FILE — Sidney Powell, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, leaves the federal court in Washington, June 24, 2021. Trump-allied lawyer Sidney Powell and others hired a computer forensics team to copy data and software on election equipment in Coffee County, some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, according to invoices, emails, security video and deposition testimony produced in response to subpoenas in a long-running lawsuit (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File).
So-called “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell was instructed to provide Dominion Voting Systems with various and substantial documents in a discovery order issued by a federal court on Friday.
In the case, the initial lawsuit was filed by the voting machine business against Powell in January 2021 — alleging the Texas-based lawyer defamed the company by claiming they “rigged the election, that Dominion was created in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chávez, and that Dominion bribed Georgia officials for a no-bid contract.”
Since then, several additional claimants, counter-claimants, defendants, and plaintiffs have filed motions in no fewer than eight related cases. Along the way, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell was also sued, along with former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. Another voting machine company, Smartmatic, also filed some lawsuits.
As the procedural posture of the matter became increasingly complex, complicated, and unwieldy, the D.C. District Court noted in March of this year that various parties and cases had “consolidated and/or voluntarily coordinated for discovery related to this litigation.”
Disputes over discovery have been playing out between Powell and Dominion for quite some time.
In November 2023, Powell complained Dominion engaged in “document dumps” which negated the company’s “obligation to review its documents for relevance to this lawsuit, or produce them in a manner pursuant to which Powell can reasonably determine which documents are responsive to their discovery requests.”
The company fired back. In a filing, they insisted the 763 different requests for documents made by the five defendants in the case at the time were being handled efficiently. The company shrugged off objections from Powell and others that they declined to perform a “relevance” review and a “secondary responsiveness review.”
Dominion’s take on discovery went on, at length:
Plus, contrary to Defendants’ arguments, practically speaking it is unnecessary for Defendants to review all documents to locate ones they want. This is not the 1980s. Defendants are not reviewing documents one by one, by hand. Defendants are loading them into databases of their own, and because Dominion appropriately provided extensive metadata that allows Defendants to identify exactly the documents they want — through their own search terms, by time period, author, recipients, attachments, and all sorts of other criteria — their complaints ring hollow.
Fast-forward to this summer. Then, the case, originally before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols was handed over to Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya.
In early October, a discovery hearing was held.
Now, Powell has been ordered to respond to several requests lodged by Dominion on a variety of topics.
“Defendants Sidney Powell and Powell P.C. are hereby ORDERED to produce any of the requested documents that go to a theory other than punitive damages, such as actual malice,” the court’s order reads.
In other words, the court has ordered the pro-Donald Trump attorney to produce certain documents, which might support the idea she intentionally lied about Dominion when making the aforementioned false claims about the company in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
The court also ordered Powell to provide extensive financial details.
From the order, at length:
[T]he Powell Parties are further ORDERED to produce documents with the following additional specifications:
The Powell Parties shall produce the top line number of Ms. Powell’s income for each of the requested years.
The Powell Parties shall further produce financial records sufficient to show profits and losses with the right to redact only information that is plainly unrelated to this lawsuit (e.g., social security). The Parties shall meet and confer on a procedure for redactions.
Powell was ordered to comply with the court’s directives by Dec. 6.
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