Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani sued by owners of Dominion voting machines

US voting machine firm, Dominion Voting Systems, has filed a US$1.3 billion lawsuit against former president Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, accusing him of defamation.

Giuliani is the second lawyer in Trump circle to be sued by the firm, after Sidney Powell.

The company said it has sued over what it called Giuliani’s “big lie” campaign about widespread fraud in the presidential election, court documents on Monday showed.

A company spokesman in an interview with CNN on Monday night, did not rule out suing Trump himself.

In the earlier suit against Powell, it accused her of spreading false conspiracy theories about the election that Trump lost to Joe Biden.

A senior Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, also filed a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign, saying he had been driven into hiding because of death threats from Trump supporters.

Giuliani said in a statement that Dominion’s lawsuit was intended to intimidate others from exercising their free speech rights.

“Dominion’s defamation lawsuit for US$1.3 billion will allow me to investigate their history, finances, and practices fully and completely,” Giuliani said, adding that he may file a countersuit against the company for violating his rights.

Trump and his allies spent two months denying his election defeat, and claiming without evidence that it was the result of widespread voter fraud, before his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6.

Dominion, based in Denver, Colorado.is seeking US$1.3 billion in damages from Giuliani, the former New York mayor, alleging in the lawsuit that “he and his allies manufactured and disseminated the ‘Big Lie’, which foreseeably went viral and deceived millions of people into believing that Dominion had stolen their votes and fixed the election.”

Dominion said it filed the lawsuit “to set the record straight” and to “stand up for itself, its employees, and the electoral process”.