Dominion Winding Up Hard Against Powell
In case you're not bored with election news, Dominion is gearing up hard to sue Sidney Powell for defamation. See their demand letter.
To win a defamation lawsuit, you need to demonstrate both that 1) someone said something untrue about you and 2) you suffered actual damages from it. If you are considered a "public figure", you face the additional burden of demonstrating that the person who said the untrue thing did so with "actual malice".
Dominion's letter is notably robust compared to the median example in this area, and it's a fun read (e.g. "[Dominion] has no ties to the Chinese government, the Venezuelan government, Hugo Chavez, Malloch Brown, George Soros, Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster"). Defamation claims often make the news for just how pathetic paper tigers they are. This is a common complaint in civil arenas, particularly in the realm of people suing each other for negative online reviews or thin-skinned plaintiffs who don't like criticism. Here are some of the more notable examples:
Shiva Ayyadurai losing a lawsuit against a website which disputed Ayyadurai's claim that he invented email.
Rolling Stone lost a lawsuit against a dean implicated as complicit in a cover-up in their discredit story about a rape at UVA (this case is notable in that the dean was found to be a public figure but survived the "actual malice" hurdle).
Covington settlement with WaPo and CNN for how they reported on Nick Sandmann (by all appearances, an actually successful litigation by the now infamous Lin Wood).
Generally speaking, defamation lawsuits tend to fail for one of three reasons:
The allegedly defamatory claims are actually true
The allegedly defamatory claims are a matter of opinion
The allegedly defamed is a public figure, and no "actual malice" can be demonstrated.
It's been obvious for a while within legal circles that Sidney Powell's crusade against Dominion voting systems was going to open her up to legal liability. A significant majority of Republicans now believe the election was stolen. Regardless of whether that belief is premised on delusions, it's undeniable that even perfectly rational state officials would be extremely reluctant to retain or renew the services of Dominion for their elections. For a company focused entirely on such a niche market, this is undoubtedly going to significantly hurt their business.
So whether there were "actual damages" appears to be a foregone conclusion that Powell will inevitably lose. Powell can win if she can prove (or Dominion fails to prove, unsure who would have the burden) the claims she made were true (e.g. Hugo Chavez was indeed involved). Given her track record thus far I don't find that likely. The only likely path would be for a court to find that Powell did not act with "actual malice" in spreading her claims. That's a much more complicated analysis I'll leave to other experts.
I'm not the only to have noticed a significant chasm between the claims of election fraud made in press conferences, versus the ones made in court. Sidney Powell was one of the few counter-examples in that she's filing lawsuits that more or less match the claims she makes to the media. That consistency, however, appears to have opened her up for a world of legal hurt.
Update 12/18/21: Sidney Powell has apparently been prevented from talking to Trump. Karl Rove and Rudy Giuliani are both throwing her under the bus. At least two of Powell's submitted affidavits bear some startling resemblance, including identical grammatical errors, and one of the alleged affiants ("Spyder") is claiming that Powell's clerks had heavily edited whatever he wrote.
Meanwhile, news companies that had helped popularize the election fraud theory are backtracking. Lou Dobbs and some other anchors aired genuinely bizarre segments essentially repudiating claims they had either made directly, or invited others to make, about widespread voter fraud involving Dominion and Smartmatic. One example of this happening in real time is when Seb Gorka on Newsmax cut off the MyPillow guy just as he was about to lay into an election fraud rant.