An employee of Dominion Voting Systems has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign and several news outlets, claiming he has become the ‘face’ of false election fraud accusations that could lead to violence.
Eric Coomer, security director at the Colorado-based company, says he started receiving death threats after Trump surrogates and media outlets suggested that he used his position at Dominion, whose voting machines were used in several battleground states, to ensure that Democrat Joe Biden prevailed in the November 3 contest.
The defamation suit, filed on Tuesday in district court in Denver County, Colorado, names the Trump campaign, the president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, lawyer Sidney Powell, conservative pundits Michelle Malkin and Joseph Oltmann, and the conservative media outlets Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, and One America News Network (OANN).
Coomer was thrust into the public spotlight after Oltmann claimed to have overheard a conversation between Antifa activists in which a man identified as “Eric from Dominion” said that he “made sure” that Trump would not be reelected.
The sensational story spread across conservative media after Oltmann was interviewed by Malkin and Gateway Pundit, and even caught the eye of the president’s son, Eric, who tweeted about it. OANN reported the alleged conversation, and Powell and Giuliani pointed to Coomer’s anti-Trump posts on social media as evidence that Dominion may be politically compromised.
The lawsuit acknowledged that Coomer criticized the president on his private Facebook page, but says the account is no longer active.
The episode made Coomer “the face of false claims” regarding Dominion’s alleged role in tipping the scales in the presidential election, his lawyers said. The security director reportedly became the target of death threats after right-wing websites posted his photo, home address and details about his family.
Coomer also said he feared that the allegations of fraud could trigger political violence.
I’ve worked in international elections in all sorts of post-conflict countries where election violence is real and people are getting killed over it. And I feel that we’re on the verge of that.
In an op-ed published by the Denver Post earlier this month, Coomer responded to the “litany of defamatory statements” made against him by the Trump campaign and others, insisting that he has “no connection to the Antifa movement” and “did not ‘rig,’ or influence the election.”
Dominion machines have been the subject of numerous legal challenges questioning the integrity of the 2020 election results. A recent court-ordered audit of Dominion systems used in Michigan concluded that the machines are “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
The explosive findings seemed to support Trump’s claim of widespread voter fraud. However, in testimony before the Michigan Senate’s Oversight Committee, Dominion CEO John Poulos claimed the audit was “severely flawed” and the allegations were “categorically false and technically incomprehensible.”
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