Tag: libel
Sidney Powell

Dominion Warns Powell Legal Action Is 'Imminent' As Employee Files Separate Lawsuit

Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos told Axios his company will be moving forward with a lawsuit against former Trump campaign attorney and conspiracy theorists Sidney Powell Monday.

"We were originally quiet and we sat back as a company," Poulos said. "Because our hope was that all of these claims would be filed in a process in court where procedure and evidence is important. And it's become clear to us that there is absolutely no interest to reveal this evidence because we know it doesn't exist. And there's no effort to actually put it in front of the court proceedings so that these allegations and all of the evidence can follow a proper process and be litigated right to the end."

But now the company will be moving forward with a lawsuit.

Poulos added that the companies focus will be on Powell and not the Trump campaign, as she has been "the most egregious and prolific purveyor of the falsities against Dominion," said the CEO. He also added that though there is no lawsuit yet, one is "imminent."

His statements come on the same day Eric Coomer, a Dominion employee in Colorado, filed a defamation lawsuit against both Powell and the Trump campaign, according to Reuters.

"Defendants, by their actions, have elevated Dr. Coomer into the national spotlight, invaded his privacy, threatened his security, and fundamentally defamed his reputation across this country," the lawsuit said.

Reuters attempted to reach out to the Trump campaign and Sidney Powell, but neither responded.

Powell received a letter from Dominion last month demanding she stops spreading "wild, knowingly baseless and false accusations" about the company's voting machines, according to the New York Times. Specifically, Dominion "demanded that Ms. Powell publicly disavow several false claims she has repeated in the past few weeks. She has maintained, for instance, that Dominion machines and their software were created in Venezuela to help the country's now-deceased former president, Hugo Chavez, win elections," reported The Times.

Dominion insists that they have absolutely no connection to Venezuela, to Hugo Chavez, or "Big Foot or the Loch Ness monster," as the letter notes.

They also demanded that Powell "retract false statements she has made suggesting that the company paid kickbacks to officials in Georgia for 'no-bid contracts' to use its machines and that it manipulated votes in 'an effort to rig the 2020 election," according to the Times. These claims also have no merit.

"The level of falsity has reached a level which I had not previously thought possible," Poulos told Axios.

According to a separate New York Times article, the legal threats by Dominion and its management are serious. Floyd Abrams, one of the country's most prominent First Amendment lawyers, told the Times that the letter Dominion sent to Powell is "extremely powerful." Abrams added, "The repeated accusations against both companies are plainly defamatory and surely have done enormous reputational and financial harm to both."

Trump’s War With the Media Has Begun And We’ve Seen Nothing Yet

Trump’s War With the Media Has Begun And We’ve Seen Nothing Yet

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Less than 24 hours after being sworn in, Donald Trump declared the first war of his presidency—on the media.

At CIA headquarters Saturday morning, Trump immediately brought up the “dishonest media,” then transitioned into praise for the agency he said was going to destroy ISIS, then resumed trashing the press, first for saying he didn’t get along with America’s spies (he called them “Nazis” last week), and then for the inaugural coverage.

“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media,” Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth… We had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field.”

Trump didn’t stop there—even though his inaugural attendance was lower than President Obama’s, according to numerous overhead photo comparisons. He lambasted Time magazine for saying his staff had removed a bust of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office, saying it was hidden behind a cameraman.

“Now, the big story—the retraction was, like, where?” Trump said. “Was it a line? Or do they even bother putting it in? So I only like to say that because I love honesty. I like honest reporting.”

Trump’s tirade didn’t stop there. Hours later, Sean Spicer, his press secretary, called the White House press corps into the James S. Brady briefing room in the White House (which last weekend they threatened to close) and lectured them for “deliberately false reporting” on the crowd size and the MLK bust.

“There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable,” Spicer said. “And I’m here to tell you that it goes two ways. We’re going to hold the press accountable, as well.”

The first war under Trump’s presidency is with the press and it’s escalating. It’s not just floating the idea that the White House pressroom may move. It’s not just last week’s pre-inaugural press conference where Trump labeled Buzzfeed and CNN “fake media.” It’s not just his latest tweets criticizing celebrities who don’t like him, or dismissing the millions of women (and men) who marched to protest his presidency on Saturday.

These incidents all raise a serious question: what’s going to happen to the First Amendment with a bully in the pulpit?

The answer, according to a handful of lawyers specializing in First Amendment and press issues, is that Trump is primed to use his office’s great power to intimidate, obstruct, censor, spy on and silence the media. In the most visible instances, bullying, the president faces no restrictions on his speech, regardless of its truth or who he victimizes.

“He can say whatever he wants using whatever means he chooses,” said James Goodale, chief counsel for the New York Times during the Pentagon Papers case and a leading legal expert on the First Amendment, when asked if Trump faces any restrictions on presidential speech and adding that he cannot be sued for his outbursts.

The Bully

But the damage is likely to go deeper and escalate in far more serious ways than a mere war on words.

“Our soon-to-be president could weaken the American system of free expression… [with] techniques that involve weakening and undermining the institutions and practices that enable public opinion to check state power and legitimate our system of democracy,” wrote Jack Balkin, the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, in a prescient article late last year.

Baklin listed five likely abuses of the presidential podium, most of which we’ve already seen from Trump and his aides. They start with the fact that Trump is a habitual liar. Trump “has found a way to lie so boldly and so frequently that it’s virtually impossible to hold him to account,” he said. “If politicians lie all the time, and never pay a price for it, there’s no reason to believe any promises they make.”

Next was the related propaganda technique called “gaslighting,” Balkin said, or “creating a false reality and causing the public to doubt what is actually true or false. By making everything uncertain and a matter of ideological perspective, government officials stoke anger and distrust in elite institutions on the one hand, and produce cynicism, resignation and despair on the other.”

That’s what spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway did this earlier month when she told CNN to stop listening to Trump’s literal words and trust what was in his heart—as if a president-elect’s words have no literal meaning.

As Melik Kaylan, a longtime reporter who has covered authoritarian regimes noted in Forbes, such intentional chaos is a reality TV ploy that also serves political strongmen. He drew on comments to MSNBC by Michael Hirschhorn, a top reality TV producer, that such gaslighting helps authoritarian regimes, because, like a TV series that never ends, “you don’t resolve disputes; you foster them endlessly to retain public attention… You stay entertained but confused, paranoid even. That’s why you need [leaders like] me.”

While that fact-blurring dynamic is becoming the ‘new normal’ under Trump, there are other ways he can go after the media, Balkin wrote, anticipating what we keep seeing. Trump and his team can deny access, or threaten it by closing a West Wing briefing room, and require journalists to take drug tests, as Esquire reported. He can stonewall or not release information, as voters saw with his income tax returns during the campaign, or by not giving media access to administration paper and electronic records.

Most disturbing, Balkin said, was that Trump can use federal surveillance tools against journalists.

“These institutions constructed formal and informal rules and norms designed to prevent abuse by the White House,” he said, referring to the FBI, CIA and NSA. “But as Richard Nixon’s presidency demonstrated, these rules and norms don’t always work, and given enough time, a determined president can chip away at or circumvent many of them.”

This is not a hypothetical threat, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Raymond Pryke, professor of First Amendment Law at the University of California Irvine School of Law, in a paper sent to AlterNet. Trump’s hostility to the press is well established, he wrote, giving the best-known examples of going after a disabled New York Times reporter, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly and Kelly Tur of NBC. “The Trump campaign denied press credentials to media that criticized him, including the Washington Post and Politico. His statements about [weakening] libel law also reflect his lack of understanding of the law and the First Amendment.”

On the libel front—where the press can be dragged into court to face accusations of intentionally publishing incorrect and damaging information—the press has less to worry about, the First Amendment lawyers said. On the other hand, they face very real worries about executive branch surveillance and spying.

“Trump can’t change the libel laws. The libel laws are created by state legislatures and are subject to constitutional limitation,” said Goodale. But Goodale said Trump could go after journalists to force them to reveal their sources.

Indeed, Trump has already tried to do this, pressuring NBC to reveal who inside the intelligence community leaked critical documents about him. “If the federal government subpoenas reporters who do not wish to testify about their sources they can go into contempt and defy Trump,” Goodale wrote, adding that was not always successful. “[The New York Times’] Judith Miller tried this and lost. [The Times’] James Risen defied the government and won (they decided not to hold him in contempt).”

Shockingly, it is President Obama who has given Trump a blueprint for going after leakers to the media and sources, Chemerinsky said, by using the Espionage Act of 1917, a broad law allowing prosecution for disclosing national security information. “Since its enactment, 12 prosecutions have been brought for disclosure of information, and nine in those were during the Obama administration.”

“There is no First Amendment right for a reporter to keep a source confidential,” he said. “Many states, like California, have shield laws that allow for this, but there is no such law at the federal level. This gives the president a powerful tool to harass and intimidate the press.”

The First Amendment lawyers agreed that the stakes are enormous, because the media—whether mainstream reporters, alternative press, blogs or social media—function as the Constitution’s check and balance against political tyranny.

On a more day-to-day level, Trump’s deepening war with the media means the public is going to have to get used to a president who lies, distorts, bullies, and evades. Meanwhile, the media is going to have to get used to being threatened, hounded and likely spied on—and possibly prosecuted—when they dare speak truth to power in Trump’s America.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s democracy and voting rights.

IMAGE: Press Secretary Sean Spicer deliver an statement at the press briefing room at the White House in Washington U.S., January 21, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

<em>National Review</em> Is In Deep Trouble

<em>National Review</em> Is In Deep Trouble

The late William F. Buckley’s journalistic baby, National Review, is in deep legal trouble.

This week it asked subscribers like me for donations to pay lawyers fending off a libel suit. Those legal bills, even before a trial it may well lose, could sink the leading right-wing journal in America, The Weeksays.

Progressives, liberals, conservatives and middle-of-the-roaders should all care about this, but not for the reasons National Review cites.

The magazine’s January 27 issue asserts “at stake most narrowly is the question of whether [climate scientist Michael] Mann’s work can be vigorously criticized, and more broadly is the fate of free speech in an increasingly politically correct society.”

Nonsense. Not to mention bad writing and editing.

National Review mischaracterizes both the facts and the import of the issues in a way that has come to define the magazine since 1997 under editor Rich Lowry.

All that is at stake here are the business interests of National Review, Lowry, writer Mark Steyn and the other defendants — as well as, of course, the wrongly maligned Dr. Mann.

Libel lawsuits are notoriously difficult to win, as they should be.

But Mann has powerful allies: facts, independent investigations that found “no basis” for any accusation of intellectual dishonesty and, perhaps most significantly, the studied refusal by both the magazine and Steyn to acknowledge error and correct the record.

In a 2012 post still available at National Review Online, Steyn reprinted an already discredited quote that compared Mann, who teaches at Penn State, to assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, the serial child rapist who was protected by college administrators.

The quoted language included this:

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of political science, except that instead of molesting children he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.

Steyn then slightly distanced himself from this quote before writing that Mann was “behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus” and musing that “if an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up?”

Lowry refused Mann’s request to take down the post, writing a month later that rather than suggesting criminality, Steyn was “savagely witty and stung poor Michael” by exposing “intellectually bogus and wrong” research reports.

If Mann filed suit against National Review, Lowry concluded, he “risks making an ass of himself.”

We all make mistakes. When journalists err our duty is prompt, forthright and candid correction, not piling on.

National Review is in trouble because its minimalist “reporting” combined with lightweight analysis was compounded by Lowry’s conduct.  Not owning up to these mistakes was not just unprofessional. It was stupid.

Would that Lowry and his writers attended any of my frequent lectures on how to report. They could learn not just interviewing and fact-gathering techniques, but what I call the first three rules of journalism:

Rule One: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Rule Two: Crosscheck and crosscheck until the facts are bolted down solid.

Rule Three: Put those facts in their proper place in the universe.

National Review’s assertion that “the state of free speech” depends on the outcome of Mann’s lawsuit is ludicrously out of proportion.

And Mann’s lawsuit is not about being “vigorously criticized,” but National Review’s disregard for facts.

I have been reading National Review since my teens, one of more than 40 magazines I take that provide a vast array of perspectives on many subjects.

Now and then over the last half-century I agreed with National Review. But, sadly, ever since editor Lowry took charge, it’s mostly laughter — derisive laughter.

When the online version got facts about me wrong years ago I called seeking a correction. No one who answered knew what to do or had authority to correct. Eventually I got Lowry on the phone, who promptly made clear that no correction would be made. He told me he saw no contradiction between that stance and his (and his magazine’s) frequent criticisms of other journals over their facts.

So why should those who see the world through a different lens care?

Well, not because National Review could go out of business. Should that happen a new publication would spring up to replace it. Many very wealthy Americans of all political stripes give money to make sure the marketplace of ideas includes viewpoints they favor.

Nor does any reason exist for those who care about integrity in journalism, be it straight news or opinion, to mourn.

But that is exactly the point.

The problem is that National Review is so lightweight that it’s easy to mock. And the same holds true in varying degrees for Fox News, Paul Gigot’s opinion pages in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, Emmett Tyrell’s conspiratorial American Spectator and the nutty reports on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Thankfully there exist The American Conservative and the libertarian monthly Reason, with its provocative substance.

America needs first-rate publications that articulate conservative perspectives by marshaling hard facts and sound logic. It needs right-wing publications as steeped in reporting, and just as political, as The Nation and Mother Jones.

Instead, we get an array of conservative outlets worthy mostly of ridicule. (There are, to be clear, plenty of loonies on the left and with ambiguous perspectives, but they are sideshows, not dominant.)

Those not on the far right need quality conservative publications against which to develop, refine and test their own ideas.

Just as Toyotas and Hondas made Americans aware of how much better inexpensive cars could be, forcing Detroit to do better, serious right-wing journalism would produce better political ideas from the majority of the political spectrum. Journalistic Yugos and Gazelles don’t improve the competition.

One result of intellectual vacuity on the right is that too many progressive ideas for a better America are not thoroughly vetted.

The flint-eyed scrutiny that Charles Peters has campaigned for since launching The Washington Monthly in 1969, and which has influenced my work, needs a counterpart on the right.  Conservatives need a journalist with a Peters-like skepticism to criticize allies so they do their best.

The path to a better America will never be drawn with the smoothness of the Laffer curve. The struggle to make tomorrow better will always be a story of ups and downs. But without a real contest of ideas America will never fulfill its promise of enabling the human spirit to flourish.

So, no, I will not be sending a check to help save National Review from its own folly. My money is better spent supporting the tiny San Francisco Public Press, which does the revealing investigative journalism that the Chronicle has never provided the city of my birth.

But I will donate to a serious, well-run and conservative magazine equal to what Charles Peters gave us. I hope you will, too. And I’ll renew my National Review subscription, if only for the laughs.

Photo: Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington D.C., accepting the “Robert Novak Conservative Journalism Award” on behalf of Jonah Goldberg. (Gage Skidmore via Flickr)

DSK Victim Sues New York Post For Libel

Over the weekend, the New York Post published sensational allegations that the maid allegedly raped by Dominique Strauss-Kahn had “turned tricks on the taxpayers’ dime,” working as a prostitute while under the protective custody of the New York District Attorney’s office. Today, the AP reports that the victim has sued the Post for libel.

The New York City hotel maid at the center of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex assault case has filed a libel lawsuit against the New York Post after it called her a prostitute. The woman’s lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, filed the claim Tuesday in Bronx state Supreme Court. A series of Post articles over the weekend said the 32-year-old was a “prostitute,” and “hooker” and that she “traded sex for money.”