Eric Coomer, who works as the security director for the Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems company, which provides election management machines to areas around the country, has filed a defamation lawsuit against defendants including the Trump campaign and two of its top defenders, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Coomer has faced death threats after right-wingers spread unhinged conspiracy theories about his alleged involvement in imaginary fraud that many of the president’s supporters claim plagued the recent presidential election. Folks have claimed that Dominion machines swung the outcome to President-elect Joe Biden, but there’s simply no legitimate evidence whatsoever for this claim.
Besides the Trump campaign, Giuliani, and Powell, Coomer’s new defamation lawsuit targets conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, the far-right website known as The Gateway Pundit, Colorado conservative activist Joseph Oltmann, and conservative media outlets including Newsmax and One America News Network. Coomer commented as follows:
‘I have been thrust into the public spotlight by people with political and financial agendas but, at heart, I am a private person. While I intend to do everything I can to recapture my prior lifestyle, I have few illusions in this regard, and so, today, I put my trust in the legal process, which has already exposed the truth of the 2020 presidential election.’
In court cases around the country, the president and his allies have utterly failed to prove their allegations of systematic election fraud, with dozens of post-election court losses for Trump and the GOP, including from a slew of Trump’s own appointees. Recently, every single U.S. Supreme Court justice indicated opposition to some of the arguments at the center of a Texas-led lawsuit in which top Republicans, including the president’s own team, sought the invalidation of the election outcome in four states where Biden won. Two justices said, unlike their colleagues, that they’d have heard the case — but they added that they would not have granted the Republican demands.
As for Coomer’s case, Oltmann (the conservative activist) once claimed to have heard a supposed “strategy call of Antifa activists,” the Associated Press explains, although what on earth that he was actually talking about, if any call actually took place, is unclear. “Antifa” is not some kind of broadly centralized organization in any respect. Nevertheless, Oltmann laughably claimed that “Eric from Dominion” commented “don’t worry about the election, Trump is not going to win. I made… sure of that.” There is no legitimate evidence whatsoever that Coomer ever made these remarks, to say the least.
Oltmann’s allegations sound like an ignorant far-right fever dream — troublingly, however, the inane nonsense spread, and at one point, Eric Trump even tweeted about Oltmann’s claims. The far-right One America News Network also spread the nonsense, and in one of his infamous public meltdowns, Giuliani called Coomer “vicious” and “completely warped.”
Again — there is not and has never been any legitimacy to the nonsensical claim that Dominion voting machines or any other brand of voting machines rigged the election for Biden. Outgoing U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, and local election officials around the country have all confirmed that there’s no legitimate supporting evidence for Trump’s claims.
