invitation to be a guest at that camp. Ever."

Furthermore, per The Daily Beast, Bourne drew her conclusion "from watching movies and television."

During her interview, she rhetorically asked, "What's one way to get rid of a Supreme Court justice in order to get the kind of people that you want on it?" She answered, "Hunting."

She also said, "Yeah, I'm crazy. Crazy like a fox."

Still, although Bourne suggested in the email her theories were "pretty wackadoodle," Powell "ignored the many red flags the email contained about Bourne's credibility and forwarded it to Bartiromo."

The Daily Beast reports:

Bourne said she has never met Powell, or communicated with her beyond that one email. She doesn't even watch Fox News, because she considers the network and all other major media outlets to be "psyops"—short for psychological operations carried out by nefarious forces as part of what she called a "mass global unconventional warfare" plot to divide Americans.

Fox News executive David Clark, who supervises Bartiromo's show, said in a deposition last year for the Dominion case he "agreed that the segment should not have run if it was based only on Bourne's email."

"I will concede that this e-mail is crazy," Clark said.

The Daily Beast's full report is available at this link.

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