Dominion sues former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Dominion Voting Systems is suing former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation in her efforts to help the president overturn the 2020 election results.

The voting machine company says Powell falsely claimed it had rigged the 2020 U.S. presidential election in favor of Joe Biden, as well as elections in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez. The suit also denounced accusations from Powell that Dominion bribed Georgia officials for a no-bid contract.

The company wants $1.3 billion in damages.

Powell was previously sued by a Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, according to NPR. Defendants in that lawsuit also included several Trump campaign surrogates and media outlets Newsmax and One America News Network. Coomer said he’d received death threats, harassment, and “untold damage to his reputation as a national expert on voting systems.” He left his home a week after the election for an undisclosed location.

Days before it was sued, Newsmax published a statement to "clarify its news coverage and note it has not reported as true certain claims made about these companies." Among other things, the outlet said it found "no evidence" of a business association between Dominion and Smartmatic, another election technology company Powell had accused of rigging elections, according to Townhall.

The new 124-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia says that Powell’s allegations have damaged the company’s reputation and resale value. It also claims that Powell aimed “to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump.”

The lawsuit denounced Powell for claiming that Dominion’s founder “admits he can change a million votes, no problem at all.” The lawsuit says Powell never produced a recording of him saying as much because “it doesn’t exist.” Powell made that comment during a Newsmax interview, according to the American Spectator. (A link on the Spectator’s website directing viewers to Newsmax says the video is unavailable.)

The lawsuit also says the election audits in Georgia “disprove Powell’s vote manipulation claims against Dominion,” since the audits confirmed the original vote count.

The lawsuit also alleges Powell produced a “doctored certificate” from the Georgia Secretary of State to support her claim that Dominion was paying kickbacks to them and their families in exchange for a no-bid contract. According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Georgia received three bids from voting machine companies. Dominion won the bid largely because it offered a lower price, the outlet reported. A Secretary of State press release confirms that it was a “competitive selection process.”

Dominion sent Powell a letter on Dec. 16 demanding that she retract her accusations against the company and warning that “defamatory falsehoods are actionable in court.”

Afterward, the lawsuit notes, Powell tweeted to her 1.2 million Twitter followers that she was “retracting nothing,” saying “We have #evidence” and “They are #fraud masters!”

Dominion CEO John Poulos said the lawsuit’s aim is to lay out all the facts about what happened during the 2020 election, according to the Washington Post. He said he wants the case to go to trial instead of settlement.

“We feel that it’s important for the entire electoral process,” he told the Post. “The allegations, I know they were lobbed against us … but the impacts go so far beyond us.”

The company has spent over $565,000 on personnel protection since the election, due to harassment and death threats against company employees, according to The Post.

Powell did not respond to requests for comment.

Source: https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/dominion-sues-former-trump-lawyer-sidney-powell-for-defamation