On Friday, Dominion Voting Systems
filed a $1.3 billion defamation suit against conservative lawyer Sidney Powell for her “demonstrably” false claims about the 2020 election.
The backstory. Powell, an ex-member of Trump’s legal team, famously tweeted amongst a flurry of other claims that Dominion, a supplier of voting machines, was created by the ex-Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to rig the 2020 election. Chavez died in 2013.
To quell Powell’s Twitter storm, Dominion sent her a cease and desist letter demanding she retract her “wild” claims. Instead of complying, the suit says:
“Powell doubled down, tweeting to her 1.2 million Twitter followers that she heard that ‘#Dominion’ had written to her and that, although she had not even seen Dominion’s letter yet, she was ‘retracting nothing’ because ‘[w]e have #evidence’ and ‘They are #fraud masters!’”
Now, Dominion is taking Powell to court over her “viral disinformation campaign.” As a result of Powell’s conspiracies, the
124-page lawsuit says:
- The value of Dominion’s business has been destroyed.
- Dominion will lose $200mn in profits over the next 5 years.
- Dominion employees and election officials have received death threats.
The flip side. Powell tweeted the suit “is baseless & filed to harass, intimidate, & to drain our resources as we seek the truth of Dominion’s role in this fraudulent election.”
THE TAKEAWAY
One of many. Dominion has also sent warnings of potential litigation to the White House, Fox News, Newsmax, Rudy Giuliani and others who’ve peddled claims about election fraud. Dominion CEO Jon Paulos
told Axios last week the company wouldn’t rule out suing Trump himself.
P.S. Powell was banned from Twitter this weekend.