A Dominion Voting Systems employee is suing the Trump campaign, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell as well as news networks OANN and Newsmax over alleged defamation.
Eric Coomer, director of product strategy and security for the company, filed the lawsuit in Denver, Colorado today.
‘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,’ he said.
Coomer says he has gone into hiding in the wake of unfounded allegations the presidential election was rigged.
The suit says those claims have led to death threats and done ‘untold damage to his reputation as a national expert on voting systems’, NPR reports.
Trump’s personal attorney Giuliani, ‘Kraken’ lawyer Powell, One America News Network and OANN reporter Chanel Rion are all named.
Newsmax, OANN and Fox News have already had to roll back their election fraud claims because Dominion and software company Smartamatic threatened to sue.
Coomer said in a statement: ‘The widespread dissemination of false conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election has had devastating consequences both for me personally and for many of the thousands of American election workers and officials, both Republican and Democratic, who put aside their political beliefs to run free, fair, and transparent elections.
‘Elections are not about politics; they are about accurately tabulating legally cast votes.’
Coomer had been caught up in conspiracy theories after conservative podcaster Joe Oltmann said he had been part of a call with an ‘Eric from Dominion’ who said, ‘don’t worry about the election. Trump is not going to win. I made effing sure of that’.
Oltmann, who is also named in the suit, has not provided any evidence of the call but his claims were spread through right wing media.
Coomer had earlier told CPR News: ‘I have a personal political opinion. I may share that with friends and family, but I have never participated, or belonged to, any political groups, political action groups, social justice groups.
‘I do not donate to political campaign’s. I don’t donate to any PACS or anything like that.’
Earlier today former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka was forced to cut off MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Newsmax for repeating debunked conspiracy theories on the presidential election.
The businessman, 59, was quickly shut down when he began repeating allegations that election technology company, Dominion Voting Systems had engaged in fraud to help Joe Biden win the presidential race.
Over the weekend, Fox News ran a package debunking their own hosts’ claims the election was ‘stolen’ from Trump in response to their claims they would launch legal action.
In their statement, Newsmax said there were ‘several facts our viewers and readers should be aware,’ among them the lack of a business relationship between the two companies or that Dominion had any ownership relationship with George Soros, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others.
No evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic used software or reprogrammed software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election,’ Newsmax said.
Company spokesman Anthony Rizzo said Newsmax itself had never made a claim of impropriety, but that others had appeared on the network to raise questions about Smartmatic.
‘As any major media outlet, we provide a forum for public concerns and discussion,’ he said.
A nearly two-minute pre-taped segment was also aired over the weekend on a Fox Business Network program hosted by Lou Dobbs and Fox News Channel shows with Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.
That came days after Smartmatic sent a letter threatening legal action to Fox and two other networks popular with Trump supporters, Newsmax and One America News Network.
The two-minute Fox segments aired in the form of a question-and-answer session between an offscreen voice and Eddie Perez, a voting technology expert at the nonpartisan Open Source Election Technology Institute.
‘I have not seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to delete, change or alter anything related to vote tabulations,’ Perez said.
The company said its only work that involved the 2020 US election came in Los Angeles.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has falsely claimed that Smartmatic was founded in Venezuela by former dictator Hugo Chavez for the goal of fixing elections.
Smartmatic was started in Florida in 2000.
Perez also said there was no apparent business relationship between Smartmatic and Dominion; Trump’s lawyers have claimed with no evidence that Dominion’s vote counting system used at some locations in the US elections had used Smartmatic’s software.
Asked Monday about the segments, Smartmatic’s lawyer, J. Erik Connolly, said the company ‘cannot comment on the recent broadcast by Fox News due to potential litigation.’
The network did not comment beyond the on-air segments aired over the weekend.