Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump's Election Lawyer Throws Him Under the Bus

Sidney Powell is trying a brazen and bizarre argument in defending herself against a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

March 23, 2021 at 6:30 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

The leopard print isn’t real either.
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

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Sidney Powell, one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers, is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation. Her lawyers have entered a truly astonishing defense: that her statements alleging the Democratic Party stole the election using the company’s vote counting software can’t be defamation because no reasonable person would have believed them.

The defense is legally wrong. Her statements were clearly assertions of fact — and they were believed by many members of the public.