Top Trump lawyer sued for $1.3 billion

Sidney Powell, the lawyer who spearheaded outgoing US President Donald Trump's failed attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election result, has been sued for $1.3 billion by the American corporation that makes voting machines.

In the defamation suit filed on Friday, the Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems chronicled some 40 of Powell's public statements that spread "wild" and "demonstrably false" allegations, reports Xinhua news agency.

The "viral disinformation campaign" that Powell mounted "to financially enrich herself, raise her public profile, and ingratiate herself to Donald Trump", deeply damaged the reputation and resale value of Dominion, the suit said.

There are "mountains of direct evidence" disproving Powell's election fraud claims about the company's machines, that have resulted in "Dominion's founder, Dominion's employees, Georgia's governor, and Georgia's secretary of state" being harassed and receiving death threats," the 124-page lawsuit further said.

Dominion CEO John Poulos also said in a statement that the lawsuit aimed to clear his company's name through a full airing of the facts about the 2020 election.

Powell is best known for her defence of Enron Corp. executives Ken Lay and Tom Skilling, who bilked thousands of investors and employees out of around $60 billion in 2001, the New York Times reported in 2005.

Lay left behind "a legacy of shame" characterized by "mismanagement and dishonesty", Bloomberg news said in a repor, and in 2009, Portfolio.com ranked Lay as the third-worst American CEO of all time.

Powell, 65, now will be forced to defend her central role in the fantasy story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Ironically, Dominion systems were also used in many counties that voted for Trump, and all of Powell's lawsuits involving the fraud claims have failed in court due to lack of evidence.

For weeks, Powell claimed that Dominion was established with communist money in Venezuela to enable ballot-stuffing and other vote manipulation, and that those abilities were harnessed to rig the election for Joe Biden.