I’ve seen these headlines but didn’t ready any of the stories.
My thought was she was making a legal argument. If the Diebold people claim that there is no way that their equipment can be tampered with or misused then they should support her argument that no reasonable person would believe it and they have no case.
On the other hand, if their equipment can be hacked, manipulated, misused, etc then her opinion has some basis and the onus is on them to prove that what she said was slanderous. Because if the equipment can be misused, reprogrammed, hacked etc then what she said is correct and they have no case.
So actually here is a case of someone playing four dimensional chess. I think you made it clearer than anyone else has.
Powell was making a narrow legal argument to support a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. A basic principle of libel law is that an actionable libel is a false derogatory statement of fact made about the plaintiff. If, OTOH, the statement is only an opinion, then it cannot be libelous because it’s not a statement of fact. Powell contends that all of the derogatory statements she made about Dominion were statements of opinion, not of fact, and, hence, not actionable.