Sidney Powell appears in an August 2021 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Embattled former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell on Friday filed a counterclaim against Dominion Voting Systems. In it, she argues that the voting machine hardware and software company currently suing her for more than $1 billion is simply trying to silence its critics.
Powell’s counterclaim alleges but one count: abuse of process against Dominion.
Powell, a former federal prosecutor, is one of several so-called “Kraken” attorneys who for months claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump by the Democrats. The plethora of post-election lawsuits filed by Powell and her associates failed miserably. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker referred Powell and her cohorts to face disciplinary proceedings in their respective state bar associations for “possible suspension or disbarment.” The state of Michigan and the city of Detroit have asked the “Kraken” team to repay them a combined total of more than $200,000 in sanctions, a request that remains pending. Powell and others on the “Kraken” team countered that they should pay no more than $44,000 to reimburse the state and the City of Detroit as a consequence of the failed litigation in the Wolverine State.
Dominion Voting Systems sued the right-wing attorney earlier this year to recover more than $1.3 billion in alleged damages over what it called “wild” and “demonstrably false” allegations against the company that Powell made through “conspiracy theorists, con artists, armchair ‘experts,’ and anonymous sources.”
Per the complaint filed by Dominion in January, after the company sent Powell a letter requesting that she cease making false claims about the company “stealing” the election, Powell doubled down on her claims by saying she had evidence to back them up.
That evidence never surfaced to the satisfaction of judges in various states nationwide, but Powell on Friday refused to concede. Rather, she again promulgated theories of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election by filing a countersuit against Dominion. The counterclaim argues that the company’s post-election lawsuits against Powell and her associates were filed to obtain “the ludicrous amount of over $1 billion in damages” while also “tarnishing Ms. Powell’s reputation with allegations that would be defamatory if not protected by the litigation privilege.”
“Dominion’s own patents and instruction manuals expressly provide for remote access to real-time election results; remote access to adjudicate votes or to flip votes; deletion of audit logs and votes; and other vulnerabilities. All of these vulnerabilities were present in Dominion voting equipment and software in the 2020 Presidential election,” Powell wrote in the countersuit. “To avoid having these underlying facts surface in public, Dominion developed this litigation and the related cases as a public-relations campaign to change the narrative, to hide the truth, and to discourage future challenges and negative reporting.”
Powell’s latest claims about Dominion appear to contradict her initial response to the company’s defamation lawsuit against her. Powell’s attorneys in March filed court documents seeking to dismiss the suit by claiming that “no reasonable person” would believe that her well-publicized comments about an international plot against former President Donald Trump were “statements of fact.”
“Given the highly charged and political context of the statements, it is clear that Powell was describing the facts on which she based the lawsuits she filed in support of President Trump,” her attorneys wrote in a 54-page motion to dismiss.
“They are repeatedly labelled ‘inherently improbable’ and even ‘impossible,'” the motion to dismiss continued — all in direct reference to the conspiracy theories peddled by Powell, her law firm, and her non-profit group Defending the Republic. “Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support defendants’ position 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.”
Powell is seeking a declarative judgement of “not less than $10 million” in addition to punitive damages.
A spokesperson for Dominion did not immediately respond to a Law&Crime request for reaction or comment on the counterclaim. If a response is received, we will update this report.
Read the full countersuit below.
[image via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation/YouTube]
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