Dominion Voting launches $1.3 billion lawsuit against former Trump attorney Sidney Powell

Dominion Voting Systems launched a $1.3 billion lawsuit against former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell on Friday, alleging defamation regarding her claims that the company was involved in a voter fraud scheme to win President-elect Joe Biden the 2020 election, Washington Post reports.

For weeks, Powell has claimed that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a scheme to rig the election for Biden and against President Donald Trump. The scheme allegedly involved a conspiracy to shift votes away from Trump towards Biden using electronic voting machines.

Dominion noted a number of other claims from Powell which the company says are false, including that the company has a history of rigging elections in favour of now-deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and that the company bribed electoral officials in Georgia.

Dominion has described the allegations as "wild" and "demonstrably false," and called Powell's campaign a "viral disinformation campaign" designed "to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump."

Dominion CEO John Poulos said in an interview that he is uninterested in settling the lawsuit and that he wants it to go to court in order to clear his company's name.

"We feel that it’s important for the entire electoral process," Poulos said. "The allegations, I know they were lobbed against us... but the impacts go so far beyond us."

Dominion also claims that Powell's allegations put the company's employees physical safety at risk, noting that many of them received threatening messages from Powell's supporters. The company also claims it was forced to spend $565,000 on security since claims of electoral fraud began mounting.

Dominion has sent cease and desist letters to a variety of individuals who have been involved in spreading claims of electoral fraud by the company including FOX News, One America News Network, Epoch Times, and Rudy Giuliani, some of whom have retracted their statements on the matter.

Thomas A. Clare, a lawyer representing Dominion in the defamation suit, said that despite the large number of people and organizations claiming electoral fraud, the company chose to target Powell first "because she's been the most prolific and in many ways has been the originator of these false statements."

The company had already sent a cease and desist letter to Powell, who took to Twitter a few days later to insist that she is "retracting nothing" while claiming that she had not read the letter.

While Powell has not yet commented on the defamation suit, the lawyer L. Lin Wood, who has worked alongside Powell, is claiming to represent her in the defamation case. He suggested that the defamation suit amounts to lawfare designed "to censor speech or try to intimidate people from telling the truth."