In a new filing in their $1.3 billion defamation case against MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, Dominion Voting Systems — a voting technology company that is the subject of conspiracy theories about the integrity of last year’s presidential election — directly connects Lindell to the ongoing so-called audit of the presidential election results in Maricopa County, Arizona. Dominion is suing Lindell over his propagation of election falsities.
That Arizona audit effort is not credible — it has even included a search for bamboo fibers among the election materials on the basis of the ludicrous theory that fraudulent ballots may have been shipped in from Asia. Lindell’s lies have helped provide the foundation for the audit debacle, Dominion observed. This observation from Dominion refutes the claim from Lindell’s side that the case should be thrown out because, as Forbes summarized it, he “isn’t alone in questioning voting machines.” The reality is, however, that other instances of conspiratorial rhetoric against Dominion closely connect to Lindell’s claims.
As Forbes summarized, Dominion argued in their new filing that “Lindell helped fuel this widespread suspicion about the election, setting the stage for Republicans in Arizona to launch an unusual and widely criticized audit of Maricopa County’s ballots this year.” Other examples of conspiracy-driven concern about the security of last year’s election “reflect the damage that Defendants helped cause,” Dominion said. Those other instances of false election-related security claims “do not retroactively provide a factual basis for Defendants to have made inherently improbable claims in the first place,” Dominion added in their new filing. Lindell doesn’t get an excuse for his past statements just because, later on, other interests ran with his same ideas and spread them even further.
Notably, Lindell and a couple other targets of defamation litigation from Dominion, including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, have not abandoned their false election claims even while facing serious lawsuits. Lindell told Forbes that he “still expects the Supreme Court to reinstate Trump as president by August at the latest,” according to the publication. There is, of course, no legitimate evidence for this idea at all. It is totally delusional.
