Dominion Voting sues Giuliani over claims of election rigging

Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer for Donald Trump and former mayor of New York City who played a key role in the former president’s months-long effort to subvert the 2020 election.

The 107-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, accuses Giuliani of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion” made up of “demonstrably false” allegations, in part to enrich himself through legal fees and his podcast.

The suit seeks damages of more than $1.3 billion and is based on more than 50 statements Giuliani made at legislative hearings, on Twitter, on his podcast and in the conservative news media, where he spun a fictitious narrative of a plot by one of the biggest voting machine manufacturers in the country to flip votes to President Joe Biden.

Giuliani, one of Trump’s closest advisers and confidants, has faced continuing fallout for his highly visible efforts to reverse the election outcome. This month, the chairman of the New York state Senate’s judiciary committee formally requested that the state court system strip Giuliani of his law license.

Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Taken together with a lawsuit the company filed this month against Sidney Powell, another lawyer who was allied with Trump, the suit represents a point-by-point rebuke of one of the more outlandish conspiracy theories surrounding last year’s election. The president’s allies had contended that the voting machine company — which was also used in states during Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, has been tested by government agencies and was used in states that Trump carried in 2020 — was somehow involved in a rigged election, partly as a result of ties to a long-deceased Venezuelan dictator.

“Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chavez,” the suit says. “It was founded in 2002 in [CEO] John Poulos’ basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.”

The suit notes that the headquarters for the company’s U.S. subsidiary is in Denver.

Poulos said his company took legal action against Giuliani both to correct the record about Dominion and restore trust in U.S. electoral systems.

Dominion is a major manufacturer of voting machine equipment in the United States, second only to Election Systems & Software. Different models of Dominion machines were used in more than two dozen states — red, blue and battleground — during the 2020 election.

The lawsuit also links Giuliani’s false statements about Dominion to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, noting that he mentioned the company in his speech at a rally for Trump before the attack, as well as numerous times on social media as the Capitol was breached.

“Having been deceived by Giuliani and his allies into thinking that they were not criminals — but patriots ‘Defend(ing) the Republic’ from Dominion and its co-conspirators — they then bragged about their involvement in the crime on social media,” the suit states.

Thomas Clare, a lawyer representing Dominion, said the riot showed just how seriously Trump’s followers had taken the falsehoods told about the election.

The company has indicated that it plans to file more lawsuits, and Clare left open the possibility of litigation against Trump.