A senior employee of Dominion Voting Systems has filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign and far-right media for defamation, saying that baseless conspiracy theories about the election have led to death threats against him and his family.
Eric Coomer, director of product strategy and security for the Denver-based company, filed the 52-page lawsuit on Tuesday in the Denver district court. The threats led Coomer to leave his home one week after the election and move to an undisclosed location.
The 14 defendants named in the lawsuit include Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, blogger Michelle Malkin, One America News Network and its White House correspondent Chanel Rion, and Newsmax Media, Inc.
News about the lawsuit was first reported by Colorado Public Radio.
“Today I have filed a lawsuit in Colorado in an effort to unwind as much of the damage as possible done to me, my family, my life, and my livelihood as a result of the numerous false public statements that I was somehow responsible for ‘rigging’ the 2020 presidential election,” Coomer said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
Conspiracy theories disseminated on the right have made the baseless claim that Coomer used his position to mastermind a high-tech scheme to steal the presidential election.
He said the widespread conspiracy theories have also had “devastating consequences” for thousands of election workers and officials, both Republican and Democratic, “who put aside their political beliefs to run free, fair, and transparent elections.”
Coomer said that not only was his own personal information posted online, but also the addresses of his parents, siblings and ex-girlfriends.
Among the defendants named in the lawsuit was Joe Oltmann, a conservative Colorado activist and podcaster.
Oltmann claimed that he infiltrated a call between Denver-area antifa members and a man identified as “Eric from Dominion” who supposedly said he would make sure that Trump wouldn’t win the election. Oltmann never provided a recording of the call, but his allegations were subsequently picked up by the right-wing media outlets named in the lawsuit.
Coomer said that no such conversation ever took place and he denied having any association with left-wing groups.
Trump has repeatedly tweeted baseless claims that Dominion was part of a plot to rig the election for President-elect Joe Biden.
Dominion has also started striking back and it may end up filing its own lawsuit.
Last week, Dominion’s legal representatives issued a letter to former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell demanding that she retract her most serious falsehoods about the company. Powell made the outlandish claim that the dead Venezuelan leftist leader Hugo Chavez somehow helped rig Dominion machines to switch votes from Trump to Biden.
Dominion’s CEO John Poulos also testified under oath for hours before a committee of the Republican-controlled Michigan state senate on Dec. 15.
In Dominion’s news release about the letter to Powell, Poulos made the following statement:
"As I have testified under oath, Dominion has recently been thrust into the national spotlight as part of a dangerous and reckless disinformation campaign aimed at sowing doubt and confusion over the 2020 presidential election. The people making these baseless claims surely know they are lies, and these lies have consequences. With this letter, we are asking Ms. Powell to publicly retract her false accusations and set the record straight."
In its letter, Dominion described how Powell has misrepresented and manufactured evidence to support her defamatory falsehoods against the company and its role in the 2020 election. The letter said her efforts were “part of a fundraising scheme to gain business and notoriety.”
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
“While you are entitled to your own opinions, Ms. Powell, you are not entitled to your own facts. Defamatory falsehoods are actionable in court and the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that 'there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.'
"Although the indisputable facts all point to the conclusion that this was a free and fair election, you launched a media circus and fundraising campaign that undermined confidence in American democracy and peddled false, inherently improbable, and defamatory claims about Dominion participating in an international conspiracy to rig the election, deeply damaging Dominion's hard-earned reputation and business in the process."
Dominion’s website www.dominionvoting.com debunks every one of the wild conspiracy theories about the company propagated by Trump and his surrogates.
The big lie is that Dominion’s voting machines could be rigged to flip votes from Trump to Biden. The electronic machines in question tabulate paper ballots, so there is a paper trail that can be audited. A hand-count of the ballots in Georgia showed no significant discrepancies with the machine tabulation.