Memo: Trump team aware of false vote machine claims
Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with President Donald Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Trump.
But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released Monday evening.
By the time the news conference occurred Nov. 19, Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.
The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.
The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Trump.
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.
Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Powell and others were making in public. It found:
That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.
That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Soros.
And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Powell and others had claimed.
As Coomer’s attorneys wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “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” and Coomer.
Even at the time, many
political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Powell and other pro-trump lawyers like Rudy Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.
It is unclear if Trump knew about or 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.”
Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver.
Powell and Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment.