Sidney Powell Seeks To Ditch Dominion Voting Defamation Lawsuit

Photographer: Al Drago / Bloomberg

Former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell said the defamation lawsuit filed against him by Dominion Voting Systems Inc. should be dismissed because “no reasonable person” would believe that its claims about the voting software company were “true statements of fact.”

In a motion to dismiss filed Monday in Washington, Powell argued that his claims about Dominion were “political speech” protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. His claims were clearly understood as nothing more than “legal opinions and theories,” he argued, and criticisms of his comments at one time as “inherently unlikely” illustrate his point.

“Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support the defendants’ position that reasonable persons would not accept such statements as fact, but would see them only as statements waiting to be proven by the courts through adversarial process.” , argued his lawyer.

Powell said he stands up for his claims even though they were repeatedly rejected by justices who dismissed his lawsuits seeking to reverse the election.

Dominion’s $ 1.3 billion lawsuit accuses Powell of gutting the company’s reputation by falsely claiming he conspired with Democrats and shadow foreign agents to steal the election. They did so, he claimed, by using corrupt computer code originally created for the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez to steal millions of votes from Donald Trump.

Powell, who spread the conspiracy theory at a press conference and numerous conservative media appearances, did not provide hard evidence.

If the case is thrown out, Dominion will be deprived of its stated objective of taking the case to trial, forcing Powell to present evidence showing that his claims about the company were true or that he at least had reason to believe them.

“Powell’s attempt to dismiss the case contradicts his claim that he wants to present his evidence in court,” Dominion’s attorney, Tom Clare, said in an emailed statement. “Dominion Voting Systems is eager to move the case forward and intends to hold Powell accountable.”

Powell also argued that the Washington court has no jurisdiction over her because Dominion failed to properly link her allegedly defamatory statements to the city. She asked the judge to consider transferring the case to Texas, where she lives, if her motion to dismiss the case is denied.