In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Trump and numerous allies of his spread outright lies about the role Dominion Voting Systems had in imaginary widespread fraud supposedly changing the presidential race’s outcome. Trump claimed the company deleted millions of his votes, and Rudy Giuliani claimed Smartmatic — a rival tech company that he tied to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez — actually owned Dominion. It was nonsense.
“People have been put into danger,” John Poulos, Dominion’s CEO, told Anderson Cooper. “Their families have been put into danger. Their lives have been upended, and all because of lies. It was a very clear calculation, that they knew they were lies and they were repeating them and endorsing them… My kids still are not allowed to get any package from the front door until we verify that it’s actually from a trusted sender.” The company has previously cited well over half a million dollars in security costs amid the tidal wave of threats from Trump fans, and it sounds like these costs are growing. Dominion is suing Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and others in connection to the spread of lies about the company that have led, in part, to serious threats against its staff and significant blows to its reputation. No legitimate evidence ever emerged tying Dominion to fraud, which evidence has shown is itself nonexistent.
The idea reasonable investigations aren’t already conducted — and then conducted again and again — is garbage. The evidence has never existed. “Last Friday, we had an office on lockdown,” Poulos explained to Cooper, discussing the ongoing threats. “Two days prior to that, I was on a phone call with one of our employees, who’s a mother of two, very upset and crying. It’s hard to talk about.” In the interview, which aired Sunday, Poulos said the employee had received a “very disgusting death threat in detail.” Besides also refuting some of the leading conspiracy theories about Dominion, whose machines allow voters to mark their ballots and tabulate votes, Poulos addressed the company’s litigation in his interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes on CBS.
“We told them,” Poulos said, discussing info provided to Fox outlining the truth. “We told them in real time. Others told them. Government officials told them. Partisan government officials told them. People inside the Trump administration told them. Local election officials on both sides of the aisle told them. This is not a matter of not knowing the truth. They knew the truth.” Trump is, of course, continuing to push his false claims of a stolen election. Just this year, he has pushed for action to invalidate the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin — years after Biden won there — and raised the prospect of holding a new presidential race or some authority (it’s unclear who) declaring him the winner. Once Congress is once again tasked with certifying a set of presidential election results in early 2025, whoever wins control of either chamber will become sharply relevant once more — although reforms to the process of certifying presidential results are under deliberation. Watch Poulos’s interview below:
