Federal Judge Denies Dominion's Dismissal of Defamation Lawsuits against Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.Each case, which seeks more than $1.3 million in damages, will be heard in its entirety.Loading something is loading. Click Sign up to receive marketing emails and other offers from Insider.On Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington, DC denied motions by Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, MyPillow CEO, seeking to dismiss defamation suits brought against them jointly by Dominion Voting Systems.Dominion sued Powell, Giuliani and MyPillow. They claimed $1.3 billion in damages. The lawsuits were filed in January and February.Each defendant asked US District Judge Carl J. Nichols for a dismissal of the lawsuits. Nichols heard arguments in the matter during a 4-hour marathon hearing in June.This ruling means that Dominion Voting Systems' multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against Powell, Giuliani, and Lindell will be fully filed.Three former Trump allies promoted false conspiracy theories regarding Dominion's involvement in the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani, Powell and their lawyers, both of them working for Trump's campaign, falsely claimed that Dominion was secretly established in Venezuela and manipulated the election results as part a plot set in motion first by Hugo Chavez, now-dead Venezuelan dictator. Mike Lindell claims that Dominion was hacked by an international consortium. He continues to make those claims and hosts a "cyber symposium."Nichols' decision comes just days after Dominion filed three more lawsuits against right-wing media networks One America News, Newsmax, and Newsmax. Dominion also accuses them of spreading false theories and Patrick Byrne, former Overstock CEO. Fox News has been sued by Dominion over these claims. Smartmatic has also been implicated in false conspiracy theories regarding election results.Dominion gets the green light to sue them.Wednesday's ruling shows that Dominion may not have met the high standards of defamation litigation brought to them by public figures.Although the laws governing defamation vary from one state to the next, they all require that the defendant prove that he acted with "reckless disregard" for the truth.Nichols ruled Dominion could have the cases tried as Dominion requested. A jury could find that Powell, Giuliani and Lindell were reckless in asserting Dominion "flipped” election results from Trump to Vice-President Joe Biden.Her lawyers argued that Powell's claims were exaggerated and made during a heated political debate. They also claimed that her unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn election results were based upon sworn statements. Nichols ruled "there is no blanket immunity to statements that are political in nature" and that the affidavits that she included, such as the one by Spyder, are absurd.Nichols ruled that the "Dominion alleges" that Powell's "evidence" was falsified by Powell, misrepresented, cherry-picked or so clearly unreliable that Powell either knew it was false or had recklessly disregard for truth.While setting up a polling place at an elementary school in Gwinnett County Georgia, a worker passes through a Dominion Voting scanner. AP Photo/Ben GrayNichols pointed out that Powell could have falsified sections of affidavits and that the "expert" she cited was clearly a conspirator."This expert also claimed publicly that George Soros (President George H.W. Nichols stated that Bush's father was the Muslim Brotherhood and that 'leftists" helped to form the Deep State' in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. This would have been an extraordinary feat for Soros who was born in 1930.Nichols pointed out that Lindell used the same "expert" to support his conspiracy theories. Nichols noted that Lindell claimed to have evidence that election machines had been hacked. However, the spreadsheets he provided did not support this claim."As a matter of preliminary, a reasonable juror might conclude that there is a large international conspiracy."Nichols stated that the government ignored it, but a spreadsheet posted on an internet blog proved it was so unlikely that even a fool would believe it."
