Former President Donald Trump’s campaign reportedly acknowledged some of the claims it made about voting companies following the 2020 presidential election were false.
According to The New York Times, an internal memo released on Monday night that was crafted by Trump’s campaign determined the allegations against the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the software company, Smartmatic, were “untrue,” as the publication reports.
They created the memo before the November 19 press conference where the Trump campaign “laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump,” as the newspaper notes.
It was released along with court papers which were filed last week as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against the campaign by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer.
The Times reports the papers “contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.”
Noting the memo was “hastily assembled,” the Times continued, “It rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public.”
It found “that Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election, that Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros,” and “there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing ‘antifa’ activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed,” as the Times notes.
It is unclear if the former president had knowledge about the memo.
Last month, former Trump attorney Sidney Powell walked out of an interview after being pressed about her claims against the companies, as IJR previously reported.
Reporter Sarah Ferguson asked Powell, “Do you ever hear yourself and think it sounds ridiculous?”
She replied, “No, I know myself very well. I’ve been in me a long time. I know my reputation.”
