Trump allies did little to investigate election fraud claims, court documents show
The more than 2,000 pages of documents reviewed by CNN provide the most significant look yet at evidence collected in several defamation cases brought against top Trump mouthpieces. In this lawsuit, former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer alleges he was defamed by the Trump campaign, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and prominent conservatives.
According to the account that Giuliani gave in the case, he spent less than an hour reviewing allegations that Coomer was part of a plot to rig the election before publicly making those claims at a November press conference.
And when Powell was deposed by Coomer’s lawyer, she acknowledged that she did not have “a lot of specific knowledge about what Mr. Coomer personally did” in the supposed scheme to steal the election.
The new documents have already been cited in at least one other case stemming from bogus election fraud claims, where Wisconsin state officials are seeking sanctions against Powell for making those claims there. The Wisconsin officials say Powell and other Trump-aligned lawyers failed at “even the most basic” effort to verify conspiracy theories.
“Even a modicum of research — nothing more complex than a little Googling — would have demonstrated the absence of any basis for the theory advanced here that Dominion voting machines had altered individual votes, much less the outcome of the election,” the Wisconsin officials said, pointing to the new Coomer case documents.
Showing evidence that a defendant knowingly communicated false statements is a key component in proving defamation claims.
Attorneys for Giuliani, Powell, OAN, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin and the Trump campaign didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment. They are asking the court to dismiss Coomer’s lawsuit.
A district court judge in Denver County, Colorado, has not determined whether to allow Coomer’s lawsuit to move forward.
Coomer’s case is further along in the evidence-collection phase than several similar, ongoing defamation cases in which Dominion is suing Giuliani, Powell and others.
Dominion has denied repeatedly that its vote-counting services allowed for election fraud, and since the election, state and US authorities have repeatedly found no widespread fraud in the 2020 vote.
Coomer left the company earlier this year. He says in his court filings that he’s “suffered severe emotional distress,” has dealt with “anxiety and depression,” and has seen his reputation “tarnished across the country,” while his “career in election services is effectively over.”
‘We didn’t pronounce him guilty’
Powell made a claim Coomer had been “recorded in a conversation with antifa members, saying that he had the election rigged for Mr. Biden.” (She admitted in her deposition for the case that there is no such recording.)
Giuliani called Coomer “a vicious, vicious man” with antifa ties, who “specifically” said “that they’re gonna fix this election.”
When pressed in the deposition about exactly what Coomer could have done to influence the election, Giuliani said that he could “guess but it would not be an educated guess.”
“Exactly what role he played, I had no idea. It’s a big company, lots of people do different things. Was it his job just to announce it? Was it his job to carry it? I had no idea, nor was I particularly interested at that point,” Guiliani recalled in his deposition in August.
Giuliani said he was told by people working with his team that there was tape of Coomer’s promises to rig the election; as Powell acknowledged in her deposition, there was no such recording. Asked by Coomer’s lawyer if Giuliani’s approach was a “trial by press conference,” Giuliani called it an “investigation by press conference.”
“We didn’t pronounce him guilty. We laid out the facts that we had,” Giuliani said in the deposition.
Powell has taken a similar tactic in her testimony in the Coomer suit, and in separate court proceedings where she is facing consequences for making election fraud claims in another state. Repeatedly, she and other lawyers she worked with on pro-Trump post-election court cases have said they put unvetted election fraud accusations into their public filings and spoke about the accusations publicly, with a belief they would be investigated later.
Like Giuliani, she had little to point to when asked how Coomer could have rigged the election.
“I don’t have a lot of specific knowledge about what Mr. Coomer personally did. That would be the purpose of discovery in any proceeding that we filed, and we never got discovery in any proceeding that we filed,” Powell said.
‘Everything pretty much went out the window’
There were no indications in the Coomer court filings that the memo was shared with Giuliani and the other Trump-aligned lawyers who were most aggressively hyping the claims. Giuliani, in his deposition, said he didn’t recognize the document because he saw “10,000 documents” during the campaign.
“[W]e spent, I mean, years setting up an internal process of where documents would go, who sees them, and then making sure that people review them, and approvals,” Dollman said. “But when Mr. Giuliani came in with his team, the — that whole approval chain, that whole — everything pretty much went out the window.”
Giuliani said in a deposition in the Comer case that he wouldn’t have paid attention to the campaign’s research memo debunking Dominion’s claims even if it had been shared with him. He said he believed that within the campaign there was “a major effort to undercut what we were doing” and he called the memo a “useless piece of information.”
“I thought the majority of them were working for [Trump] to concede as soon as possible so they could move on to another job and so they wouldn’t be criticized too heavily in The Washington Post,” he said.
In his August deposition, Dollman downplayed the significance of the memo and continued to claim that the election was fraudulent, though he couldn’t identify the type of fraud that had supposedly occurred.
“What is that opinion based on?” Coomer’s lawyer asked him.
“Just — we have no underlying definite facts that it wasn’t,” Dollman said.
‘Reckless disregard for the truth’
The conservative media-sphere played a major role in injecting the bogus claims about Dominion and Coomer into the Trump-world’s bloodstream, according to Coomer’s theory of the case. Several conservative commentators are named as defendants and have given depositions in the legal proceedings. Key verification steps — like contacting Coomer for comment about the claims — were not made by the far-right media figures who promoted the theories, according to the court records.
The Coomer claims were broadcast to conservative commentator Michelle Malkin’s audience in a November 13 livestream interview she did with a conservative activist making the allegations, and again in a prerecorded interview she did with the activist on Newsmax later that month.
Malkin has cut ties with Newsmax, which issued a retraction and apology to Coomer. Newsmax was initially a defendant in the lawsuit but in April reached a settlement in the case.
Powell’s team noticed Malkin’s November 13 interview and sought out the conservative activist making the allegations about Coomer to submit an affidavit, the court records of Powell’s deposition show.
OAN also showcased the Coomer allegations in a 30-minute broadcast segment, spearheaded by the network’s White House correspondent Chanel Rion, called “Dominion-izing the Vote,” which first aired on Nov. 21.
He said, according to his deposition, that he instructed Rion get in touch with Coomer but was not sure of what the effort looked like. “She had communicated to me that she believed he was in hiding at that time,” Herring said.
“I just don’t remember all of the methods that I did to try and find him. But he was — I could not find him, at the end of the day,” she said.
Herring’s lawyer pointed out that the OAN piece included Dominion’s denials.
“Dominion has denied this. Why — why would you — why would you report on something that Dominion has denied?” Herring’s lawyer asked him at the deposition.
“We’ve seen a lot of denials that aren’t correct,” Herring said.
“The ‘Dominion-izing the Vote’ report is a good example of one of those … with reckless disregard for the truth,” Marty Golingan, a former OAN producer, wrote in his declaration.
Neither Herring nor the lawyer representing him and Rion responded to CNN’s questions about the former employee.
Leslie Perrot and Jeremy Harlan contributed to this story.