Dominion Voting Systems — a voting and election management machine company that was a central subject of pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election — is apparently preparing for more defamation litigation, according to its CEO John Poulos. The company has already filed $1.3 billion defamation lawsuits against attorney Sidney Powell, prominent Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and Poulos said that the Lindell lawsuit, which emerged most recently, is “definitely not the last lawsuit.”
Poulos said that Dominion is “not ruling anybody out” after a CNBC host asked if they planned to sue Fox News, which provided a platform for the conspiracy theories. Presumably, “not ruling anybody out” means that Dominion has considered suing ex-President Trump as well. Poulos said that it’s “difficult to put a hard number to it, but the reputational damage alone has been devastating to us,” adding that the “larger point” of the lawsuits “really is to get the facts on the table in front of a court of law, where evidence is properly judged.”
In short, Giuliani, Lindell and others claimed that Dominion voting machines were manipulated to change the documented outcome of the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden. There is no meaningful evidence for this claim, and no court anywhere in the country ever even partially accepted the idea, but Giuliani and the other targets of this defamation litigation have refused to recant their unhinged allegations. Before Biden’s inauguration, Giuliani explicitly pushed the idea that a centrally planned conspiracy to rig the election for Biden unfolded, but he failed to ever even meaningfully map out this imagined conspiracy. Who was in charge? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Space aliens?
In response to defamation lawsuits from Dominion, Giuliani and Lindell have both separately insisted that they welcome the litigation because they imagine that it will give them an opportunity to finally prove their claims. Providing more of a look at the actual reality of the situation, the New York Daily News reported this week that Giuliani spent about a week evading the people trying to formally serve him with the Dominion lawsuit. At one point, he apparently slammed his car door in a process server’s face and refused to open it back up. (The server got the documents jammed between the door and doorframe, but Giuliani’s driver and doorman removed them, and Giuliani shut the door.) Eventually, a Giuliani assistant accepted the lawsuit.
Rudy Giuliani spent a week dodging service of a $1.3 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems after publicly declaring he was ready for the legal fight, a source told the Daily News. https://t.co/eDFBLYL80Y
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 23, 2021
