CNN has revealed footage from depositions that former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell sat for as part of a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer, and the videos provide a troubling look at the obviously shaky foundation of the lies from the former president and his allies about the integrity of last year’s election. Trump, Giuliani, and others have consistently claimed that the election was somehow rigged for Biden, and they’ve alleged that voting technology companies including Dominion were in on it. In the deposition footage, Giuliani openly derided the idea that he had any responsibility to double-check the claims he was making.
As he put it at one point, summarizing the claims:
‘We had a report that the heads of Dominion and Smartmatic, somewhere in the mid-teens, 20… 13, 14, whatever, went down to Venezuela for a get-to-know meeting with Maduro so they could demonstrate to Maduro the kind of vote fixing they did for [Hugo] Chavez.’
Dominion Voting Systems has never operated in Venezuela, and Smartmatic (another voting technology company) operated in one county — and one county alone — in the 2020 presidential election cycle. Eventually, though, Giuliani got to the gist of the problem, explaining how he refused to even “investigate every piece of evidence” that he received — although that didn’t stop him from spreading the so-called evidence around anyway! As he put it during the deposition:
‘Sometimes I go and look myself online when stuff comes up. This time, I didn’t have the time do it…. It’s not my job in a fast-moving case to go out and investigate every piece of evidence that’s given to me. Otherwise, you’re never going to write a story. You’ll never come to a conclusion.’
As for Powell, she made a similar argument in her own deposition. Asked at one point why she didn’t put out a statement correcting her previous false claim that she had a certain recording, she said that such “didn’t seem to be the material part of the inquiry.” In other words, she was evidently fine with falsehoods getting out there. Powell and Giuliani have both faced professional consequences for their misconduct — Giuliani has been suspended from practicing law in New York and Washington, D.C., while Powell has been sanctioned by a Michigan federal judge and referred for further disciplinary proceedings. Check out coverage from CNN of their depositions below:
