Rudy and the "Big Lie"
One week ago today, Dominion Voting Systems made good on its threat to sue Rudy Giuliani for defamation, demanding that President Trump’s personal lawyer be made to pay $1.3 billion in damages for spreading a “Big Lie” about Dominion fixing the election for President Joe Biden. If it feels like it’s been longer than a week, it’s probably because Dominion’s lawsuit dropped amid ongoing revelations about the wild beliefs of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and just before news of the insane GameStop bubble that cost Wall Street hedge funds tens of billions of dollars and made Dominion’s $1.3 billion lawsuit look small in comparison.
But take a step back and all of this news is connected to one inescapable theme that runs through the 107 pages of allegations Dominion is leveling against Giuliani. It’s a theme that will be familiar to anyone following American politics in recent years or even just the stock market last week: when people abandon rational inquiry in favor of “It just feels right” justifications, when they rely on shoddy “evidence” to support pre-conceived notions, when they cherry pick a few convenient facts while ignoring larger truths—well, things can get real crazy real fast, especially when the internet is involved.
So it’s worth digging into the Dominion vs. Giuliani allegations, which aim to document how former President Trump’s personal lawyer used all of these misinformation-brewing strategies, amplified them via digital media and friendly cable television networks, and thereby pushed his lies about the election being stolen. If true, the events described in Dominion’s lawsuit could offer a consequential lesson in how a series of destined-to-go-viral falsehoods whipped people into a frenzy of escalating actions, climaxing, in this particular case, with the deadly assault of the US Capitol.
It seems possible this lawsuit will also introduce a concept that’s been severely lacking in recent years as politically-motivated liars have abused the current media environment, their positions of authority, and people’s trust: consequences.
Giuliani, in response to Dominion’s allegations, has said the effort is just “another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left-wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech,” and he’s threatened a countersuit, warning: “I’m a pretty good investigator.”
But it is precisely Giuliani’s status as a man who should be a good investigator that Dominion is now using against him in federal district court in Washington, DC.
The voting machine company is arguing that as a former federal prosecutor, Giuliani either knew his conspiracy theories about Dominion flipping votes from Trump to Biden were false, or he “recklessly” failed to check the veracity of claims he was peddling. (Claims that in some cases could be disproved with “a basic Google search,” the lawsuit contends.)
In the process, Dominion alleges, Giuliani and others “manufactured and disseminated the ‘Big Lie,’ which foreseeably went viral and deceived millions of people into believing that Dominion had stolen their votes and fixed the election.”
In addition to damaging Dominion’s reputation, harming its business, and generating threats to its employees’ lives, another result of this “Big Lie,” according to Dominion, was that on January 6, “having been deceived by Giuliani and his allies into thinking that they were not criminals,” a mob of people who saw themselves as “patriots” defending America from a Dominion-linked coup gathered for a rally in DC and “took the fight from social media to the United States Capitol.”
As chilling as Dominion’s recounting of these events is, Giuliani’s bizarre theories, when picked apart using the cool logic of legal filings, also end up looking comically absurd. (Giuliani has yet to formally respond to the filings.)
For example, while Giuliani repeatedly and loudly claimed over the last several months that Dominion is a Venezuelan company founded by Hugo Chávez to steal elections, “Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chávez,” the company’s lawyers write. Rather, the lawsuit explains, “it was founded in 2002 in John Poulos’s basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.” Later, it grew into the major elections infrastructure company it is today.
Even as Giuliani has promoted his false theories, Dominion notes, the former federal prosecutor “has not explained how—if Dominion were actually controlled by the associates of a Venezuelan dictator—it was permitted to operate in the United States by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.”
And that’s just the start of things Giuliani has not explained, according to Dominion. He’s also failed to explain “how a decades-old international election-rigging conspiracy involving independent testing labs accredited by the [U.S. Election Assistance Commission] and thousands of bipartisan local election volunteers could have evaded detection for so long,” the suit says.
“Nor,” the suit continues, “has Giuliani explained how—if Dominion were willing and able to commit a massive fraud to deprive Trump of the presidency—Trump won the presidential election in 2016, when Dominion machines were used in 1,635 jurisdictions in more than two dozen ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states.”
Perhaps most disturbing, though, is the familiarity of the multi-step con Giuliani is alleged to have employed to generate his supposed evidence of widespread, Dominion-linked election tampering.
The con described in the lawsuit goes something like this: Step one, find someone else who’s willing to publicly make a wild claim. Step two, use your credibility and platforms to declare that person to be an “expert.” Step three, present that newly minted expert’s ideas as “evidence” that urgently needs to be heard in the court of public opinion.
(But not necessarily in actual court. As the Dominion lawsuit reminds, “after Giuliani had repeatedly gone on television and online to falsely accuse Dominion of election fraud,” he “admitted during a court hearing in Pennsylvania that the Trump Campaign ‘doesn’t plead fraud’ and that ‘this is not a fraud case.’”)
As an example of the expert evidence con, the Dominion lawsuit digs into Giuliani’s specific claims about vote-flipping in the State of Michigan. In one Michigan county, the Election Night results initially showed Joe Biden winning because of “a series of human errors” by the county clerk, the lawsuit explains. In fact, Trump had won the county.
The error was quickly corrected and the Michigan Secretary of State determined there was no evidence of foul play. But, “intentionally disregarding the announcement from the Secretary of State, Giuliani seized on the mundane reality of the clerk’s human error and intentionally distorted it to fit the false preconceived narrative that Dominion had fixed the election,” the lawsuit alleges.
On top of that, Giuliani claimed his accusations were backed up by a “forensic expert.”
Who was this so-called expert? From the lawsuit:
As Giuliani was well aware when he made those false claims, the purported “forensic expert” was Russell Ramsland—a “Deep State” conspiracy theorist in cahoots with Sidney Powell who was selected not because Ramsland had election security expertise, but because he was determined to promote the false preconceived narrative that the election had been fixed.
Before Giuliani touted Ramsland’s expertise, Ramsland had publicly claimed, among other things, that George Soros helped form the “Deep State” in Nazi Germany in the 1930s—along with President George H.W. Bush’s father, the Muslim Brotherhood, and “leftists.” Mr. Soros was born in 1930.
Moreover, by the time Giuliani touted Ramsland as a “forensic expert” and specifically referenced the “forensic review” from Ramsland and his “very reputable company,” Ramsland had been publicly discredited for making false claims of overvoting in Michigan, which Ramsland based on vote counts from an entirely different state—Minnesota.
It goes on. The lawsuit even delves into the particulars of Ramsland’s claims about Dominion’s vote-counting machines and Michigan’s Antrim County, alleging that his claims represent “gross misunderstandings” of how Dominion’s machines and software actually work and plainly demonstrate that “he is no expert at all.” The lawsuit also points out that Ramsland himself cited “experts” to back up his allegations, but declined to identify “a single one.”
“Given Giuliani’s tenure as a federal prosecutor, he is well aware of how to evaluate the credentials of a purported expert and the reliability of a purported expert report,” Dominion argues. “Despite these facts, Giuliani falsely passed Ramsland off as a reputable forensic expert with the expertise needed to produce a legitimate forensic report on Dominion’s machines.”
For a lot of people, the experience of being sued for $1.3 billion would be bracing. On Friday, just five days after Dominion’s suit hit federal court, Giuliani went on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast to promote a new theory. With his client, former President Trump, awaiting a Senate impeachment trial—and he himself facing potential disbarment—Giuliani claimed on Bannon’s show that the Capitol Hill insurrection could be traced to The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans. As evidence, he cited “anonymous sources.”
Bannon protested: “You can’t throw a charge out there like that and then say, ‘Yeah, I got a double secret probation guy who I can’t mention.” Soon, the Lincoln Project was threatening to sue Giuliani for defamation (along with Bannon and “Giuliani’s client,” Trump). In a scathing letter to Giuliani, the Lincoln Project demanded a retraction and an apology by this Wednesday. “Refuse at your peril,” the group’s lawyer wrote. “You will never again be America’s Mayor, but there still may be time to save some of the cash that you pawned your credibility for, should Dominion Voting Systems ultimately leave you with any.”
Cash, by the way, is also a motivation Dominion sees for Giuliani’s behavior.
“Giuliani reportedly demanded $20,000 per day for that Big Lie,” Dominion says in its lawsuit. “But he also cashed in by hosting a podcast where he exploited election falsehoods to market gold coins, supplements, cigars, and protection from ‘cyberthieves.’”
Right now there are a number of legal fights that could shape the future of how we talk about politics online. But even with no internet companies named as parties to Dominion vs. Giuliani, this suit is among them. That’s because this case has the potential to reverse the sense that great financial rewards await online speakers who behave as Giuliani is alleged to have behaved.
Defamation suits are not new in this country. They’re not even new for speech conducted wholly or partly online. But for a viral “Big Lie” that allegedly led to a historic breakdown in America’s peaceful transition of presidential power to be slowly, methodically, and very publicly unraveled through a federal defamation trial, and then punished with a huge financial penalty that stands as a warning to those who might try to monetize digital lies in the future—that would be very new.
Some of the stories I’ve been reading this week:
• “Replacing the small-town paper” — How local election outcomes can be shaped by Nextdoor, “a platform best known for helping neighbors find a good plumber or a lost cat.”
• “Vengeance” — About online reputation destruction, and how hard it is to overcome.
• “The First Amendment is broken” — Another must-read by Emily Bazelon.
• “$65 million to lobby Washington” — What Big Tech spent last year.
• “Baked Alaska” — A Twitter troll is arrested and accused of tricking 4,900 Democrats into trying to vote for Hillary Clinton by text in 2016.
• “Pressure builds” — Why Biden may revive federal net neutrality rules.
• “Digital Fascism” — The phrase is part of Turkey’s justification for banning Twitter ads in that country.
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