One of Sidney Powell’s conspiracy-promoting pals deserves a fat paycheck — she thinks. A star “expert” for Powell’s election fraud argument before the Supreme Court — supposed former intelligence contractor, self-described “trained cryptolinguist,” podcaster, QAnon promoter, and alleged con artist Terpsichore Maras — has sued Dominion Voting Systems for $US3.4 ($5) billion. Because she argues that, uh, Dominion didn’t prove her anonymous affidavit testifying that Dominion’s voting machines were vulnerable to tampering was actually wrong. In her eyes, this shows her case isn’t not untrue.
The Washington Post identified Maras by her preceding blog post which mirrored the affidavit. In December 2020, the court tossed aside findings by her and former Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s other supposed experts, stating that they “reach implausible conclusions often because they are derived from wholly unreliable sources.” In Dominion’s libel lawsuit against Powell, it claimed that Powell hadn’t even spoken to Maras before throwing up her testimony as fact, which Maras confirmed to the Washington Post.
Maras’s lawsuit accuses Dominion of slander because it “cannot disprove” that her conspiracy theories, listing her in its $US1.30 ($2) billion lawsuit against Powell as a crew member of “wholly unreliable sources.” The mostly inscrutable affidavit includes photographs of maths equations in notebooks and speculates about the involvement of George Soros and Chinese hardware manufacturers. Maras herself admits that she “can’t prove anyone manipulated anything” because “TRAP DOOR KEY HOLDERS can offer you enough to verify to you what you need to see without revealing anything and once again indicating the inability to detect manipulation.” Then adds this punchy conclusion: “ZERO PROOF of INTEGRITY OF THE VOTE.”
“Therefore, the Defendants are declaring that the Plaintiff is guilty of the crime of perjury by portraying it as false information,” Maras concludes. (Dominion’s hundreds of pages of complaints in various libel suits take great pains to sift through and refute piles of nonsense.) Maras goes on to claim that Dominion’s doubt about her credibility, buried in a 124-page complaint, has directly exposed her to “most extreme hatred and contempt and has harmed Plaintiff’s professional reputation and her credibility.” Various outlets had already widely questioned Maras’s qualifications elsewhere.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as various high-level Trump appointees, agreed that no evidence pointed to Dominion altering ballots. Dominion has noted that it only counts ballots and that its machines are not connected to the internet, therefore making it impossible for anyone to watch or meddle with vote-counting in real-time.
Last week, the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia rejected Powell and others’ motions to dismiss because they kept shilling fraud claims even after counties conducted paper ballot counts, and courts dismissed their dozens of election rigging lawsuits. They argued that claims like Powell’s supposed proof — largely reliant on Maras’s claims — can still be considered defamatory if they “imply a provably false fact or rely upon stated facts that are provably false.” In her motion to dismiss, Powell herself claimed that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact” because she made them about a “controversial” election.
Maras doesn’t mention that Dominion also called her a “serial liar and con artist” for allegedly falsely presenting herself on a veterans’ website as a lieutenant who’d served in the Office of Naval Intelligence and received a Purple Heart. They also cite a 2020 fraud case against Maras by the state of North Dakota, which asserted that she’d pretended to be a doctor, used various noms de guerre and social security numbers, and fluffed resumes in “a persistent effort … to deceive others.” The court fined her $US25,000 ($34,515), ruling that she’d violated consumer protection laws by raising money for charity and spending it at Walmart and QVC.
Dominion has stated numerous times that Powell’s conspiracy-mongering resulted in death threats against Dominion and its employees, such as: “You’re all fucking dead, You’re all fucking dead…We’re going to fucking kill you motherfuckers” and “We’re gonna blow your fucking building up.”
Recent podcasts by Maras continue to hammer on election conspiracies, the “coming storm,” and anti-vaccine propaganda which I won’t detail here.
Maras is seeking $US1.7 ($2) billion in compensatory damages and another $US1.7 ($2) billion in punitive damages. Read the full complaint here.