When it comes to the “Stop The Steal” movement, there were few public figures more intertwined with the situation than lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, along with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
These individuals were very much the figureheads of Trump’s attempts to prove that the 2020 election was somehow rigged against him, and they spent months traveling from coast to coast in that effort.
Of particular focus for the trio was the work of Dominion Voting Systems, who many “Stop The Steal” devotees believe may have had an undue influence on the outcome of the contest.
But, with no courts willing to even hear the trio’s attempts to adjudicate the issue, Dominion has now sued them all for defamation, and their last-ditch efforts to have the enormous lawsuits tossed aside has now failed.
A federal judge has rejected bids by three top promoters of President Donald Trump’s election fraud claims to throw out defamation lawsuits they face over a slew of allegedly false statements they made about the election-technology firm Dominion.
Lawyers for former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and My Pillow founder Mike Lindell argued that the suits were legally deficient, but U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols ruled on Wednesday that the suits could proceed.
The three defendants’ arguments found little resonance with Nichols, a Trump appointee who seemed disdainful of their conduct and of suggestions that their statements were within the bounds of freewheeling political debate.
His words left little room for interpretation.
“As an initial matter, there is no blanket immunity for statements that are ‘political’ in nature,” Nichols wrote in his 44-page opinion. “It is true that courts recognize the value in some level of ‘imaginative expression’ or ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ in our public debate. … But it is simply not the law that provably false statements cannot be actionable if made in the context of an election.”
This could add insult to injury for Rudy Giuliani, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump who has been reportedly cut off by The Don over his failure to garner results in his effort to expose what he believed were issues with the 2020 election.
