Lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems addressed a scathing letter on Wednesday night to former Trump election steal lawyer Sidney Powell, demanding that she publicly retract a series of false statements that the election technology supplier has said she wittingly made about its voting machines.
The baseless claims have been weaponized in conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump and his allies about voter fraud and have invited threats of violence on Dominion employees.
Dominion lawyers Thomas Clare and Megan Meier rebuked Powell in the letter for waging a campaign of “reckless disinformation” about Dominion’s machines and touting QAnon-related conspiracies about the machines at news conferences, pro-Trump rallies and on Trump-friendly conservative news networks.
Powell has also filed unsuccessful federal lawsuits seeking to overturn election results in four key swing states, Dominion’s lawyers said, making “wild, knowingly baseless and false accusations” that have “endangered Dominion’s business and the lives of its employees.”
Dominion has been a scapegoat for declarations “predicated on lies” by the President and his allies that the company’s machines switched votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden, the lawyers said.
“Although the indisputable facts all point to the conclusion that this was a free and fair election, you launched a media circus and fundraising campaign that undermined confidence in American democracy and peddled false, inherently improbably, and defamatory claims about Dominion participating in an international conspiracy to rig the election,” Clare and Meier wrote.
They added that the effort by the former federal prosecutor, who once represented Trump’s first National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in a criminal case related to the Russia investigation, had deeply damaged the company’s “hard-earned reputation.”
The letter comes after John Poulos, Dominion’s chief executive, told the State Senate Oversight Committee in Michigan on Tuesday that the company had been the victim of “a dangerous and reckless disinformation campaign aimed at sowing doubt and confusion.”
“It would be impractical to address every one of your falsehoods in this letter,” the lawyers said, demanding instead that Powell, who Trump dumped from his election gambit last month, publicly retract several of the more serious false claims she has repeated in the recent few weeks. Among them, a wild claim that suggested the company’s voting machines were made with Cuban money in Venezuela to help Hugo Chavez win elections in the country. The lawyers noted that it has no connection to Venezuela, to Chavez or to “Big Foot or the Loch Ness monster.”
Powell has also been called on to disavow false statements she has made suggesting that the company paid Georgia officials to use its machines and that the company had manipulated votes to rig the recent election.
Powell notably reserved some of her most bizarre claims for news conferences — never formally making the wild allegations in her formal court filings, the lawyers noted.
The move has been a common post-election tactic by the Trump campaign that wins approval from supporters without taking any genuine legal standing.
These idiots will likely face some serious civil liability for the things they have been saying. Business torts are real and can be very expensive, and there is no first amendment protections. It starts with tortious interference with prospective economic advantage and the list of torts gets very long.
Trump may have this issue too. A couple years ago, we learned that he told Secretary Mattis to ‘fuck Amazon into the ground’ or so some such directive on a $10B DoD contract Amazon did not get. Employers – in this case the American people – are not on the hook for the intentional torts of employees. In other words, any liabilities are Trump’s and not ours. Bezos will likely let this go – Mattis said he ignored the directive – but if he doesn’t, just defending this lawsuit would likely bankrupt Trump.
Sidney Powell’s gonna get sued for defamation, she’s gonna defend herself, and it’s going to be glorious to behold.
Why ask for a retraction? Why not sue her for defamation from the get go?
I can assure you that there are ample First Amendment protections. It’s just that Sidney Powell is a lying and/or delusional sack of shit who has long past blown by them.
Tortious interference would never work because she has no clue what deals Dominion may be attempting to get into. This is a straight-up defamation case.
I really hope so. The fact that they get away with this time and time again, is why it has become a problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center figured out how to deal with these crackpots: bankrupt them.