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- Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Mike Lindell is “definitely” not its last, its CEO told CNBC.
- Lindell, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani had claimed Dominion’s voting machines helped “steal” the election.
- When asked if the company would sue Fox News, John Poulos said Dominion was “not ruling anyone out.”
- Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.
Dominion Voting System’s CEO said the company would continue to take legal action against people who spread baseless claims that its voting machines were used to “steal” the 2020 presidential election – and it isn’t ruling anyone out.
Dominion has already filed defamation lawsuits against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell and former president Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, seeking at least $1.3 billion in damages in each case.
The filing against Lindell on Monday “is definitely not the last lawsuit,” Dominion CEO John Poulos told CNBC Tuesday.
Dominion has sent cease-and-desist notices and warnings to preserve documents to more than 150 people, The Washington Post reported. This includes the media outlets Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News.
When asked if the company would sue Fox News, Poulos said Dominion was “not ruling anyone out.”
According a conspiracy theory, Dominion and Smartmatic, a rival election-technology company, developed technology that "flipped" votes from Trump to President Joe Biden through a method developed with the regime of now-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
The theory has been thoroughly debunked. But that didn't stop Powell and Giuliani pushing elements of the theory while filing a series of failed lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the election. Lindell has also spread misinformation about the machines, saying Dominion "built them to cheat."
A Fox News spokesperson told Insider earlier in February that the network ran several "fact-check" segments "prior to any lawsuit chatter." While several of its news shows reported that there was no evidence of Dominion's systems changing votes, Fox News, in particular its opinion hosts, "questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774 times" in the two weeks after the network called the race, according to Media Matters.
On February 4, Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News over election conspiracy theories, saying it had "damaged democracy worldwide." Fox News said it fairly reported and commented on "allegations in a hotly contested" election, and asked a judge to dismiss the defamation lawsuit.
Lindell was "reckless" in his peddling of disinformation
Lindell's claims were "absolute nonsense," Poulos told CNBC, adding that what the controversial CEO touted as evidence was actually "fake documents."
The voter-fraud theory, which Dominion calls "the Big Lie," had caused "devastating" reputational damage to the company, Poulos said.
But Americans can be "forgiven for believing [the claims]" because they were touted as facts, he said.
Despite naming both Lindell and MyPillow on the lawsuit, Poulos said Dominion doesn't want to put the pillow company out of business.
"The larger point is to get the facts on the table in front of a court of law where evidence is properly judged," he said. American voters could then understand what happened during the election, and how false Lindell's claims were, he said.
In the lawsuit, Dominion listed various promotional codes that MyPillow had used to offer discounts on his website, including "QAnon" and "FightforTrump."
Lindell uses the codes to lure people to MyPillow's website, Poulos told CNBC.
These codes show "just how reckless Mr Lindell was in his peddling of disinformation," he added.
In the lawsuit, Dominion said Lindell's voter-fraud claims have caused MyPillow's sales to surge by up to 40%.
But Lindell told Insider he expects to lose $65 million in pillow revenue this year because of boycotts from retailers, including Bed Bath and Beyond and Kohl's.