Government

Dominion Voting Sues Newsmax, OAN, The Overstock Weirdo For $1.6 Billion

Good luck collecting that judgment.

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Dominion Voting Systems added to its impressive roster of post-election defamation suits today, adding claims against conservative television channels Newsmax and One America News (OAN), as well as noted wingnut about town Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com.

Seeking upwards of $1.6 billion in each filing, Dominion outlines a broad conspiracy to defame the company by relentlessly pushing a false narrative that it deliberately rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden. Presumably when Donald Trump promised to “open up our libel laws,” this is probably not what he meant.

Like the parties, each of the lawsuits is its own crazy funhouse of wackassery. Defendants in the OAN suit include the network’s founder, Robert Herring Sr., his son Charles, and anchors Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb.

Rion, who made her name as a Seth Rich conspiracy theorist, spent much of 2019 touring Ukraine with Rudy Giuliani to assemble “evidence” against Joe Biden, and even claimed to have been pursued by George Soros in person. She has now graduated to election conspiracy theories, and strongly supports the Arizona “fraudit,” along with Christina Bobb. Rion and Bobb are both on the board of Voices and Votes, an organization which raised private funds to support the recount debacle. But this was no obstacle to covering the recount in breathless detail, because these are very serious journalists.

The complaint alleges that the network hyped debunked claims about Dominion switching votes via algorithm, despite the fact that the company’s machines leave an auditable paper trail, and that it put discredited figures like Sidney Powell, Mike “My Pillow” Lindell, Rudy Giuliani, and Patrick Byrne on the air to slander the company.

The suit contains numerous fun Easter eggs, like this one:

Ed Solomon was portrayed by OAN on its network as an alleged “expert mathematician.” In reality, however, he is a convicted felon who, at the time he was interviewed by OAN, was working as an “installer” at a swing set construction company in Long Island.

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Sounds legit!

Dominion argues that OAN deliberately chose to air those lies in a ploy to both get to the right of Fox, which pissed off its own viewers when it functionally called the election for Biden on November 3 by acknowledging the reality of his win in Arizona, and to curry favor with Donald Trump and his supporters.

It’s a claim echoed in the Newsmax suit, which was filed in the Superior Court of Delaware, unlike the others which were docketed in federal court in DC.

During and after the November 2020 election, Newsmax saw a business opportunity. Spurred by a quest for profits and viewers, Newsmax—a competitor to media giant Fox—engaged in a race to the bottom with Fox and other outlets such as One America News Network (OAN) to spread false and manufactured stories about election fraud. Dominion quickly became the focus of this downward spiral of lies, as each broadcaster attempted to outdo the others by making the lies more outrageous, spreading them further, and endorsing them as strongly as possible.

And while the Newsmax complaint doesn’t name the on-air talent as defendants, it specifically calls out hosts Greg Kelly and Grant Stinchfield, both for their own statements and for repeatedly hosting guests like Lindell and Powell to make slanderous claims which had already been widely debunked.

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The suit against Patrick Byrne is the oddest of a the bunch, because Byrne is an extremely weird dude. The New Yorker has an amazing profile, but TL,DR, the FBI caught him having an affair with Russian agent Maria Butina, an affair he says he continued at the FBI’s behest for secret spy reasons, although he claims to have turned down a request by the agency to deliver an $18 million bribe to Hillary Clinton so that Barack Obama could “control” her when she became president. It was then that he was asked to leave the company he founded, so it could get back to selling furniture without the taint of … well, all of that.

Here’s the very first paragraph of the Byrne complaint.

After blowing up his career at Overstock by having an affair with a Russian spy, Patrick Byrne soon found himself a new pet project: promoting the false narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen. In fact, as Byrne has publicly admitted, he had already committed to that narrative three months before the election took place. After the election, Byrne manufactured and promoted fake evidence to convince the world that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a massive international conspiracy among China, Venezuelan and Spanish companies, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), prominent Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Dominion, which, Byrne falsely claimed, committed fraud and helped steal the 2020 presidential election.

Giddyup! It’s the addition of Chief Justice Roberts that ties the whole room together — the perfect accessory.

It’s not clear that any of these parties have anything approaching $1.6 billion in assets. After the election, there were rumors of an offer by Team Trump to buy Newsmax for $200 million. There were similar reports of an offer to buy OAN for $250 million and turn it into a vehicle for the former president. And Byrne is a wealthy man, but he’s probably not a billionaire.

It’s a shitshow, and it’s just getting started.

US Dominion Inc v. Byrne [Docket via Court Listener]
US Dominion Inc. v. Herring Networks, Inc. [Docket via Court Listener]
US Dominion Inc. v. Newsmax Media Inc. [Complaint via Law & Crime]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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