Sidney Powell’s Dominion conspiracy theories were bogus: campaign memo

• Sidney Powell’s 2020 election conspiracy theories have led to a lot of legal headaches.
• New court filings from attorneys seeking sanctions against Powell suggest the headaches could’ve been avoided if she’d looked at a memo from her own client.
• The Trump campaign internal memo showed Powell’s conspiracy theories about Dominion and Smartmatic were bogus.

Days after Sidney Powell alleged a far-ranging international conspiracy theory to rig the presidential election in a November 2020 press conference, then-President Donald Trump fired her from his campaign’s legal team. 

Undeterred, Powell went on to sue officials in numerous states Trump had lost in an attempt to overturn election results. All of those lawsuits have failed and have led to numerous legal headaches, including defamation lawsuits alleging billions of dollars in damages and multiple attempts to seek sanctions against Powell.

All of this could have been prevented, according to filings submitted to court Wednesday by attorneys representing Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, if Powell had simply checked with her own client: The Trump campaign.

Powell’s lawsuits — in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia — falsely claimed that the election technology companies Dominion and Smartmatic were secretly in cahoots with each other. The lawsuits pushed the conspiracy theory that the companies used technology developed under the regime of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to flip votes from Trump into now-President Joe Biden’s favor.

In the brief period Powell worked for the Trump campaign, staffers had written a memo that showed her claims about Dominion and Smartmatic were false. Powell ignored it, Evers‘ attorneys say, which demonstrates that she didn’t do her due diligence while bringing the “Kraken” lawsuits falsely alleging election conspiracy theories.

“The memo itself further illustrates that even a modicum of research — nothing more complex than a little Googling — would have demonstrated the absence of any basis for the theory advanced here that Dominion voting machines had altered individual votes, much less the outcome of the election,” the lawyers write.

Evers is seeking $106,000 in sanctions against Powell and her co-attorneys to cover the costs of the litigation. They included the internal Trump campaign memo as an exhibit in the filings, offering it as additional evidence of Powell’s professional failures.

The memo was first discovered through litigation from Eric Coomer, a Dominion executive suing the campaign, Powell, and other conspiracy theorists, alleging defamation and other damages.

Powell has argued against paying sanctions to Evers’ attorneys, claiming the court doesn’t have the jurisdiction to force the payments because the case didn’t go very far before it was dismissed.

The judge who oversaw Powell’s “Kraken” case in Michigan approved sanctions against her and fellow conspiracy theorist attorney Lin Wood in April, finding they engaged in a “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”

Rudy Giuliani, another election conspiracy theorist who filed lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results on Trump’s behalf, had his law license suspended in New York over his false claims.

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