Dominion voting machines demands pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell retract ‘defamatory’ accusations

Attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems sent a letter to Sidney Powell, a onetime member of President Trump’s legal team, demanding she retract her claims that the voting machine company helped rig the 2020 election.

The letter, from the Alexandria, Va.-based law firm Clare Locke, warns Powell that she will expose both herself and the Trump campaign to “substantial legal risk for defamation” if she refuses to publicly recant the many unsubstantiated claims she has made about the company. 

“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,” the letter states. “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 among the most vocal and active proponents of allegations — none of which have held up in court — that the election was stolen from Trump through widespread fraud and corruption.  

Powell has claimed that Dominion used an algorithm to flip some votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. She has also claimed that Dominion paid kickbacks to GOP officials in Georgia and elsewhere to keep quiet about the scheme, among many other allegations.

The former Trump attorney has not taken those claims to court, where she would have to provide proof and where Dominion would be given a chance to refute her claims in front of a judge. 

Public officials in both parties have not found anything suspicious about Dominion’s voting machines, which produce a paper trail that can be tracked back to a person’s electronic vote. In Georgia, GOP officials oversaw a forensic analysis of the machines and conducted multiple 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.” 

The Trump campaign dissociated itself from Powell after she made the claims about Dominion at a press conference at the Republican National Committee in November, where she stood alongside Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis.

Powell did not respond to a request for comment. 

Dominion’s attorneys specialize in defamation cases and have won millions of dollars in high-profile cases for their clients. Clare Lock represented the dean at the University of Virginia who was painted in a negative light in a debunked Rolling Stone story about a rape on campus, as well as the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, who sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for putting him on a list of anti-Muslim extremists. 

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.