Eric Coomer is a former employee of Dominion voting machines. In the various lies told about Dominion by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and other Team Kraken Trump Campaigners, Coomer was singled out. They claimed Coomer was associated with Antifa and in a phone call with Antifa stated that Trump was not going to win the election because he had rigged the machines to not let Trump win. They even claimed to have a tape of Coomer, they supposedly got from a saying this. Their source was a man named Joe Oltman who claimed to have infiltrated Antifa and recorded a call where Coomer said this.
In a result that I am sure will stun absolutely nobody, no such tape has ever been produced. Coomer denies making any such statement or having any connection to Antifa. Giuliani et al’s allegations resulted in he and his family receiving death threats. He has sued for defamation.
In some ways Coomer may have an easier road for his case than parallel lawsuits filed by Dominion Smartmatic in that he argues he is not a “public figure” subject to the difficult to prove “actual malice” standard. If the court accepts that as true, he need only demonstrate negligence on the part of the defendants.
On August 14th Giuliani was deposed by Coomer’s attorneys. You can read the entire rant filled madness HERE.
In the deposition Giuliani doubled down on all of his claims against Coomer and Dominion, devolved into multiple Hunter Biden (mentioned by name five times by Giuliani) rants, and continued to assert the witness, Joe Oltmann, who claims to have heard and recorded the call at issue, was credible.
In Giuliani’s wacky testimony Republicans in Wisconsin and even the Trump Campaign were all part of the conspiracy against Trump as was Trump’s Chief of Election Cybersecurity (Chris Krebs). Even the crazy story about votes being routed through Germany is true according to Giuliani. From the deposition:
“I sort of thought of Michigan as the center of the Dominion fraud and so we focused on all of the Internet traffic in and out of there, it was substantial, and that's the one that was traced to Germany and then traced to a main mass computer in Frankfurt, Germany that has since disappeared. Not there anymore. Flew away . . .
The votes actually were sent to Frankfurt, Germany. In fact, we thought incorrectly that the major computer was in Barcelona, Spain because that's the one they used to help to fix an Italian election in 2018. We found out, I can't tell you exactly when, but after it was -- at about the time that it was destroyed, although some votes may have been sent to Barcelona, that most of them went to Frankfurt, Germany, and there are analyses done of the traffic leaving Michigan going to Europe. And originally they thought it was Barcelona. I do think some went to Barcelona but the vast majority went to Frankfurt, Germany which is where the major computer was, which we were told was shared by Smartmatic and Dominion who did have a joint operating agreement.”
I love the computers flying away part. These were the computers in Frankfurt that crazies on the internet said had been seized in a raid by the United States military. Also, there is no evidence Dominion and Smartmatic have a “joint operating agreement.”
Coomer’s attorneys presented to Giuliani what they have characterized in briefs filed with the court as a “smoking gun” memo. It’s a series of email from within the Trump Campaign where they investigate the allegations against Dominion and conclude they are all false, even ridiculous. One email even directly states that there is no evidence Dr. Coomer is a supporter of Antifa.
Giuliani dismissed the emails as “propaganda” and argued that the Trump Campaign diabolically wanted Trump to lose. Seriously. Back to the deposition:
“Looks to me like -- okay, looks like propaganda . . . I mean I've been involved in many, many presidential campaigns. This campaign had checked out three weeks earlier and they undermined -- I even have memos from Republican National Committee people and from other people on the campaign telling people not to cooperate with us, Jenna and me, because the republican party will do better if Trump loses, they'll collect more money. There was no question there was a major effort to undercut what we were doing.”
The really remarkable thing is that this undercutting by the Trump Campaign was going on at a time when, according Giuliani’s testimony, Trump had put him in charge of the Trump Campaign.
A brief filed by Coomer’s attorneys summarizes Giuliani’s deposition testimony as continuing “to spread the same election fraud claims, this time under oath, that led to his suspension by the New York State Bar.”
For the record, Oltmann never produced a recording he claimed he made of Coomer saying he had rigged the election. Oltmann, in his own deposition, testified that 18 people were on the phone call at issue, but he refused to name any of them, except one. That one person says Coomer was not on the call and that he had never heard of Coomer before.
