A memo released last night as part of a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign suggests campaign officials “were aware early on” that many of their lawyers’ election fraud claims against Dominion Voting Systems and election software company Smartmatic were untrue.
The court papers, initially filed late last week in the suit spearheaded by former Dominion employee Eric Coomer, also indicate the officials were aware of the baseless allegations ahead of the “widely watched” Nov. 19 news conference, during which the campaign’s legal team claimed Dominion, Smartmatic, financier George Soros, and Venezuela worked together to steal the election from former President Trump.
Even as Sidney Powell “and other lawyers attacked Dominion in the conservative media,” it appears the campaign just “sat on its findings.”
According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion.
The next day, the emails show, Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.
The Nov. 14 memo found: (1) Dominion did not use Smartmatic voting technology in the 2020 election; (2) Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or Soros, as was then purported; (3) and there was no evidence Dominion’s leadership was connected to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Powell and others also claimed, The New York Times writes.
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, wrote lawyers for Coomer, the former Dominion employee.
It is unclear if Trump himself ever saw the memo; “still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.”
“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 release of the documents was only the latest legal trouble for Rudy Giuliani Sidney Powell, both of whom have been sued directly by Dominion for defamation.
Dominion has also brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false election claims.
Last month, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the cases could continue moving toward trial.