FAIRYTALES

 

 

“When I used to read fairytales, I fancied that never happened, now here I am in the middle of one.” Alice.

During the 2020 election, the Trumpians pushed out a number of conspiracy claims. Prominent among them was a claim that Democrats had installed a vote-switching machine in state election commissions. The claim was that a machine invented during the reign of Hugo Chavez  enabled an operator to switch a vote from candidate A to candidate B at the push of a button. The machine was said to be manufactured and sold by a company called Dominion, run by Chavez associates, and was, the conspiracy asserted, a principal means of stealing the election.

 

One of the most prominent advocates of the Dominion vote-switching-machine conspiracy (along with Trump, Giuliani, et al) was a Texas lawyer named Sidney Powell. She not only represented Trump in litigation advancing the Dominion theory, she gave numerous interviews on Fox and elsewhere, asserting that Dominion's vote-switching machines had been used to steal the election.

Dominion responded that everything about that claim was a lie. There is no vote-switching machine and there never was. There is a company named Dominion, and they do and did sell vote-counting machines, but they have nothing to do with Hugo Chavez, their machines were invented and are manufactured in Colorado, and the devices are neither capable of switching votes nor were they used in any way to deprive Trump of a single vote.

 

Dominion sued Powell for libel. 1.3 Billion dollars.  The complaint listed all the occasions on which Powell claimed that Dominion’s machines were used to switch votes.

 

Earlier this week, Powell filed her response. She asked the District Court to dismiss the complaint on a number of grounds: she said the complaint was too long, she said that even though her statements were made in the District of Columbia, she wanted the court to send the case to her home county in Texas, she said this was a political matter and therefore all of her statements were protected by the First Amendment, and she saved her best argument for last. 

 (First, a few words of legal background. Actionable libel may fairly be described as a defamatory statement of fact that is false. Opinion, on the other hand, is not actionable. That is protected by the First Amendment. Generally speaking, courts have adopted a simple test to determine whether a statement is fact or opinion: if the statement can be provable to be true or false, then it is a statement of fact, whereas an opinion is not susceptible to such proof.)

 In their request to dismiss the Dominion libel complaint, Powell’s lawyers argued that her statement that Dominion’s machines were used to cheat Trump and steal the election was merely a statement of opinion, not fact. It is hard to imagine any judge agreeing with that proposition. Certainly, the claim that the machines were used to switch votes can be proved to be true or false. Therefore it is clearly a statement of fact. That brings us to the Alice in Wonderland part of the Powell defense;

Her lawyers argue that even assuming Powell's charges were statements of fact, they are so outlandish, so implausible, "no reasonable person would conclude the statements were truly statements of fact." Therefore they must be opinion!

In other words, my client and her colleagues are such outrageous liars, no reasonable person would believe a word they say. 

(I guess that means January 6 never happened?)

When they get around to disbarring Powell, they oughta take a hard look at her lawyers.

A bientot.

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