Pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell is using the excuse to defend herself against a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from a voting machine company.
Sidney Powell on Monday filed her defense against a $1.3 billion lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, saying "no reasonable person" would have believed her lies about the company's voting machines and thus the suit should be dismissed.
The $1.3 billion lawsuit is one of two Powell is facing for her baseless claims that voting machines used in the 2020 election were rigged against Donald Trump. There was never any proof of her wild claims.
The federal government has said the 2020 election was the "most secure in American history," and last week, the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security released a joint report specifically debunking Powell's claims.
In defending Powell against the suit, her defense attorneys admitted that her claims were so crazy that "reasonable people" would not believe them.
The lawyers wrote:
Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as 'wild accusations' and 'outlandish claims.' They are repeatedly labelled 'inherently improbable' and even 'impossible.' Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants' position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.
Powell made her claims that Dominion voting machines were rigged multiple times.
She first made the claim at a press conference with Trump's legal team at the Republican National Committee in November — in which Powell and other Trump lawyers like Rudy Giuliani spouted a torrent of lies about voter fraud.
Powell also filed multiple lawsuits in states President Joe Biden won that made the baseless argument that voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden, and thus Trump should be declared the winner. Every single one of those lawsuits has now been thrown out, and are among the dozens of court losses Trump and his allies suffered in their failed attempt to steal the 2020 election.
While Powell claims that "reasonable" people wouldn't believe her lies, many people appeared to believe her. Trump himself made the claim that Dominion voting machines deleted votes. And BuzzFeed News reporter Zoe Tillman reported that insurrectionists arrested for attacking the Capitol often echoed Powell's lies about voting machines.
Powell's attempt to get the court to throw out the lawsuit comes as she faces numerous woes surrounding her effort to overturn the election.
Three of Michigan's top officials — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson — filed a motion in federal court to get Powell disbarred. Michigan was one of the states where Powell filed a lawsuit alleging voting machine fraud — a suit that was thrown out by a federal judge, who accused Powell of trying to diminish "people's faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government."
"The 2020 general election was the most secure in our nation’s history, and these lawyers abused their authority by filing meritless, frivolous lawsuits for the sole purpose of undermining public faith in the election," Benson said in a statement in February, referencing Powell and three other lawyers who also filed lawsuits seeking to get the 2020 election overturned. "They must be held accountable for this unprecedented attack on our democracy and prevented from replicating such harm in the future."
Meanwhile, the city of Detroit also asked a federal judge to bar Powell from practicing law in the Eastern District of Michigan.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
