White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani were both told by a law firm representing the election vendor Dominion to preserve documents related to the company.
The letters, which were first reported Wednesday by CNN, request that a wide variety of records be retained. Giuliani was warned in the letter that litigation was “imminent.”
Dominion has been a target of Trump’s and his supporters’ most absurd allegations about the election being stolen. Already, one of the company’s employees has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign and some of its allies.
Dominion is being represented by Clare Locke, a Virginia-based law firm that is a heavy hitter in the defamation law space. The firm previously warned Sidney Powell — another lawyer advising Trump on his efforts to overturn the election — that she was exposed to “substantial legal risk for defamation” if she did not retract her claims about the company.
Powell has laid out an elaborate and over-the-top false theory — involving communist infiltrators and the late Hugo Chavez — about Dominion technology being rigged so that Trump would lose the election. She is among those being sued for defamation by the Dominion official.
The new letter to Giuliani referenced the firm’s warning to Powell and others.
“Because you have been, and continue to be, an architect and driver of the ongoing
misinformation campaign against Dominion, we write to you now to (1) demand that you cease and desist making defamatory claims against Dominion and (2) ensure that there is no confusion about your obligation to preserve and retain all documents relating to Dominion and your smear campaign against the company,” the letter said.
It asked Giuliani to preserve any records documenting his involvement in the lawsuits that pushed the conspiracy theories about Dominion, as well as any documents related to his communications to the media about the allegations.
Cipollone, meanwhile, was told to preserve all records documenting any White House communications about the Dominion claims, including White House communications with Giuliani, Powell and other Trump allies pushing the theories.
Read the letters below:
The Trump Era started with embarrassing kerfuffles and it will go out the same way. Good. Riddance.
Are you happy now, Ms. Sarandon?
This is what you do when you’re about to sue the living shit out of corrupt people. It will allow them to be accused of spoliation of the evidence. When that happens and it is clear that they have destroyed documents, it no longer matters what the documents said. The jury is allowed to draw the negative inference from their destruction that whatever was in the documents was inculpating.
Sarandon was also a Ralph Nader National Chair back when he gave us George W. Bush - the gateway to Trumpism.
This has the additional beauty of coming from a plaintiff who isn’t merely butt-hurt, but can demonstrate substantial, bankrupt-your-sorry-asses damages.
Finally, good attorneys are getting jobs, going after the bad attorneys.