Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas Tuesday to Rudy Giuliani and three other allies of former President Donald Trump involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The committee said Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Boris Epshteyn "publicly promoted unsupported claims about the 2020 election and participated in attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of election results."

You may have missed it, but Wednesday was a very good day for Truth. Whatever ordinarily stirs the miasma of the MyPillow lies and the other assorted crazy, at least on occasion, the generally broken systems we rely upon to separate the liars from the public they seek to dupe really do function. In that sense there’s been a whole lot of good news. Early Wednesday, an email obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared with Politico showed that a day before the Jan.

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that a major defamation case against key boosters of former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud can continue forward. This is a win not just for the plaintiff, Dominion, a corporation that sells voting machines and software, but also for the American public. It’s looking increasingly like defamation suits could be our best bet for holding election conspiracy theorists accountable and for deterring future false claims of election fraud.

As a former Trump campaign lawyer, Sidney Powell did more than perhaps anyone to push the big lie that President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in last November’s presidential election was the result of fraud involving Dominion Voting Systems machines. Now, however, lawyers representing her have acknowledged that the “big lie” is, in fact, just that.

Voting company Smartmatic on Thursday filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, some of the network's top hosts, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell for starting a "disinformation campaign" against the company.

Why it matters: This is the second voting company to file a lawsuit against Giuliani and Powell, following Dominion Voting Systems' two $1.3 billion defamation lawsuits against the pro-Trump lawyers.

President Donald Trump is still eager to push the message that he won the election even though there’s no evidence to support his baseless claims of election fraud. He’s so intent on continuing the efforts that at a Friday meeting he discussed naming attorney Sidney Powell as a special counsel to investigate the presidential election. Powell is the attorney who spewed crackpot conspiracy theories that there was a plot by Venezuela to rig voting machines used in the presidential election.

Sidney Powell, the headline-grabbing attorney who was seemingly part of President Donald Trump's legal team, responded late Sunday to the Trump campaign's statement that she was, in fact, never a member of the campaign's legal team.

In a shock move late Sunday, Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis and Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani released a statement that said:

The Trump campaign has distanced itself from a lawyer who made dramatic claims of voter fraud at several media events.

Sidney Powell claimed without evidence last week that electronic voting systems had switched millions of votes to President-elect Joe Biden, and said he won due to "communist money".

President Trump has refused to concede the election, making unsubstantiated claims of widespread electoral fraud.

Mr Biden won the US presidential election by a significant margin.

The Trump campaign has released a statement about the status of former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell.

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Trump Campaign Attorney Rudy Giuliani and Senior Legal Adviser Jenna Ellis said.

Why Powell’s status as an attorney for the campaign has changed is unclear. Details about her departure, and whether she was fired, were not provided.