An attorney for Dominion Voting Systems suggested over the weekend that the company may take legal action against former President Donald Trump for falsely claiming that it helped now-President Joe Biden win the 2020 election race.
Dominion attorney Stephen Shackelford made the suggestion during an interview with CNN host Brian Stelter about a defamation lawsuit the company filed last week against Fox News for pushing similar lies on its network.
“We have not ruled out any potential defendants who participated in this defamation campaign,” Schackelford said.
Trump and his supporters repeatedly claimed that Dominion had dropped votes for Trump or switched votes for him to Biden. None of the claims made against the company have held up to scrutiny, and there’s no evidence to suggest that their voting systems technology caused Trump to lose the race.
In November, just a few days after Election Day, Trump cited a news report from One America News, alleging that Dominion had deleted 2.7 million ballots. He further alleged that 221,000 votes were “switched” in Pennsylvania alone, a state that, in reality, saw Biden defeat Trump by just over 81,000 ballots.
In response, Twitter placed a disclaimer next to the tweet, alerting readers that it contained inaccurate information. But that didn’t stop the former president from continuing to spread false information about Dominion. Indeed, Trump continued to tweet false allegations against the company through December and into early January.
Trump also continued to peddle lies about election interference after losing his social media accounts, repeating them in a speech during the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.
“How the hell is it possible that we lost? It’s not possible. I got more votes,” Trump wrongly claimed, falsely adding that there were “votes and ballots they threw out.”
Dominion Voting Systems has already filed lawsuits against a number of other individuals and entities that made similar statements against the company, including toward his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and against Fox News. In the latter’s case, Dominion accused Fox of engaging in “reckless propagation of these enormous falsehoods in order to profit off these lies.”
“Fox wanted to continue to protect its broadcast ratings, catering to an audience deeply loyal to President Trump,” the lawsuit alleged.
Dominion has also sued Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell, claiming that she caused financial harm to the company through her statements made in lawsuits and personal media appearances. Powell’s defense team has employed a novel counterargument against those claims, however, suggesting that she shouldn’t have been taken seriously.
“Reasonable people would not accept such statements [made by Powell] as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process,” Powell’s lawyers asserted.
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