Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Voting Machine
Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows
Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a
news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had
determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.
By Alan
Feuer
Sept. 21,
2021, 2:11 p.m. ET
Two weeks
after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump
held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in
Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming
that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the
financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr.
Trump.
But there
was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on
Monday evening.
By the time
the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already
prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company,
Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The
memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.
The court
papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation
lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee,
Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware
early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.
The
documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion
even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the
conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a
vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.
According
to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s
deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13
asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion.
The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled
together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public
fact-checking services.
Even though
the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms.
Powell and others were making in public. It found:
That
Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic,
in the 2020 election.
That
Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.
And that
there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing
“antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.
As Mr.
Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo
produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump
campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories
regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.
Even at the
time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike,
dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W.
Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in
denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency
in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.
It is
unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest
that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of
the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating
freely.
“The Trump
campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked
conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them
with their own research debunking those theories.”
Mr. Coomer,
Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell,
Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court
in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a
right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s
defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.
Soon after
the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and
amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described
“elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R.
Biden Jr.’s victory.
On Nov. 19,
for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news
conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr.
Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s
voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included
Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive
influence of communist money.”
Ms. Powell
and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents.
Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mr. Trump
continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent
months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election
was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last
month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially
true.”
And as
recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless
coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single
shot being fired.”
It remains
unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members.
According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had
not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he
questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.
A
monthslong campaign. During his last days in office, President Donald J. Trump
and his allies undertook an increasingly urgent effort to undermine the
election results. That wide-ranging campaign included perpetuating false and
thoroughly debunked claims of election fraud as well as pressing government
officials for help.
Baseless
claims of voter fraud. Although Mr. Trump’s allegations of a stolen election
have died in the courts and election officials of both parties from every state
have said there is no evidence of fraud, Republicans across the country
continued to spread conspiracy theories. Those include 147 House Republicans
who voted against certifying the election.
Intervention
at the Justice Department. Rebuffed by ranking Republicans and cabinet
officials like Attorney General William P. Barr, who stepped down weeks before
his tenure was to end, Mr. Trump sought other avenues to peddle his unfounded
claims. In a bid to advance his personal agenda, Mr. Trump plotted to oust the
acting attorney general and pressed top officials to declare that the election
was corrupt. His chief of staff pushed the department to investigate an array
of outlandish and unfounded conspiracy theories that held that Mr. Trump had
been the victor.
Pressuring
state officials to 'find votes.' As the president continued to refuse to
concede the election, his most loyal backers proclaimed Jan. 6, when Congress
convened to formalize Mr. Biden's electoral victory, as a day of reckoning. On
that day, Mr. Trump delivered an incendiary speech to thousands of his
supporters hours before a mob of loyalists violently stormed the Capitol.
“They
wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was
quoted as saying in the deposition.
But at the
time that the internal report was prepared, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell were
both “active supervisors,” as he put it in his deposition, in the Trump
campaign’s broader plan to challenge the election results — an effort that eventually
included more than 60 failed lawsuits filed across the country. While Ms.
Powell soon went her own way in claiming that Dominion had conspired to steal
the election, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his
campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state
legislatures to overturn the popular vote.
The motion
notes that “the lines were blurred” as to whom Ms. Powell was working for at
the time: herself, her nonprofit organization or the Trump campaign. Almost
immediately after she promoted the conspiracy theory about Dominion at the news
conference in November, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from her. But by
December, as Mr. Trump’s legal options narrowed, the former president
considered bringing her back into the fold and discussed whether to appoint her
as a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud.
The release
of the documents was only the latest legal trouble for Mr. Giuliani and Ms.
Powell, both of whom have been sued directly by Dominion for defamation.
Dominion has also brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the chief
executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false election claims. Last month, a
federal judge in Washington ruled that the cases could continue moving toward
trial.
About the
same time, a federal judge in Detroit ordered penalties to be levied against
Ms. Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers — Mr. Giuliani was not among them
— who filed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results in Michigan
using the false claims about Dominion.
“This case
was never about fraud,” the judge, Linda V. Parker, wrote in her decision. “It
was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the
judicial process to do so.”
In June, a
New York court suspended Mr. Giuliani’s law license, ruling that he had made
“demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of
last year’s election for Mr. Trump.
Even
recently, the new court documents say, former Trump campaign officials have
continued to cling to the baseless notion that the election was marred by
fraud.
When
lawyers for Mr. Coomer asked Sean Dollman, a representative of the Trump
campaign, in a deposition if the campaign still believed that the election was
fraudulent, he answered, “Yes, sir.”
The lawyers
then asked, “What is that opinion based on?”
According
to the court documents, Mr. Dollman gave a less than certain answer.
“We have no
underlying definite facts that it wasn’t,” he said.
Susan
Dominus, Shay Castle and Mindy Sink contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer
covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about
mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption
and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The
Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
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