Valfusk under USA-valet 2020? Rapporterade incidenter.

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Ursprungligen postat av squeaky

Brave in the parking lot — not so brave in court’:
Sidney Powell trying to walk back her own legal filing should get an Olympic medal for gymnastics.

Actual malice is the legal standard established by the Supreme Court for libel cases to determine when public officials or public figures may recover damages in lawsuits against the news media. Beginning with the unanimous decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the Supreme Court has held that public officials cannot recover damages for libel without proving that a statement was made with actual malice — defined as “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/889/actual-malice

Powell Put Forward Conspiracy Theorists, Con Artists, and Other Facially Unreliable Sources as Experts

88. For example, Powell sponsored the declaration of an anonymous “military intelligence expert” code-named “Spyder,” who has since been identified as Josh Merritt. Powell’s “military intelligence expert” has now admitted that he never actually worked in military intelligence and that the declaration Powell’s team wrote for him to sign is “misleading” and he “was trying to backtrack” on it.

104. In order to bolster and lend credence to her false accusations about Dominion, Powell also touted “expert” witnesses who submitted declarations in support of her sham litigations, which Powell posted to her fundraising website. Powell’s so-called experts included Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, Russell Ramsland, William Briggs, Matt Braynard, and Navid Keshavarz-Nia.

Spoiler

105. According to a publicly available court order, Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman is a serial liar and con artist. After serving in the Navy for less than a year, Maras-Lindeman created a profile on Together We Served, an online veteran community, and falsely claimed an extensive military career—including that she had reached the rank of lieutenant, served in the Office of Naval Intelligence and in combat zones in the Republic of Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and was awarded multiple medals including a Purple Heart. In a recent fraud case, attorneys for the state of North Dakota said that Maras-Lindeman falsely claimed to be a doctor. They also said she used multiple aliases and social security numbers and created exaggerated online resumes as part of what they called “a persistent effort … to deceive others.”

They alleged that Maras-Lindeman organized a charitable event to raise funds for homeless shelters, a Catholic school, and a monument, but then used money she collected on purchases for herself at Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, QVC, and elsewhere. A judge ordered Maras-Lindeman to pay more than $25,000 after finding that she violated consumer protection laws by misspending money she raised and soliciting donations while misrepresenting her experience and education. Powell put Maras-Lindeman’s affidavit forward as evidence without even bothering to speak to her, whether to assess her credibility or otherwise. In addition, Powell either knew that she was putting forward the affidavit of a judicially adjudicated con artist, or Powell purposefully avoided checking the publicly available court order on the North Dakota Attorney General’s website confirming that Maras-Lindeman is exactly that.

150. In her media binder of “evidence,” Powell repackaged and published Ramsland’s disproven report on Antrim County, even though the publicly available facts disproving the report were included in Dominion’s retraction demand letter to Powell.

151. Powell’s media binder of “evidence” also repackaged and published the declaration of the discredited Josh Merritt—Powell’s purported “military intelligence expert” who never actually worked in military intelligence. But since Merritt had been discredited, Powell’s media binder puts his declaration forward as though it were written by someone else. Indeed, the only difference between the “new” declaration and Merritt’s declaration is the information about the declarant’s background; the rest of the declaration is substantively identical to Merritt’s.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20445919/dominion-libel-lawsuit-against-sidney-powell.pdf

Analyzed under these factors, and 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.

[...]

The highly charged and political nature of the statements likewise underscores their political and hence partisan nature. Powell alleged that “Democrats were trying to ‘steal the vote’
from Trump and that ‘they ha[d] developed a computer system to alter votes electronically.” She and others appeared at a rally called “Stop the Steal,” which the Complaint identifies as a “Georgia political rally.” She claimed that she had evidence that the election result was the “greatest crime of the century if not the life of the world.” Reasonable people understand that the “language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes … is often vituperative, abusive and inexact.” It is likewise a “well recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.”

Given the highly charged and political context of the statements, it is clear that Powell was describing the facts on which she based the lawsuits she filed in support of President Trump. Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as “wild accusations” and “outlandish claims.” They are repeatedly labelled “inherently improbable” and even “impossible.” Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process