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      Arizona Republicans deploy Cyber Ninjas in pro-Trump election audit

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      Months after Donald Trump’s election defeat, Republicans in Arizona are challenging the outcome with an unprecedented effort to audit results in their most populous county – all run by a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, with no elections experience.The state senate used its subpoena power to take possession of all 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county and the machines that counted them, along with computer hard drives full of data. The materials were then handed to Cyber Ninjas, a consultancy run by a man who has shared unfounded conspiracy theories claiming official election results are illegitimate.Elections professionals fear the process will severely undermine faith in democracy.“I think the activities that are taking place here are reckless and they in no way, shape or form resemble an audit,” said Jennifer Morrell, a partner at The Elections Group, a consulting firm advising state and local officials which has not worked in Arizona.Conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s victory have had particular staying power in Arizona, which went Democratic for just the second time in 72 years. On Friday, Trump predicted the audit would reveal fraud and prompt similar reviews in other states he lost.“Thank you state senators and others in Arizona for commencing this full forensic audit,” he said in a statement. “I predict the results will be startling!”Cyber Ninjas began a manual recount on Friday, a day after Democrats asked a judge to put an end to the audit. The judge ordered the company to follow ballot and voter secrecy laws and demanded it turn over written procedures and training manuals before a hearing on Monday. He offered to pause the count over the weekend if Democrats posted a $1m bond to cover added expenses. The party declined.On a since-deleted Twitter account, Cyber Ninjas owner Doug Logan used hashtags and shared memes popular with people promoting unsupported allegations casting doubt on Biden’s victory. Logan says his personal views are irrelevant because he is running a transparent audit with video streamed online.“There’s a lot of Americans here, myself included, that are really bothered by the way our country is being ripped apart right now,” Logan said. “We want a transparent audit to be in place so that people can trust the results and can get everyone on the same page.”Logan refuses to disclose who is paying him or who is counting the ballots, and will not commit to using bipartisan teams for the process.The Republican-dominated Arizona senate refuses to let media observe the count. Reporters can accept a six-hour shift as an official observer but photography and note-taking are prohibited. It would be a violation of journalistic ethics for reporters to participate in an event they were covering.The state senate has put up $150,000 for the audit but Logan has acknowledged that is not enough to cover his expenses. A rightwing cable channel, One America News Network, raised money from unknown contributors which went directly to Cyber Ninjas. Logan would not commit to disclosing the donors and would not provide an estimate for the cost of his audit.Cyber Ninjas plans to have teams of three people manually count each ballot, looking only at the presidential and US Senate contests, which were won by Democrats.Logan said the counters were members of law enforcement and the military as well as retirees. He would not say how many were Democrats or Republicans and would not commit to ensuring the counting teams are bipartisan.The process was to be overseen by volunteers. As of a week ago, 70% were Republicans, according to Ken Bennett, a Republican former secretary of state serving as a liaison between the Senate and the auditors.Cyber Ninjas plans to review ballot-counting machines and data and to scan the composition of fibers in paper ballots in search of fakes. It plans to go door-to-door in select precincts to ask people if they voted. Logan was vague about how the precincts were chosen but said a statistical analysis was done “based on voter histories”.The audit has been beset by mistakes. Hand counters began the day using blue pens, which are banned in ballot counting rooms because they can be read by ballot machines. A crew from a group of Phoenix television stations, azfamily, had unfettered access to the supposedly secure facility as auditors were setting up equipment and receiving ballots and machines.Election experts said hand counts are prone to errors and questioned a lack of transparent procedures for adjudicating voter intent.Maricopa county conducted pre- and post-election reviews to check the accuracy of voting machines, including a hand count of a representative sample of ballots, as required by state law. The county hired two auditing firms that reported no malicious software or incorrect counting equipment.“We’re going to set up a new norm where we don’t accept the outcome of elections in a free and fair and just democracy, and that is the core of what is at stake here,” said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa county elections official.“I think that is incredibly, incredibly problematic.” More

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      George W Bush reveals he voted for Condoleezza Rice in 2020 US election

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      Former president George W Bush revealed in an interview with People magazine that he didn’t vote for either the Republican incumbent Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election. Instead, he wrote in Condoleezza Rice.Rice, who served as secretary of state for Bush from 2005 to 2009, was aware of the write-in. But, “She told me she would refuse to accept the office,” Bush shared.This revelation comes amid a promotional book tour for Bush’s new compilation of oil paintings depicting American immigrants and their stories.It’s all in an effort, Bush says, to soften hearts for compassionate immigration reforms after several years of harsh and “frightening” anti-immigrant rhetoric, mostly from his own Republican party.Earlier this week, Bush criticized the GOP, calling current actors in the party “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist”. Bush told People that he “painted with too broad a brush” and excluded “a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem”.But the former president is not without his own history of faults, and his journey to rehabilitation after a devastating presidency built upon the “war on terror” isn’t as well received by many as one would think.Bush’s legacy includes the illegal invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He resisted LGBTQ+ rights, botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. More

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      Arizona Republicans to begin auditing 2020 ballots in effort to undermine election results

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      Nearly five months after Joe Biden was declared the official winner of the presidential race in Arizona, state Republicans are set to begin their own audit of millions of ballots, an unprecedented move many see as a thinly-veiled effort to continue to undermine confidence in the 2020 election results.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe GOP-controlled state senate ordered the audit, set to formally get underway this week, which may be one of the most absurd and alarming consequences to date of Donald Trump’s baseless lies about the 2020 election. It will be executed by a private Florida-based company. It also reportedly will be supported from far-right lawyer Lin Wood and observers from the far-right news network One America News Network.The audit will be solely focused on Maricopa county, the largest in the state and home to a majority of Arizona’s voters. Biden narrowly defeated Trump in the county, a crucial battleground that helped the president win Arizona by around 10,000 votes. The audit will include a hand recount of all 2.1m ballots cast in the county, a process expected to take months.Trump and allies have claimed, without evidence, there was fraud in Maricopa county. But the county has already conducted two separate audits of the 2020 election and found no irregularities. The Republican decision to continue to investigate the results, months after they were certified by both county and state officials, extends the life of election conspiracy theories. The audit also comes as Arizona Republicans are advancing legislation in the state that would make it harder to vote by mail.“They’re trying to find something that we know doesn’t exist,” said Arizona secretary of state Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who serves as the state’s top election official. “It’s ludicrous that people think that if they don’t like the results they can just come in and tear them apart.”David Becker, an election administration expert and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the effort was so shoddy he was hesitant to acknowledge it as a legitimate investigation.“I’ve never seen an ‘audit’ that was remotely similar, and given the fundamental flaws, I don’t think this process can even be described as an audit,” he said in an email.Other voting rights groups have expressed similar concerns.“At this point, additional audits will have little value other than to stoke conspiracy theories and partisan gamesmanship – or worse,” the groups, which included the Carter Center in Atlanta and the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote in a letter to the Arizona senate earlier this month. “In short, this appears to be a decision driven by politics rather than a search for the truth.”Alarm over the audit has escalated in recent weeks after Republicans announced the firms that would be leading the effort. The company that will lead the audit, a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, is led by Doug Logan, who supported several baseless conspiracy theories about the election. In December, he retweeted a post that questioned the validity of Maricopa’s ballot count and falsely said Trump may have gotten 200,000 more votes than were reported in Arizona, according to the Arizona Mirror, which first reported his involvement in the audit.He also made statistical comparisons between elections in Venezuela and the 2020 race in a tweet that included a “stop the steal” hashtag, according to the Mirror. Cyber Ninjas is not accredited by the US Election Assistance Commission to inspect voting machines, the Washington Post reported.“You’re bringing in this firm that’s on a treasure hunt,” Hobbs said. “They are not qualified, they don’t even know what they’re doing.”It’s not clear how Cyber Ninjas was chosen to lead the audit. Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona senate, did not return a request for comment. In an interview with One America News Network, a far right news outlet, Fann said the audit was needed to answer questions about the 2020 election.“It is our job to make sure those laws are followed to the T, that they are always above reproach, and if we find any mistakes, we need to fix it and or report it,” she told the outlet.The Arizona state senate is renting a Phoenix arena to conduct the audit and there is growing scrutiny over how the process is being funded. While the state senate has allocated $150,000 towards the effort, it is also being backed by private donors. L Lin Wood, an attorney who promoted some of the most inflammatory lies about the 2020 election, told Talking Points Memo he had donated $50,000 to a fundraiser to support the effort. Wood also told the outlet that he hosted Logan at his South Carolina home last year.“That should scare a lot of people,” said Martin Quezada, a Democrat in the Arizona state senate. “Who are the people that are gonna be donating to this? It’s already shown that this is the people who have an agenda and that agenda is to show that there was some sort of fraud, that there was a stolen election.”It’s also unclear how much access media and other independent observers will have to the audit. Reporters will be prohibited from using pens and paper and will have to sign up to serve as official observers, a spokesman for the audit told an Arizona Mirror reporter on Wednesday. The Arizona Republican party also tweeted that the process will be live-streamed and that observers from One America News Network, the far fight outlet, would ensure nonpartisan “transparency”.There is also concern the audit could lead to voter intimidation. In its statement of work, Cyber Ninjas wrote it had already performed “non-partisan canvassing” in Arizona after the 2020 election and knocked on voters’ doors to “confirm if valid voters actually lived at the stated address”. The company said it would continue that work during the audit “to validate that individuals that show as having voted in the 2020 general election match those individuals who believe they have cast a vote”.Such activity could amount to illegal voter intimidation, a group of voting rights lawyers wrote to Cyber Ninjas and others involved in the audit earlier this month.Quezada, the Arizona state senator, said it was impossible to separate the audit from the suite of voting restrictions in the Arizona state legislature that would make it harder to vote by mail. Among the most prominent is a bill that would essentially do away with a longstanding and popular practice in the state that allows any eligible voter in the state to automatically receive a mail-in ballot if they want. Another measure would require voters to provide identification with their mail-in ballot.“They want to justify all of the changes that they are already proposing to election laws because they need to have some sort of legitimacy behind it to justify the severe restrictions they’re hoping to put in place here,” he said. “Every element of this audit, from the beginning, to the end, it just stinks to high hell.” More

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      The Guardian view on an America First Caucus: a warning democracy is under siege | Editorial

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      In 1944, George Orwell felt that the word fascism had “lost the last vestige of meaning” so liberally had it been used. But fascism remains very much alive. Decades after Orwell’s message, one of the challenges today is to identify and name it. Whether the label could be applied to Donald Trump had divided expert opinion, until the 6 January assault on Capitol Hill by a mob whose passions had been inflamed by his speech earlier that day. This melted the resistance historians of fascism like Columbia University’s Robert Paxton felt to using the f-word. The use of violence against democratic institutions, he wrote, “crosses a red line”.If anyone wondered what American fascism might look like then they could start with the proposed congressional “America First Caucus”, which emerged this weekend from the office of extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying the torch for Trumpism, this fringe agenda conceals its racial argument behind muscular populist ones. The caucus plans were welcomed by legislators who had fanned the flames of the Capitol riot. Before being elected to Congress, Ms Greene peddled conspiracy theories, made racist statements and indicated support for the execution of Democratic leaders and FBI agents. She renounced those beliefs on the eve of being kicked off congressional committees but made no apology for having held them.The proposed caucus platform contained not so much dog whistles as foghorns for white supremacy. America, the document claims, is based on “respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and decries “post-1965 immigrants” for depressing workers’ wages, highlighting the year when the US ended its policy of giving preferential treatment to western European migrants. It calls for rebuilding the US with an “aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”. Thankfully the plan exploded on the launch pad. Republican leaders calculated it would hurt their electoral chances in moderate swing seats. Ms Greene disowned the caucus proposals.Fascism not only pursues rightwing policies, it seeks to build up mass-mobilising movements and paramilitary organisations with the aim of establishing a single-party dictatorship. Mr Trump saw armed citizens as a political asset. His heirs see despotism as a viable alternative to the current political structure. In Congress 147 Republican lawmakers promoted Mr Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Republicans in 47 states have 361 proposed laws to restrict voting access on grounds of baseless claims of electoral fraud.Around the world electorates will have to become reacquainted with fascism. Voters must attune themselves to what it looks and sounds like. In the UK, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer was caught out earlier this year on a national radio phone-in when he failed to recognise a conspiracy theory popular with fascists, and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, known as the “great replacement”. It falsely claims that dwindling white birthrates have been orchestrated by multicultural global elites in an attempt to make whites a minority. There’s no suggestion that Sir Keir agreed with the racist caller but there was criticism in the way he handled the call. There is an urgent and pressing need to recognise both the real threat of fascism as well as the rhetorical and emotional motifs it employs. More

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      Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump's empire of disinformation?

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      When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with customers in 28 states.But the 2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe Biden.Among the more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.The truth matters. Lies have consequencesIt was laughable but also potentially devastating to Dominion’s reputation and ruinous to its business. It also fed a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fuelled Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, as Congress moved to certify the election results. Five people died, including an officer of the Capitol police.The company is fighting back. It filed $1.3bn defamation lawsuits against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, for pushing the allegations without evidence.Separately, Dominion’s security director, Eric Coomer, launched a suit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani, Powell and some conservative media figures and outlets, saying he had been forced into hiding by death threats.Then came the big one. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims.“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”The suit argues that Fox hosts and guests “took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire” by broadcasting wild assertions that Dominion systems changed votes and ignoring repeated efforts by the company to set the record straight.“Radioactive falsehoods” spread by Fox News will cost Dominion $600m over the next eight years, according to the lawsuit, and have resulted in Dominion employees being harassed and the company losing major contracts in Georgia and Louisiana.Fox fiercely disputes the charge. It said in a statement: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Other conservative outlets have also raised objections. Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax, said: “We think all of these suits are an infringement on press freedom as it relates to media organisations. There were the years of Russian collusion investigations when all of the major cable networks reported unsubstantiated claims. I think Fox was reporting the news and certainly Newsmax was.”But some observers believe Dominion has a strong case. Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: “Dominion has an outstanding prospect in its litigation against Fox for the simple reason that Fox knowingly broadcast over and over again the most outrageous and clear lies.You should not have a major television outlet that is a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods about the election“Certainly there are protections under the first amendment and otherwise but this is so far outside the bounds, such a clear case, that I think Fox is looking at a very serious legal exposure here and that’s the way it should be.“You should not have a major television outlet that is able day after day to provide a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods having to do with the election, one that helped trigger a violent insurrection on 6 January. They should not be able to feed a steady stream of those pernicious lies into the body politic without any legal consequences.”‘A real battleground’Eisen, a former White House “ethics czar”, suggests that the Dominion case could provide at least one model for dealing with the war on truth.“The United States and the world need to deal with disinformation,” he said.“There can be no doubt that every method is going to be required but certainly libel law provides one very important vehicle for establishing consequences and while there’s no such thing as a guarantee when you go to court, this is an exceptionally high risk for Fox with a large price tag attached as well.”There are signs that the legal actions, and their grave financial implications, have got reckless individuals and outlets on the run.Powell asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit against her, arguing that her assertions were protected by the right to free speech. But she also offered the unusual defence that she had been exaggerating to make a point and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.Two days after voting machine maker Smartmatic filed a $2.7bn defamation suit that alleged TV host Lou Dobbs falsely accused it of election rigging, Fox Business abruptly canceled Lou Dobbs Tonight, its most viewed show. It has also filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic suit.Meanwhile pro-Trump outlets have begun using prepared disclaimers or prerecorded programmes to counter election conspiracy theories spouted by guests. When Lindell launched into an attack on Dominion on Newsmax in February, co-anchor Bob Sellers tried to cut him off and then walked off set.RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the Washington Post: “We are seeing the way that libel has become a real battleground in the fight against disinformation.“The threat of massive damages for spreading probably false conspiracy theories on matters of public concern could turn out to be the one tool that is successful in disincentivising that behaviour, where so many other tools seem to have failed.”The defamation suits will provide another test of the judiciary as a pillar of American democracy. The courts’ independence proved robust regarding dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the election outcome.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It is such an under-appreciated illumination of the multiple avenues for pursuing politics. Sometimes we get understandably absorbed by what Congress can do, which is obviously significant at times, but mostly fairly kind of deadlocked.“But we’re going to see the legal system prosecuting the 6 January perpetrators, prosecuting Donald Trump and prosecuting these libel charges by Dominion over the monstrous lies that were told after the election.“Thank goodness for the courts because the elected branches have really botched it.” More

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      Trump 'money bomb' scheme raised millions from unwitting donors – report

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      Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign used pre-checked boxes and obscure design on fundraising emails to wring millions of dollars out of unwitting supporters, detonating a “money bomb” which allowed the Republican to compete against Joe Biden in the last months of the race.The practice, pursued by the campaign and WinRed, a for-profit company, was detailed in an extensive report by the New York Times on Saturday. It is legal, but Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, told the paper it was “unfair, unethical and inappropriate”.Another expert quoted by the Times said such “dark pattern” digital marketing “should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do” in politics.The “money bomb” did not bring victory, as Trump lost the electoral college by 306 votes to 232. He also lost the popular vote by more than 7m ballots.But, the Times said, “the recurring donations swelled Mr Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.”Trump still claims his defeat was caused by massive electoral fraud. It was not, as a succession of court cases concluded.After escaping conviction in his second impeachment trial, for inciting the Capitol riot of 6 January, the former president is free to run for office again. He continues to seek donations, leading to friction with the party he dominates.The Republican WinRed operation was conceived as a response to ActBlue, an online fundraising platform set up by Democrats to attract small-dollar donations.As the Times reported, refunds to donors are not unusual and can be made when individuals give more than the legal limit. The paper said that at the end of 2020, after Trump’s defeat, the Biden campaign and Democratic bodies made 37,000 online refunds worth $5.6m.The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee made more than 530,000 refunds, returning $64.3m.“In effect,” the Times wrote, “the money that Mr Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.”Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, told the Times: “Our campaign was built by the hardworking men and women of America and cherishing their investments was paramount to anything else we did.”The Times reported that the practice was used for the Georgia Senate runoffs in January and continues to be used by the Republican party.It also detailed distressing experiences affecting Trump donors hit by surprise deductions and consequent trouble with banks and credit card companies.Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old from California, donated $990 in September. It recurred seven times for a total of almost $8,000, the Times said.Calling the Trump campaign and the RNC “bandits”, Amelino told the paper: “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.” More

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      in Elections

      Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for $1.6bn over election fraud lies

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      The North American voting machine company Dominion has hit Fox News with a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit, accusing the network of spreading election fraud lies in a misguided effort to stop an exodus of enraged viewers after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.The complaint accuses some of Fox’s biggest personalities Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro “and their chosen guests” of spreading “defamatory falsehoods” about Dominion.Fox supercharged false conspiracy theories about Dominion, the lawsuit says, by plucking the lies from relatively obscure corners of the far-right internet and broadcasting them to tens of millions of viewers on television and online.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” the complaint says. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”Fox vowed to fight the case in a statement Friday morning: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Dominion, a large US and Canadian voting machine company, earlier sued Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for $1.3bn each for spreading election lies during weeks of legal challenges to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in what officials have called the most secure election in US history.On Tuesday, Powell defended herself against the Dominion suit by arguing in court that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats. The company also sued the chief executive of a pillow company, Mike Lindell, a Trump friend who produced a video about election conspiracies.Baseless conspiracy claims about Dominion accusing the company of using technology that flipped votes away from Trump appear to have originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog.But in an effort to steal the presidential election, Trump himself gave the claims the broadest possible platform, including with a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part: “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”Dominion said the lies had threatened its reputation and business.“Dominion brings this lawsuit to set the record straight, to vindicate its rights, and to recover damages for the devastating economic harm done to its business,” the company said in the Fox lawsuit.Fox is fighting a legal battle over spreading election lies on multiple fronts. The voting technology company Smartmatic earlier brought a $2.7bn lawsuit against Fox and network commentators accusing them of a “disinformation campaign”.Fox has filed multiple motions to dismiss the Smartmatic case.Dominion’s lawsuit says that after the 3 November election, “viewers began fleeing Fox in favor of media outlets endorsing the lie that massive fraud caused President Trump to lose the election.“They saw Fox as insufficiently supportive of President Trump, including because Fox was the first network to declare that President Trump lost Arizona,” the complaint continues. “So Fox set out to lure viewers back – including President Trump himself – by intentionally and falsely blaming Dominion for President Trump’s loss by rigging the election.”Dominion brought the suit in Delaware, where Fox is incorporated.“Fox recklessly disregarded the truth,” the lawsuit says. “Indeed, Fox knew these statements about Dominion were lies …“Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.” More

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      Pro-Trump lawyer says ‘no reasonable person’ would believe her election lies

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      A key member of the legal team that sought to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump is defending herself against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit by arguing that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.In a motion to dismiss a complaint by the large US-based voting machine company Dominion, lawyers for Sidney Powell argued that elaborate conspiracies she laid out on television and radio last November while simultaneously suing to overturn election results in four states constituted legally protected first amendment speech.“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” argued lawyers for Powell, a former federal prosecutor from Texas who caught Trump’s attention through her involvement in the defense of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.Powell falsely stated on television and in legal briefs that Dominion machines ran on technology that could switch votes away from Trump, technology she said had been invented in Venezuela to help steal elections for the late Hugo Chávez.Those lies were built on empty claims that apparently originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog, only to be amplified on a global scale by Trump himself in a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”Citing lost business and reputational damage, Dominion filed a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against Powell and her colleague on Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani. A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats.Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of an election they considered invalid, killing a police officer in violent clashes in which four others died.But lawyers for Powell argued her false statements about election fraud in the months preceding the Capitol insurrection were unmistakably not presented as true facts.“It was clear to reasonable persons that Powell’s claims were her opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern,” her legal motion says. “Those members of the public who were interested in the controversy were free to, and did, review that evidence and reached their own conclusions – or awaited resolution of the matter by the courts before making up their minds.”The filing brought expressions of disbelief from Trump critics.“This is her defense. Wow,” tweeted the Republican representative Adam Kinzinger.“Bad argument!” tweeted Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen. “[Powell] should have gone with an insanity defense due to #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.”“Shorter Sidney Powell: suckers!” tweeted Charlie Sykes, an editor of the anti-Trump conservative publication the Bulwark.As Trump fought to reverse his election loss in November, the former president himself reportedly supported Powell’s claims in private – and trumpeted them in public, touting Powell two weeks after the election as a key part of “the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS”.Powell was publicly exiled from the Trump camp a week after that tweet, after she appeared at a news conference hosted by the Republican National Committee alongside Giuliani, whose hair dye memorably ran down his face, and Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis.The group was “an elite strike force team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign”, Ellis announced.Then Powell faced the cameras and claimed to have identified “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States”.Aides reportedly told Trump that Powell was not helping, and Giuliani and Ellis issued a subsequent statement announcing, “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity.”But that did not prevent Powell from filing lawsuits the next week on Trump’s behalf in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.In her defense against the Dominion defamation lawsuit, Powell argued that whatever “reasonable persons” thought of her wild claims, Dominion had failed to demonstrate that she herself thought them to be false as she spoke them – a key distinction in defamation cases.“In fact,” Powell’s motion reads, “she believed the allegations then and she believes them now.” More