- Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation suit against pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, asking for $ 1.3 billion in damages.
- Powell, a former campaign attorney for President Donald Trump, defended a conspiracy theory that the electoral technology company falsified the results in the 2020 presidential election.
- The lawsuits describe several falsehoods that Powell made in his electoral processes and public statements about the election and Dominion’s nonexistent involvement in falsifying the results.
- His conspiracy theories were even more damaging because they were amplified by Trump and the right-wing media.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation suit on Friday against pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for $ 1.3 billion in damages.
For months, Powell defended a false conspiracy theory, claiming that Dominion’s electoral technology helped to falsify the results of the 2020 presidential election to “exchange” President Donald Trump’s votes for President-elect Joe Biden.
His complicated theory claimed that Dominion was secretly in league with a rival electoral technology, Smartmatic, and had links to the regime of the now late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
“Far from being created in Venezuela to rig elections for a now-deceased Venezuelan dictator, Dominion was founded in Toronto with the aim of creating a fully auditable paper-based voting system that would enable people with disabilities to vote independently on verifiable paper. banknotes, “argues the Dominion lawsuit.
Smartmatic also said it will seek legal action against electoral conspiracy theorists and media organizations that have given them a platform.
Powell was one of the faces of the Trump campaign’s legal team in November, but Trump expelled her from the team after she publicized her conspiracy theory at a news conference alongside lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. Giuliani and Ellis remained on the campaign’s legal team, even when both continued to spread falsehoods about the election and Giuliani spread many of Powell’s theories.
Despite being expelled from Trump’s “elite strike force”, Powell used his false theories as the premise of four federal lawsuits that seek to overturn the results of the 2020 elections. All of them have failed and have now resulted in motions for her to was suspended.
Dominion’s 124-page defamation suit – with nearly 2,000 pages showing – presented in federal court in Washington, DC, describes how Powell repeatedly spread lies about the company, challenging the evidence from electoral and security certification authorities and courts that they found claims without merit.
He says he reached the figure of US $ 1.3 billion adding the value of the contracts at risk because of the misinformation, punitive damages of his claim and the recovery of the cost of the litigation against it.
“These false claims caused catastrophic damage to this company. They labeled Dominion, which they voted as a company perpetrating a major fraud,” said Tom Claire, the attorney representing Dominion, at a Zoom news conference on Friday. “These claims set off a media storm that promoted these same false claims to a global audience. They made the company radioactive and destroyed the value of its thriving business and put Dominions’ multi-year contracts at risk.”
A lie has spread through a right-wing media ecosystem
The process describes how Powell used the right-wing media ecosystem to spread the theory. He says Powell’s falsehoods “in conjunction with like-minded allies and media” have led to threats against Dominion officials and election officials.
He also points out that Trump tweeted videos of Powell making his claims “to his more than 88 million followers, instantly and irreparably damaging Dominion’s reputation and business to a global audience and endangering the lives of Dominion employees.”
Claire said on Friday that this lawsuit against Powell will be the first in a series and that the company is still evaluating whether to sue Trump himself.
He told Insider that he hopes to sue other parties in parallel with Powell, rather than waiting for the case to be concluded against her.
U.S. President Donald Trump observes during a ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to fighter Dan Gable in the White House Oval Office in Washington, DC, on December 7, 2020.
Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images
In December, Claire sent document retention letters to Giuliani, as well as to right-wing media organizations, including Fox News, Newsmax and One America News, and previously told Insider that the company was evaluating defamation lawsuits against them as well.
The lawsuit also describes how Powell raised money from his media tour, publicizing his conspiracy theory through a corporate vehicle called “Defending the Republic, Inc”, also named as a party to the lawsuit.
“Powell did them intentionally in the course of his business as a media figure, author and lawyer because she could derive – and in fact did – direct and indirect financial benefits from making these false statements,” says the lawsuit.
Powell did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Real malice
In order to succeed in a defamation suit, plaintiffs like Dominion must show that defendants like Powell acted with “real malice”, rather than sincerely believing their falsehoods.
To overcome this obstacle, Claire said on Friday, the lawsuit points to the fact that Powell ignored Dominion’s retraction requirements.
“I heard that they wrote me too! I didn’t see it, but we didn’t retract anything. We have # evidence. They are # masters of fraud!” Powell tweeted on December 20, responding to a tweet from Lin Wood, a Trump voter, lawyer, and conspiracy theorist who was banned from Twitter after falsely alleging that Supreme Court chief judge John Roberts was involved in a network pedophiles and called Vice President Mike Pence to be executed.
“It is difficult to imagine better evidence of disrespect for the truth,” said Claire.
Lawyer Sidney Powell looks at lawyer L. Lin Wood as he speaks during a press conference on election results in Georgia on December 2, 2020.
Elijah Nouvelage / Reuters
Claire also said that Powell continued to promote his conspiracy theory, even when it was challenged by solid evidence, falsified court documents and misrepresented the qualifications of its sources.
“She continued to make the same discredited statements repeatedly, in the face of all the concrete evidence,” said Claire. “She hid and misrepresented who her sources really were, as well as her qualifications. She trusted sources with a history of spreading false statements and conspiracy theories.”
The lawsuit points to evidence that Powell presented in his federal lawsuit in Georgia. She said that Dominion did not have updated certification in the state. In fact, the exhibition simply cut the certification date, which was recent.
On the left, an exhibition that Sidney Powell opened in a lawsuit without approval. On the right, the authentic electoral technology approval certificate.
Dominion process
Jan Jacobowitz, a former professor of law at the University of Miami and a specialist in legal ethics, previously told Insider that Powell could be removed or face further legal sanctions if she is discovered for falsifying documents in her lawsuits. The city of Detroit, following the failure of the Powell lawsuit in Michigan, has already referred it to layoff.
The Dominion lawsuit describes the dubious sources that Powell cites in its lawsuits. One is “Spider” – Powell sometimes spelled the name as “Spyder” – who claimed to be a “military intelligence expert”. Powell removed his identity from the process’ displays, but mistakenly included his real name in the metadata. The Washington Post spoke to Merritt and found that he misrepresented his qualifications.
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at a Trump campaign press conference.
AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin
Another source, who Powell described as a “Venezuelan military officer”, was identified by the Associated Press as Leamsy Villafaña José Salazar. The Dominion lawsuit describes Salazar’s claims as false on his face.
“If Salazar is now a pure-hearted whistleblower with the best interests of American democracy in mind, why did he wait more than five years after arriving in the United States – even after Trump lost the presidential election – to tell someone that US elections were being manipulated using decades-old Venezuelan vote-reversing software[?]”says the process.
Other supporters on which Powell relied on his lawsuit, says Dominion, are “conspiracy theorists, swindlers and other unreliable facial sources as experts.” One lied about his military career. Another allegedly lied about being a doctor and used the money raised for charity for personal gain. Yet another intended to show fraud by citing a county that does not exist. And one defended anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claiming that George Soros helped give rise to Nazi Germany in the 1930s (Soros is Jewish and was born in 1930).
“Lies have been told about Dominion government officials, election workers and voting systems,” Dominion CEO John Poulos said on Friday. These lies have consequences. They have served to diminish the credibility of the elections in the United States. They subjected Dominion employees and employees to threats of harassment and death. And they have seriously damaged our company’s reputation. “