Three of the Trump allies who threw their reputations, their fortunes, and their fates in general in with the former president had a rude awakening on Wednesday. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, and Sidney Powell attempted to get the billion-dollar lawsuits filed against each of them tossed by a federal judge. And those endeavors all ended in miserable failure.
As per Reuters, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington D.C. has declared that the lawsuits against Giuliani, Lindell, and Powell filed by Dominion Voting Systems — which were each $1.3 billion dollars apiece — could move forward, despite their attempts to shoot them down. Each one is accused of defamation, having spread, as per the suits, false information about 2020 election, including that the voting booth company was involved in a massive conspiracy to rig the results.
Nichols singled out one of their arguments — that what they said was protected under the First Amendment — for scorn, saying free speech offers them “no blanket immunity.”
A lawyer for Powell — herself a lawyer, who joined and then left the Trump team, and who was initially billed as “the Krakken” — told Reuters they were confident about moving forward, and that what his client said was “accurate and certainly not published with malice.” Her defense in the past has been that “no reasonable person” would have believed her claims.
This is bad news for all of them, but perhaps for Giuliani most of all. The former NYC mayor has reportedly not received any financial help from his client, nor from most of his circle. Those closest to the former president haven’t so much as even re-tweeted Giuliani’s legal fund, which has raised barely nothing, even as he’s drowned in legal fees, on top of this billion dollar lawsuit — all for things he did for Trump.
Dominion, meanwhile, has kept filing lawsuits. They filed two more on Tuesday, one against One America News Network, the other against Newsmax Media Inc, for their role in spreading voter fraud misinformation involving them. The company has reportedly not ruled out the possibility of going after Trump, too.
(Via Reuters)