Trump campaign knew Dominion fraud allegations were untrue, new memo suggests

A memo released Monday night as part of a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign suggests campaign officials "were aware early on" that many of their lawyers' election fraud claims against Dominion Voting Systems and election software company Smartmatic were untrue, The New York Times reports Tuesday.

The court papers, initially filed late last week in the suit spearheaded by former Dominion employee Eric Coomer, also indicate the officials were aware of the baseless allegations ahead of the "widely watched" Nov. 19 news conference, during which the campaign's legal team claimed Dominion, Smartmatic, financier George Soros, and Venezuela worked together to steal the election from former President Donald Trump. Even as Sidney Powell "and other lawyers attacked [Dominion] in the conservative media," it appears the campaign just "sat on its findings," per the Times.

The Nov. 14 memo, albeit "hastily assembled," reportedly found: (1) Dominion did not use Smartmatic voting technology in the 2020 election; (2) Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or Soros, as was then purported; (3) and there was no evidence Dominion's leadership was connected to left-wing "antifa" activists, as Powell and others also claimed, the Times writes.

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"The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion," wrote lawyers for Coomer, the former Dominion employee.

It is unclear if Trump himself ever saw the memo; "still, the documents suggest that his campaign's communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely." Read more at The New York Times.