Justification By Faith

Given the famous right-wing belief in personal responsibility and detestation of namby-pamby excuses for criminal behaviour, it should come as no surprise that one of the Trumpster's loudest metalegals is trying to cop an insanity plea. During the recent election campaign Sidney Powell pressed all the patriotic buttons to cast doubt on the reliability of the voting machines, and even went so far as to conjure up the spectre of that most plausibly potent threat to American security since Nicaragua, the democracy-devouring pineapple god Hugo Chávez. Dominion, the company which manufactures the voting machines, is understandably annoyed and has filed a suit for defamation, to which Powell's team have responded by stating that no sensible person would have believed her anyway. She was merely spouting "opinions and legal theories" which were no more to be taken as actual true facts than all that science stuff which the Bible declines to corroborate. Unlike British libel cases, where the only real criterion is the injury done to rich people and their itsy-bitsy feelings, defamation plaintiffs in the US have to demonstrate deliberate falsehood on the part of the defendant; so the Dominion company finds itself in the unenviable position of trying to show legal sanity in a groupie of the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble.