prove in trial. Defamation lawsuit against Fox News In December 2020, defamation attorneys representing Dominion sent letters to Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and former Dominion contractor and self-described whistleblower Mellissa Carone, advising them to preserve all records relating to the company and demanding Giuliani and Carone cease making defamatory claims about the company, warning that legal action was "imminent." Carone had alleged in testimony that "Everything that happened at that [Detroit ballot counting facility] was fraud. Every single thing." The letter to Carone asserted that, despite Carone presenting herself as a Dominion insider, she was "hired through a staffing agency for one day to clean glass on machines and complete other menial tasks." Michigan Circuit Court judge Timothy Kenny had previously ruled that an affidavit Carone had filed was "simply not credible." Dominion sent My Pillow CEO and Trump supporter Mike Lindell a letter in January 2021 stating, "you have positioned yourself as a prominent leader of the ongoing misinformation campaign" and that "litigation regarding these issues is imminent". Lindell told The New York Times, "I would really welcome them to sue me because I have all the evidence against them". Under threat of litigation, on January 15, 2021, the conservative online magazine American Thinker published a retraction of stories it published asserting that Dominion engaged in a conspiracy to rig the election, acknowledging, "these statements are completely false and have no basis in fact". Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax all aired fact checks of their own previous coverage of Dominion and competitor Smartmatic after Smartmatic threatened lawsuits, and after they were listed as other groups spreading falsehoods about Dominion in the lawsuit by Dominion against Giuliani. Dominion filed defamation lawsuits against former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell on January 8, 2021, and against Giuliani on January 25, 2021, asking for $1.3 billion in damages from each. Both lawsuits accused Powell and Giuliani of waging a "viral disinformation campaign" against the company involving "demonstrably false" claims. In the lawsuit against Powell, the company stated that Powell had "doubled down" after Dominion formally notified her that her claims were false, and had posted on Twitter to spread false claims to over one million followers. One of Dominion's attorneys explained they had filed the lawsuit against Powell first "because she's been the most prolific and in many ways has been the originator of these false