In January of this year, Dominion Voting Systems filed defamation lawsuits against Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell, a former member of Trump’s legal team who was disavowed by the Trump campaign. Both Giuliani and Powell pushed false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, claiming that Dominion’s voting technology was used to steal the election from Trump. Dominion is seeking at least $1.3 billion in damages.
According to court records, Dominion's lawsuit against Powell arose “from statements made by Sidney Powell, who—acting in concert with allies and media outlets determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election—caused unprecedented harm.”
Similarly, Dominion’s statement on Giuliani’s defamation suit, per court records, claims that “he [Giuliani] 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.”
A viral social media post claims “Dominion lost their lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.”
This is a false claim. Both lawsuits are ongoing.
According to courtlistener.com, which describes itself as a “fully-searchable and accessible archive of court data including growing repositories of opinions, oral arguments, judges, and federal filings,” from The Free Law Project, both Powell’s case and Giuliani’s case are still active.
Furthermore, a spokesperson from Hamilton Place Strategies, a consulting firm representing Dominion, confirmed to The Dispatch Fact Check via email that “the defamation suits against Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are still active.”
If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email at factcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please email corrections@thedispatch.com.
Lying sacks of poop make claim…. This theater of the absurd is getting old. Can’t we send all these Trump folks to Elba or something?
Is there a threshold in these fact checks for how widely disseminated a claim is? I’m just wondering. A lot of these claims I’ve never heard outside of the Dispatch debunking them.
Thanks for this link-filled fact-check. The links to the "court records" for the two cases go only to Dominion's original complaint. But from the linked pages, one can also click the hyperlink to the right of "Docket Number" for a private recreation of the Docket Sheet as created and maintained by the official PACER service through which the U.S. Courts publish their filings online. It's the Docket Sheet which shows all the documents that've been filed, in chronological order; one can scroll to the most recent filings to confirm that yes, indeed, there are very recent filings comprising the most recent activities of the litigants, judge, and court staff — and the absence of a terminating filing, like a "Final Judgment of Dismissal," which is the document one would expect to see if the viral social media claim were true.
Normally I have a strong preference for original source documents, which here would be the ones from PACER, over private-party summaries or recompilations taken from those original source documents. However, Court Listener website and the Free Law Project non-profit which sponsors it are doing a public service by saving members of the public the modest fees that PACER charges members of the public to search, access, and download its documents. The blue header at the top of each page — with the Docket Number, Document Number, date of filing, and page number — is applied when the document is digitally captured by and uploaded into PACER, so that header, and serves as an adequate confirmation for casual purposes that you're looking at a genuine document.