I think this part is the thrust of their refutation:
All of the accusations Defendants have advanced regarding Ms. Freeman and Ms.
Moss committing election fraud are false, and because the statements accused them of criminal
conduct, they are defamatory per se. Ms. Freeman and/or Ms. Moss did not, at any time, ever:
conspire to clear poll watchers from the room where they were counting ballots, produce secret
“suitcases” full of illegal ballots, or illegally count ballots multiple times. There is not, and has
never been, any basis in the video for making such statements.
So parsing this in a very lawyerly way:
It's certainly possible they never conspired to clear the poll watchers. That may have not been their responsibility.
As far as "producing secret 'suitcases' full of illegal ballots", that statement contains three implicit assertions that allow for the lawyer to mislead us about what really happened: "secret", "suitcases", and "illegal".
The statement doesn't preclude them from having produced known suitcases of illegal ballots. The statement doesn't preclude them from having produced "bags" of illegal ballots. It doesn't preclude them from having taken legal ballots with known values and then running them multiple times. And you can run the permutations on all of those assertions. Basically there's a lot of wiggle room around the truth there.
Now the following statements in a later section I think are juicier from Freeman/Moss's perspective:
Defendants’ false claims and referring to her as “a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler,” “known scammer,” “known political operative,” and “ballotteer.”"
That could actually be legitimate if he didn't know those things about her (but IANAL). Anyone have any criminal history on the women? I don't recall seeing anything.
The docket:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61642105/freeman-v-herring-networks-inc/
The main filing:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61642105/1/freeman-v-herring-networks-inc/
I think this part is the thrust of their refutation:
So parsing this in a very lawyerly way:
It's certainly possible they never conspired to clear the poll watchers. That may have not been their responsibility.
As far as "producing secret 'suitcases' full of illegal ballots", that statement contains three implicit assertions that allow for the lawyer to mislead us about what really happened: "secret", "suitcases", and "illegal".
The statement doesn't preclude them from having produced known suitcases of illegal ballots. The statement doesn't preclude them from having produced "bags" of illegal ballots. It doesn't preclude them from having taken legal ballots with known values and then running them multiple times. And you can run the permutations on all of those assertions. Basically there's a lot of wiggle room around the truth there.
Now the following statements in a later section I think are juicier from Freeman/Moss's perspective:
That could actually be legitimate if he didn't know those things about her (but IANAL). Anyone have any criminal history on the women? I don't recall seeing anything.