in a defamation suit brought by Dominion by claiming that "no reasonable person would conclude that her statements were truly statements of fact."[240]
By January 6, 2021, President Trump's claims regarding Dominion had been debunked time and again. The President knew, or should have known, that he had no basis for alleging that Dominion's voting machines had cost him the election.
THE STATE FARM ARENA VIDEO
President Trump also recklessly promoted allegations that video footage from a ballot counting center in Fulton County, Georgia, was proof of major election fraud. He was repeatedly informed that these allegations were false, but he pressed them anyway.
On December 3rd, Rudy Giuliani presented State legislators with selectively edited footage of ballots being counted on Election Night at Fulton County's State Farm Arena.[241] Giuliani misrepresented the video as "a smoking gun" proving election fraud.[242] The President repeatedly claimed that he would have won Georgia, if not for a supposed conspiracy that unfolded on election night. President Trump and some of his supporters alleged that political operatives faked a water main rupture to expel Republican poll watchers.[243] These same operatives then supposedly took illegal ballots from suitcases hidden under tables and added those ballots to the official count multiple times over by scanning them more than once.[244] Not one of these allegations was true.
In a speech on December 5th, President Trump made the false claim about the State Farm Arena and claimed that "if you just take the crime of what those Democrat workers were doing … [t]hat's 10 times more than I need to win this state."[245] During a December 22nd speech, he played the same deceptive footage presented by Giuliani several weeks earlier.[246] President Trump also repeatedly scapegoated one of these Fulton County election workers during his January 2nd phone call with Georgia's Secretary of State, repeatedly referencing her by name and calling her "a professional vote scammer and hustler."[247] It was a malicious smear.
President Trump was directly notified at least four different times that the allegations he was making were false. On December 15th, then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen told him: "It wasn't a suitcase. It was a bin. That's what they use when they're counting ballots. It's benign."[248] Rosen's deputy, Richard Donoghue, also debunked this claim, including on a phone call on December 27th and in a meeting in the Oval Office on December 31st: "I told the President myself … several times, in several conversations, that these allegations about ballots being smuggled in in a
