Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages for what the voting machine company called the former New York City mayor’s “viral disinformation campaign” against them in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Giuliani was one of the key lawyers in Trump’s efforts to “Stop the Steal” and contest the race that he lost to President Biden, making unsubstantiated claims of widespread and massive voter fraud and pushing wild allegations about Dominion. Biden defeated Trump 306-232 in the Electoral College.
“Acting in concert with allies and media outlets that were determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election, Giuliani launched a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion that reached millions of people and caused enormous harm to Dominion,” the company claimed in a 107-page complaint filed Monday. “As a direct, foreseeable, and intentional result of that viral disinformation campaign, Dominion has suffered the following single and indivisible injuries: Dominion employees have been stalked, have been harassed, and have received death threats; Dominion has been forced to make an expenditure of money to remedy the defamation and to protect the lives of its employees; Dominion has lost profits; and Dominion’s reputation has been irreparably damaged.”
Dominion sent Giuliani a notice of his obligation to preserve documents related to Dominion back on Dec. 22, and, after the storming of the U.S. Capitol, it sent him a follow-up letter on Jan. 10 about the “recent violence and your continued defamatory claims about Dominion.”
The new lawsuit claimed that “although he was unwilling to make false election fraud claims about Dominion and its voting machines in a court of law because he knew those allegations are false, he and his allies manufactured and disseminated the ‘Big Lie,’ which foreseeably went viral and deceived millions of people into believing that Dominion had stolen their votes and fixed the election.”
Giuliani responded to the Dominion lawsuit late Monday morning.
“Dominion’s defamation lawsuit for $1.3B will allow me to investigate their history, finances, and practices fully and completely,” Giuliani said in a text to the Washington Examiner. “The amount being asked for is, quite obviously, intended to frighten people of faint heart. It is another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left-wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech, as well as the ability of lawyers to defend their clients vigorously. As such, we will investigate a countersuit against them for violating these Constitutional rights.”
Dominion claimed that “Giuliani reportedly demanded $20,000 per day for that Big Lie” about election fraud. Giuliani recently acknowledged to the New York Times that his associate requested that he be paid that large sum for his post-election work, but he suggested the request was made without his knowledge, saying, “I never had a single expectation of being paid a penny.”
The new lawsuit also claimed Giuliani “cashed in” through his podcast and that “even after the United States Capitol had been stormed by rioters who had been deceived by Giuliani and his allies, Giuliani shirked responsibility for the consequences of his words and repeated the Big Lie again.” The “big lie” is a reference to a quotation from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Dominion lawyer Thomas Clare said Giuliani “peddled his lies about Dominion in the court of public opinion, in concert with reckless media outlets that knowingly gave him a global platform to spew baseless falsehoods and to undermine confidence in our democracy” and that “after we asked Giuliani to retract his false claims, he doubled down and said he’d love to take discovery on Dominion.” He added, “We’re here to grant his wish and to remind him that discovery is a two-way street.”
Dominion argued that “recounts of paper ballots have repeatedly shown that Dominion machines accurately counted votes in the 2020 election — conclusively disproving the election-fixing claims promoted by Giuliani and his allies.”
The lawsuit claimed that Giuliani’s efforts were done “in concert” with Sidney Powell, a Trump-allied lawyer and defense attorney for retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn whom Dominion already filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against earlier this month, and “in concert” with trial lawyer Lin Wood, My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, and other personalities and outlets whom Dominion claimed were “determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election.”
In a follow-up statement to the Washington Examiner, Clare said that their “current focus” is on Powell and Giuliani but added: “There will be additional lawsuits, and we are continuing to take an evidence-based look at others who orchestrated and amplified the disinformation campaign.”
Trump repeatedly tweeted about Dominion before his account was suspended.
Dominion’s lawsuit noted that Giuliani claimed on Fox Business in November that the company was owned by Smartmatic and that Smartmatic was founded to “fix elections” as he touted its alleged connections to deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez — claims he repeated on television, his radio show, and elsewhere, all of which Dominion denies. The lawsuit pointed to Giuliani repeating many of these claims during a press conference at the Republican National Committee on Nov. 19, during which Powell claimed that Dominion machines ran an algorithm to flip votes from Trump to Biden — an unproven allegation. Giuliani and the Trump legal team attempted to distance themselves from Powell days later, but Giuliani continued making claims about Dominion, telling Fox News on Dec. 12 that the “Dominion machine … was developed to steal elections and being used in the states that are involved.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other election security groups said in the wake of the November election that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The statement followed a viral all-caps tweet sent by Trump earlier in the day that quoted One America News Network, claiming that “DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.” Trump fired the head of CISA, Chris Krebs, saying he disagreed with the agency’s statement on election security.
Then-Attorney General William Barr disputed the claims Giuliani and others were making in early December, saying, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.” Barr reportedly told Trump on Dec. 1 that the election fraud allegations leveled by Trump allies such as Giuliani were “just bullshit.”
“Rudy Giuliani actively propagated disinformation to purposefully mislead voters. Because Giuliani and others incessantly repeated the false claims about my company on a range of media platforms, some of our own family and friends are among the Americans who were duped,” Dominion CEO John Poulos said on Monday. “Not only have these lies damaged the good name of my company, but they also undermined trust in American democratic institutions, drowning out the remarkable work of elections officials and workers, who ensured a transparent and secure election. The thousands of hand recounts and audits that proved machines counted accurately continue to be overshadowed by disinformation.”
Mike Brest contributed to this report.
