The motions by two lawyers who once worked on President Trump’s behalf — Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell — to sever their cases from that of the former president’s escalates the pre-trial maneuvering that could fracture District Attorney Fani Willis’s cohort of 19 defendants. 

The moves come after the two sought to begin their trials on an accelerated timetable, and it is the first request for a formal split  in what the district attorney calls a “criminal enterprise.” Ms. Willis asserts that all 19 worked criminally to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Ms. Willis argues that “severance is improper at this juncture and that all Defendants should be tried together.”

Ms. Powell tells a different story, writing that  she “appeared in no courtrooms or hearings” for Mr. Trump and has “had no contact with most of her purported conspirators and rarely agreed with those she knew or spoke with.” Ms. Powell is charged with, among other crimes, racketeering and conspiracy to commit computer theft.

In the weeks after the 2020 election, Ms. Powell was at the forefront of a group of lawyers who launched dozens of lawsuits across America, all alleging that President Biden’s victory was marred by voter fraud. She threatened to “release the Kraken” in her efforts to expose electoral misconduct. The Kraken, from Scandinavian folklore, is a sea monster of enormous size rumored to trawl the Norwegian Sea.

While Ms. Powell has advised Mr. Trump and litigated his election fraud theories in court, the nature of their relationship could soon come into greater focus. Ms. Willis portrays her as one of the former president’s camarilla, while Ms. Powell describes only a glancing relationship, one unmarked by financial entanglement. The legal and exculpatory salience of that invitation will likely be contested at trial. 

A filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against Fox — ultimately settled for $787 million — discloses that in 2020, Ms. Powell shared a memorandum titled “Election Fraud Info” with a Fox Business News host, Maria Bartiromo. The memo’s author, as yet anonymous, asserted that her insights come from “time-travel in a semi-conscious state” and that she has “had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl. I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”

Now, Ms. Willis alleges that Ms. Powell is implicated in a scheme to break into Dominion’s hardware at Coffee County, Georgia, though officials there appear to have invited her intervention. The prosecutor writes that she worked to ensure that “certain members of the conspiracy” would “possess official ballots” outside “of the polling place” where they belonged. 

The district also names as an “overt act” of the racketeering case the possibility, floated in a White House meeting held in December 2020, that Ms. Powell be appointed special counsel to investigate voter fraud. That appointment never came to pass, but has also attracted the attention of Special Counsel Jack Smith. 

Now, Ms. Powell argues that she’s been miscast. Her motion notes that she “has been practicing law for forty-five years in the highest traditions of the Bar,” having “distinguished herself at every turn.” She was once one of the youngest assistant United States attorneys in the country. She adds that she represented General Flynn against charges “completely concocted against him by a politicized FBI.”

The motion, which maintains that Ms. Powell’s “entire life and career have been built on integrity, the Rule of Law, and her love of Truth and Justice,” argues that she “went her own way following the election, and she never reached an agreement on a course of action with any indicted or unindicted co-conspirator.”

While Ms. Powell notes that she “did not plan or organize the Coffee County trip,” her strongest argument could be that, as she puts it, a “unanimous Coffee County Election Board gave permission for the forensic inspection, and nothing was stolen.”

Now comes Ms. Powell’s assertion that she can receive a fair trial only if she is “tried alone in three days at most.” Anything otherwise, she concludes, will violate her constitutional due process rights. Georgia courts have held that defendants should be tried separately when it is “necessary to achieve a fair determination of the guilt or innocence” of one of them. 

Ms. Powell seeks a separate fate from not only Mr. Trump, but also her fellow attorney, Mr. Chesebro. She writes that they “have no connection, no communications, no relationship.” She posits that it “defies human nature even to imply that an adverse spillover effect would not occur” if she is tried — and televised, a Georgian practice — with Mr. Chesebro and the others who could soon follow her search for a solo show.  

This article has been updated from the bulldog.