The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.

The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Trump.

According to e-mails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the e-mails show, Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.

Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Powell and others were making in public. It found:

— That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.

— That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Soros.

— And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Powell and others had claimed.

As Coomer’s attorneys wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Coomer.

Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudy Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.

It is unclear if Trump knew about or saw the memo. Still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.

“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”

Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign, and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.

Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Powell and Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joe Biden’s victory.

Powell and Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Trump also did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Powell and Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. An attorney for Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”

And as recently as three weeks ago, Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”

It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.

“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.