A letter was sent to Sidney Powell, a former member of Trump’s legal team, from Dominion Voting Systems attorneys after requesting that she withdraw her claims that the voting machine corporation helped rig the 2020 election.
The letter from Clare Locke, a law firm based in Alexandria, Va., warns Powell that if she refuses to publicly retract the numerous false allegations she has made against the company, she will expose both herself and the Trump campaign to “substantial legal risk for defamation.”
The letter states, “As a result of your false accusations, Dominion has suffered enormous harm, and its employees have been stalked, have been harassed, and have received death threats.” Furthermore, “We demand that you immediately and publicly retract your false accusations and set the record straight. If you refuse to do so and instead choose to stand by your defamatory falsehoods, that will be viewed as additional evidence of actual malice.”
Powell has been one of the most outspoken and committed supporters of the allegations, none of which took place in court, that the election was stolen from Trump by systematic fraud and corruption.
Powell says that Dominion used an algorithm to flip some votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. She claims that, among many other allegations, Dominion paid kickbacks to GOP officials in Georgia and elsewhere to keep quiet about the scheme.
These allegations were not brought to court by the former Trump attorney, where she would have to present facts and where Dominion would be offered a chance to refute her claims before a judge.
In both parties, elected officials have found nothing odd about Dominion’s voting machines, which create a paper trail that can be traced back to the electronic vote. GOP officials oversaw a forensic examination of the computers in Georgia and carried out several recounts.
Judges across the country have roundly rejected Powell’s lawsuits for containing “nothing but speculation and conjecture” from “anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections.”
After she commented about Dominion at a press conference at the Republican National Committee in November, where she was standing alongside Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign dissociated itself from Powell.
Dominion’s lawyers specialize in defamation cases and have won millions of dollars for their clients in high-profile cases. Clare Locke was the University of Virginia dean who was painted in a negative light in a debunked Rolling Stone campus rape story, as well as the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, who sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for putting him on an anti-Muslim extremist list.
The attorneys say they have “clear and convincing evidence” that Powell has acted with “actual malice,” which is an important threshold in defamation cases.
“There is clear and convincing evidence that you knowingly or recklessly disregarded that your claims about Dominion were false and made them anyway, and therefore acted with actual malice,” the attorneys wrote.
