In August, Dominion Voting Systems sued former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne for $1.73 billion for his repeated false claims that the company’s voting machines helped to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Last month, Byrne moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
Dominion’s response to Byrne’s gambit does not pull any punches.
The filing rips Byrne for attempting to run from the “false and defamatory statements about Dominion” he pushed for several months. Dominion’s response lays out in detail each of Byrne’s claims they say are untrue and harmful:
Dominion’s voting software was built for Hugo Chávez to rig elections;
Dominion intentionally and purposefully designed and built its voting software to facilitate systemic election fraud;
Dominion machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden in the 2020 Presidential Election, including through the use of a secret algorithm, even in jurisdictions where Dominion machines were not used;
Dominion ran a rigged 2018 federal election in Dallas, Texas (a jurisdiction where Dominion machines were not even used);
Dominion allowed foreign countries, including China, to hack its voting machines during the 2020 Presidential Election and flip votes from Trump to Biden;
Dominion bribed senior officials in at least two states to win contracts to supply voting machines to those jurisdictions;
Dominion servers were used in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to steal votes for Hillary Clinton and that former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered because he knew it; and
Dominion ordered and paid for the illegal shredding of ballots from the 2020 Election.
Dominion says Byrne’s statements were made with malice because he “published claims that are so inherently improbable that only a reckless person could have believed them” and that Byrne manufactured fake evidence to support his narrative about election fraud.
”Byrne committed to tell lies about Dominion in August 2020. He continues to tell lies about Dominion today,” it concludes.
Shortly after the 2020 election, Byrne jumped on baseless claims of election fraud, claiming he had an army of “hackers and cyber sleuths” working to prove that Trump won instead of Joe Biden.
There is no evidence to support that claim. His election fraud claims culminated with an Oval Office meeting in December involving Trump, former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and lawyer Sidney Powell.
Earlier this year, Flynn and Byrne both spoke at the conspiracy-soaked WeCanAct conference in Salt Lake City.
Byrne resigned as CEO of Overstock in 2019 after publicly disclosing his relationship with alleged Russian spy Maria Butina, claiming his romantic involvement with her was at the behest of “Men in Black” and businessman Warren Buffett.
In addition to the suit against Byrne, Dominion has also filed multibillion-dollar lawsuits against Powell, Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Byrne has until Jan. 5 to respond.
