COLORADO, USA — Colorado's second-highest court agreed on Thursday that a former executive of Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems may proceed with a defamation claim against Rudy Giuliani for his unproven accusations of election rigging in the 2020 presidential race.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals mirrored a more comprehensive opinion issued in April, which permitted Eric Coomer's defamation claims to proceed against a wider cast of defendants, including the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate, was excluded from the prior decision because he was in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings.
Coomer, the former director of product security and strategy for voting technology supplier Dominion, has initiated several lawsuits based on a similar sequence of events: Conservative commentators and supporters of Trump repeated an inflammatory claim originally made about him by Colorado podcaster Joe Oltmann.
Days after the 2020 election, Oltmann claimed he had recently listened in on an "antifa" conference call — a reference to anti-fascist ideology. On the alleged call, an unnamed participant referenced "Eric ... the Dominion guy." Oltmann claimed "Eric" said, "Don't worry about the election, Trump is not gonna win. I made f-ing sure of that."
