New court documents reveal that the Trump campaign knew that many of their lawyers’ most outlandish claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were baseless, but they continued to assert them in public anyway.
Less than two weeks after the election, the Trump campaign’s deputy director of communications, Zach Parkinson, asked Trump campaign staffers to investigate a series of claims about Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machines company, and Smartmatic, an elections software company. Trump allies, including lawyer Sidney Powell, had claimed Dominion and Smartmatic conspired with the financier George Soros and the government of Venezuela to steal the election from Trump. Powell also asserted, without evidence, that Dominion had connections to antifa, the left-wing activist group.
The staffers put together a memo debunking many of Powell’s most egregious assertions. They found that Dominion had no connection to Soros, Venezuela, or antifa. They also noted that Dominion did not use voting technology from Smartmatic in the 2020 election, a fact that conflicted with previous statements from Powell.
The memo was part of court documents filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign by Eric Coomer, a former Dominion employee.
A right-wing podcaster alleged that Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, hacked his company’s computer system to ensure a Trump defeat. That allegation was amplified by Powell and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Coomer later sued them.
If Coomer’s lawyers could prove that Powell and Giuliani saw the memo, it could prove that they willfully and knowingly engaged in defamation.
The New York Times reports:
As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.
“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Coomer “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”
The Times adds:
Even recently, the new court documents say, former Trump campaign officials have continued to cling to the baseless notion that the election was marred by fraud.
When lawyers for Mr. Coomer asked Sean Dollman, a representative of the Trump campaign, in a deposition if the campaign still believed that the election was fraudulent, he answered, “Yes, sir.”
The lawyers then asked, “What is that opinion based on?”
According to the court documents, Mr. Dollman gave a less than certain answer.
“We have no underlying definite facts that it wasn’t,” he said.
