The voting machine company Dominion sued pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation Friday over Powell’s smear campaign against Dominion, in which she spent weeks accusing the company of being at the center of a voter fraud scheme to steal Donald Trump’s second term.
Dominion wants $1.3 billion in compensatory and punitive damages from Powell, who did not respond to TPM’s request for comment. Dominion also included Powell’s fundraising organization, Defending The Republic, as a defendant in the 124-page complaint.
The voting machine manufacturer has publicly mulled legal action against others who spread conspiracy theories about its machines “flipping,” “injecting” or otherwise “fractionalizing” votes to benefit Joe Biden.
The company has notified the White House, Rudy Giuliani and others to preserve documents, and warned various media outlets of “imminent” legal action, leading to a bizarre Newsmax segment that contradicted weeks of conspiratorial coverage.
But Powell was the spokesperson for the Dominion theories. Taking the stage as a then-lawyer for the President’s campaign in November, she rolled out her narrative of the company’s super secret lineage as a Communist election-spoiler that would subvert American democracy as Trumpworld knew it.
Dominion sent Powell a letter the following month, after the Trump team had dumped her, demanding she retract the “lies.” She did not.
Instead, Powell pursued a media blitz and a series of “sham” lawsuits, Dominion said, which ultimately were laughed out of court.
The Dominion suit emphasized Powell’s role in undermining faith in the democratic process.
Referring to claims from an unnamed purported former Venezuelan military officer cited several times by Powell, the suit noted that “there are serious reasons to doubt the outlandish claims of someone who worked for a dictatorship with an interest in undermining confidence in American democracy.”
The lengthy suit didn’t leave anything out, going through the shoddy work and outrageous claims made by several witnesses — referred to as “conspiracy theorists, con artists, and other facially unreliable sources” — upon whom Powell relied to fundraise and attain right-wing fame.
The bogus claims about rigged machines led to not only financial harm but also a wave of threats from Trump supporters convinced that the election had been stolen, Dominion alleged.
“You’re all fucking dead, You’re all fucking dead,” one person allegedly said in a voicemail left for Dominion customer support, one of many examples cited in the suit. “We’re bringing back the firing squad and you fuckers are all dead, everybody involved up against the wall you motherfuckers.”
The company has spent more than $565,000 on private security “for the protection of its people,” Dominion said.
Citing the endless TV hits Powell did on outlets like Newsmax, One America News Network and elsewhere, Dominion noted that Powell simply disregarded their attempts to get her to stop spreading falsehoods about the company.
“Powell,” the company said, “remained unapologetic.”
