Dominion skewers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell's election claims as 'ludicrous, inherently improbable, and technologically impossible'

• Dominion called Powell and Giuliani's election claims "ludicrous, inherently improbable, and technologically impossible."
• The company is suing Fox News for defamation and seeking $1.6 billion in damages.
• Dominion accused Fox of giving Powell and Giuliani's claims airtime despite knowing they were lies.

Dominion Voting Systems said in a lawsuit against Fox News that GOP lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani's claims of election fraud were "ludicrous, inherently improbable, and technologically impossible."

The voting tech company is suing Fox News for defamation and seeking $1.6 billion in damages. In its complaint, Dominion noted that Powell and Giuliani repeatedly claimed the "election had been stolen by vote-flipping algorithms in Dominion machines that had been created in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chavez," who has been dead since 2013.

"As Fox well knew, Powell and Giuliani were facially unreliable sources and their claims were ludicrous, inherently improbable, and technologically impossible," the complaint said. "Powell was and is such an obviously unreliable source - and her claims about Dominion were so inherently improbable and outlandish - that those very same lies resulted in Tucker Carlson publicly mocking her for failing to produce evidence to support them."

Fox News is also facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting tech company that Giuliani, Powell, and others in former President Donald Trump's orbit repeatedly spread lies about on conservative airwaves. Among other things, they claimed Smartmatic owned Dominion (it doesn't, they're rival companies) and that the two colluded to tamper with voting machines and secretly switch votes from Trump to Biden.

Dominion said in its lawsuit that Fox and network hosts including Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs "at a minimum recklessly disregarded the fact-and indeed knew-that voters had used paper ballots that could be recounted by hand, and that Dominion was not owned by Smartmatic, rendering the fantasy of a vote-flipping-machine made for a deceased Venezuelan dictator nonsensical and verifiably false."

The complaint also highlighted Powell's fall from grace as her conspiracy theories about the election became increasingly untethered from reality.

"Even the Trump Campaign publicly distanced itself from her, with Trump loyalist Chris Christie calling her claims a 'national embarrassment,' and Republican senators calling the White House to say she seemed 'unhinged,'" the lawsuit said. "Indeed, at the White House itself, officials stated that Powell's claims were 'nonsense.'"

Powell is the defendant in another $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion. In a court filing last week, her lawyers argued that the case should be dismissed because "no reasonable person" takes her seriously.

"Even assuming, arguendo, that each of the statements alleged in the Complaint could be proved true or false, no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact," Powell's lawyers said.

Fox News said in a statement Friday: "Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court."

The Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits represent the biggest legal threat to Fox News to date. Other right-wing outlets like Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN), both of whom have also gotten legal notices from the voting tech companies, have put out statements distancing themselves from the conspiracy theories they aired and taken down articles which referenced them.

On Thursday, the Fox News primetime commentator Laura Ingraham also cut Trump off when he began spouting lies about election and voter fraud on her show.

"If you look at the numbers, the numbers were vastly in favor of us in the presidential election. It was disgraceful that they were able to get away with it. The Supreme Court didn't have the courage to do what they had to do," Trump said.

"Speaking as a lawyer," Ingraham interjected, "we're not going to relitigate the past."