Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign, has been slapped with a defamation lawsuit over her accusations that voting machines were rigged in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.
Dominion Voting Systems is seeking $1.3 billion in damages for the “unprecedented harm” it says Powell brought about via her “wild” allegations. Its complaint chronicles more than three dozen of the attorney’s public statements about the company, which has headquarters in Denver and Toronto.
“[Powell] has directly accused Dominion of fraud, election rigging, bribery, and conspiracy, which are serious crimes,” the lawsuit, which can be read in full here, proclaims. “For Dominion — whose business is producing and providing voting systems for elections — there are no accusations that could do more to damage Dominion’s business or to impugn Dominion’s integrity, ethics, honesty, and financial integrity.”
Dominion CEO John Poulos told The Washington Post Friday that his company is hoping to take the case to court rather than settle.
“We feel that it’s important for the entire electoral process,” he said. “The allegations, I know they were lobbed against us . . . but the impacts go so far beyond us.”
Powell did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. In a Friday tweet, however, the former federal prosecutor blasted the suit as “baseless,” and said it had been “filed to harass, intimidate and to drain our resources as we seek the truth of [Dominion’s] role in this fraudulent election.”
“We will not be cowed in exercising our 1st Amendment rights or seeking truth,” she added.
Days after the 2020 election, Powell falsely claimed that Dominion voting machines had been rigged to weigh Biden’s votes more heavily than those for President Donald Trump in Georgia. The conservative firebrand also asserted that the company had supplied machines with a “vote flipping” algorithm for former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez prior to his 2013 death.
Though the Trump campaign appeared to distance itself from Powell over time, that didn’t stop her from continuing her efforts to have the 2020 election results overturned. In December, she appeared at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Georgia where she urged voters to boycott their state’s Jan. 5 Senate runoffs.