https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/politics/trump-d******n-v****g.amp.html


Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting e******n conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court
Sidney Powell, a lawyer allied with Donald J. Trump’s campaign, spoke at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters in November and pushed baseless claims of e******n tampering.

Sidney Powell, a lawyer allied with Donald J. Trump’s campaign, spoke at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters in November and pushed baseless claims of e******n tampering.Credit...Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Alan Feuer
Sept. 21, 2021, 2:11 p.m. ET
Two weeks after the 2020 e******n, 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 v****g machine company had worked with an e******n software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the p**********l 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, D******n V****g 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 D******n 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 D******n 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 e******n 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 D******n. 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 D******n did not use v****g technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 e******n.

That D******n had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.

And that there was no evidence that D******n’s leadership had connections to left-wing “a****a” 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 D******n” and Mr. Coomer.

More on Eric Coomer:
He Was the ‘Perfect Villain’ for V****g Conspir****ts
Eric Coomer had an e******n-security job at D******n V****g Systems. He also had posted anti-Trump messages on Facebook. What happened next ruined his life.
Aug. 24, 2021
Even at the time, many political observers and v**ers, 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 D******n 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.”

Eric Coomer, a former D******n V****g Systems employee, was accused of playing a role in a conspiracy to breach v****g machines and reverse the 2020 e******n’s outcome. Credit...Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated Press

Mr. Coomer, D******n’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 e******n, 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 e******n by hacking D******n’s v****g machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of c*******t 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 e******n was s****n from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the e******n was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of e******n f***d were “substantially true.”

And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 e******n was “essentially a bloodless c**p 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.

Trump’s Bid to Subvert the E******n
Card 1 of 4
A monthslong campaign. During his last days in office, President Donald J. Trump and his allies undertook an increasingly urgent effort to undermine the e******n results. That wide-ranging campaign included perpetuating false and thoroughly debunked claims of e******n f***d as well as pressing government officials for help.
Baseless claims of v***r f***d. Although Mr. Trump’s allegations of a s****n e******n have died in the courts and e******n 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 v**ed against certifying the e******n.
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 e******n 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 v**es.' As the president continued to refuse to concede the e******n, his most loyal backers proclaimed J*** 6, when Congress convened to formalize Mr. Biden's e*******l 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 e******n 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 D******n had conspired to steal the e******n, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state legislatures to overturn the popular v**e.

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 D******n 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 v***r f***d.

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 D******n for defamation. D******n has also brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false e******n 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 e******n results in Michigan using the false claims about D******n.

“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 e******n for Mr. Trump.

Even recently, the new court documents say, former Trump campaign officials have continued to cling to the baseless notion that the e******n 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 e******n w*s f********t, 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.