Dominion Systems, the voting systems company at the center of conspiracies about the 2020 U.S. presidential race, has forced former President Donald Trump’s campaign to admit they knew all along the accusations made on election fraud were unfounded.

In its defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign, an internal memo was revealed that showed the campaign’s lawyers had already determined that the charges it lobbed at Dominion were false.

According to emails from Nov. 13, 2020, the Trump campaign's deputy director for communications reached out to staff to "substantiate or debunk" the allegations being made against Dominion. During the aftermath of Trump's loss to now-President Joe Biden, surrogates like lawyer Sidney Powell and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claimed that Dominion purposely changed votes in favor of Biden.

They alleged that Dominion was part of a vast, international conspiracy involving the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, liberal financier George Soros, and another voting tech company, Smartmatic, conspiring to unseat Trump from the presidency. Going further, the campaign and its surrogates also accused Dominion of being sympathetic to far-left activists for Antifa, who Trump has accused of being domestic terrorists.

What the memo shows is that no campaign staffer reached the conclusion that the claims were true. None of the nearly 60 election fraud lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign or its allies in the aftermath of the election were accepted by a court as legitimate. Judges in several of their suits lambasted the Trump legal team for their meritless arguments and chastised them for a lack of understanding of the Constitution.

It is not known if Trump knew about the memo, but the campaign communication team also showed no sign that the memo factored into its messaging. The conspiratorial charges that were spawned by the election continued past November and into the present by Trump, Giuliani and their associates, like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Giuliani, in a separate deposition, alluded to the existence of the memo but said it was his belief that those who drafted it wanted to see Trump defeated to “raise money.”

Dominion and Smartmatic both announced lawsuits seeking restitution for the reputational damages incurred by these conspiracy campaigns. Smartmatic has begun litigation against Fox Corp., Fox News Network, Giuliani and Powell for spreading lies about the company. Dominion announced its own multi-billion-dollar lawsuits but added Lindell, conservative news networks Newsmax and One America News, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne to their list.

Around the same time as the Dominion lawsuit revealed the memos, a federal judge admonished Powell and eight other Trump attorneys on Aug. 25 for their lies about the election and abuse of the litigation process.

“This case was never about fraud,” Judge Linda V. Parker wrote in her decision. “It was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”

Editor's note: The story when originally published incorrectly identified Patrick Byrne as the CEO of Overstock.com. He is the former CEO.

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