Dominion Voting Systems, the election-equipment company that has become a target of wild right-wing conspiracies since November, is suing Rudy Giuliani for defamation, the second lawsuit it has initiated recently in an effort to clear its good name.
The 107-page suit, filed in the Federal District of Washington, seeks $1.3 billion from Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, who repeatedly identified Dominion as a culprit in a wide-ranging plot to deny his client the election. In its lawsuit, the company accuses Giuliani of engaging in “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion,” which led to harassment and death threats directed at its employees and “unprecedented and irreparable harm” to its reputation. The filing includes documentation of dozens of false statements made by Giuliani at hearings, on Twitter, and elsewhere. Among them: that Dominion was founded by deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez with the purpose of fixing elections. The suit notes that Giuliani did not make these risible claims in the court filings he filed on Trump’s behalf (which had their own problems), and argues that he ran with the claims for publicity and money-raising purposes.
Giuliani has hardly been the only Trump adviser pushing misinformation about Dominion. Earlier this month, the company filed a similar lawsuit against Sidney Powell, another conspiracy-friendly lawyer who had represented Trump in court after the election.
And for weeks after November 3, Dominion was a punching bag on right-wing news networks, who boosted the false claims laid out in the Giuliani lawsuit. Amid the threat of legal action, Fox News and Newsmax recently aired awkward segments clarifying that there was no evidence of the malfeasance their anchors had been promoting.
