“Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump. But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening. By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic.”

“The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue. The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.”

“Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found: That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election. That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros. And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing ‘antifa’ activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed. As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, ‘The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion’ and Mr. Coomer” – New York Times.