On Friday, Dominion Voting Systems (DVS) brought a $1.3 billion defamation suit against lawyer Sidney Powell for claiming there was rampant fraud in the 2020 election. Since the election, Sidney Powell has filed multiple lawsuits. Her website, Defending the Republic, documents the lawsuits and evidence she and her small team have investigated. It lays out the evidence of fraud and foreign interference in the presidential election, "especially but not exclusively through the Dominion voting machines." UncoverDC wrote a deep dive into the evidence revealed in her lawsuit in the state of Michigan in early December. Her efforts are separate from those of President Trump's team of lawyers.
On Friday, Powell said that Dominion's lawsuit against her is "baseless & filed to harass, intimidate, & to drain our resources as we seek the truth of Dominion Voting Systems’ role in this fraudulent election. We will not be cowed in exercising our 1st Amendment rights or seeking truth."
In December, John Poulos, CEO of Dominion, warned Sidney Powell that the company would bring lawsuits against anyone who sought to defame it. The company filed a lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court in Washington. The lawsuit states that Powell, "acting in concert with allies and media outlets determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election—caused unprecedented harm" when she claimed that "Dominion was created in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chávez, and that Dominion bribed Georgia officials for a no-bid contract." Dominion says her claims are "demonstrably false" and categorically denies that it was founded to rig elections. Others, including Trump campaign lawyer, Rudy Giuliani have also received letters from Dominion asking them to stop making false accusations.
The lawsuit also says that Powell has repeatedly "published statements with actual malice," either knowing they were false or "misrepresenting, and cherry-picking evidence to support her false accusations." The company alleges that she is doing this "all in furtherance of her plan to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump for benefits she expected to receive as a result of that association." The lawsuit appears to be a substantive refutation of her claims.
The 2020 election has been hotly debated both in the public forum and in six swing states' legislatures due to alleged election fraud. Powell and others filed multiple lawsuits and have mostly been dismissed without an evidentiary hearing, including two that were tossed by the Supreme Court without hearing the evidence. On Friday, Dominion issued a statement on Twitter, saying that the defamation suit is "an important step for the company, and the U.S. electoral process as a whole." Congress certified the electoral college votes sent by those states despite the growing evidence of fraud as hundreds of thousands of Americans assembled on the steps of the Capitol to raise their voices in opposition to certification before the evidence was fully investigated and heard.
