Lawsuits are coming.
Dominion Voting Systems, one of the targets of President Donald Trump’s groundless conspiracy theories about the election he lost, alerted Fox News, Fox’s top personalities, other conservative media outlets, radio host Rush Limbaugh and conservative lawyers who defamation litigation against them is “imminent.”
The electronic voting company this week sent 21 letters to the White House, Fox News, its hosts Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, to the media Newsmax, One America News Network, Epoch Times and others demanding that they stop making defamatory statements. Domain, and to preserve all documents they have regarding the company.
“We wrote to provide a formal warning that litigation related to these issues is imminent,” Dominion lawyers Thomas Clare and Megan Meier wrote to Fox News Media General Counsel Lily Fu Claffee in one of the letters, which were provided to CNBC.
In their letters to individual news presenters, including Bartiromo, a former CNBC employee, the lawyers demanded that they “stop and give up making defamatory claims against Dominion”, saying that they had “presented and continued to present the campaigners. disinformation against “the company.
Others who have received similar letters warning of litigation and document preservation demands include Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, lawyer L. Lin Wood, who contested the results of the Georgia presidential election, and Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly.
CNBC requested comments on the letters from its recipients.
During an interview on CNN on Thursday, Dominion’s CEO John Poulos said the company would take legal action against several people “promoting lies and amplifying those lies … on various media platforms since election day” .
“We will not neglect anyone,” said Poulos, when asked if the company would sue Trump.
Trump, since losing the national popular vote to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes, has promoted a series of false claims to argue that he won the election overwhelmingly and that the ballots for him were fraudulently suppressed, while voting for Biden were artificially added in a handful of states where the results were particularly close.
On November 12, just nine days after election day, Trump tweeted a statement that “THE DOMAIN DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES OVER THE NATIONAL.”
One of the most ardent supporters of the Dominion conspiracy theories was Sidney Powell, who last month was kicked out of the team of lawyers working for the Trump campaign to nullify Biden’s victory because his extreme claims were being widely criticized. Since last week, Powell has met Trump at least once and has visited the White House three times in connection with his efforts.
Dominion’s lawyers also sent Powell a letter warning of defamation charges.
In his interview with CNN, Poulos said Powell’s claims that his company’s voting machine features software created “under the direction” of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a bogeyman in the right-wing media, and that Dominion has links to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros are “complete lies”.
Dominion’s security director Eric Coomer sued the campaign of Trump, Giuliani, Powell and several conservative media outlets.
The Coomer lawsuit says he became the target of death threats and other harmful communications because of the defendants’ false claims made about Dominion machines.
On its website, Dominion said “misinformation” about the company poses a threat to democracy.
“Unsubstantiated claims about the integrity of the system or the accuracy of the results have been rejected by electoral authorities, subject matter experts and outsourced fact verifiers,” says the company on its website.
“Malicious and misleading false allegations about Dominion have resulted in dangerous levels of threats and harassment against the company and its employees, as well as election officials.”
Last week, another electronic voting machine company, Smartmatic, said it had issued legal notices and letters of retraction to Fox News, Newsmax and OAN “for publishing false and defamatory statements”.
“The demand letters identify dozens of factually inaccurate statements made by each of the organizations as part of a ‘disinformation campaign’ to harm Smartmatic and discredit the 2020 US election,” said the company at the time.
“Smartmatic had nothing to do with the” controversies “that certain public and private figures alleged in relation to the 2020 elections in the United States,” said the company. “Several fact-checkers have consistently unmasked these false statements with impressive consistency and regularity.”
Smartmatic said that despite false claims to the contrary, the company’s “only involvement in the United States in the 2020 elections was as a manufacturing partner, systems integrator and software developer for the Los Angeles County publicly owned voting system. “.