According to a report from CNN, a bid by allies of former President Donald Trump to get a defamation suit filed against them by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive dismissed was shot down by a Colorado judge on Friday.
The report notes that Eric Coomer was accused by lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani — among others — of involvement in a plot to rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump.
As CNN's Tierney Sneed reports, District Judge Marie Avery Moses ruled the trial can go forward and that more "extensive" discovery can also proceed.
In the ruling, Moses wrote, "There is no constitutional value in false statements of fact or the deliberate spread of dangerous and inflammatory political disinformation designed to sow distrust in democratic institutions. The public has an active interest in ensuring that there are remedies for defamatory statements."
She added, "There is evidence that Giuliani's allegations against Coomer conformed to a preconceived storyline of fraud given his allegations of fraud after the election. Further, there is evidence that Giuliani had incentive to defame Coomer both in support of former President Trump and to maintain national attention. This evidence is sufficient to support a finding of actual malice."
According to CNN's Sneed, "Already, the case has revealed that Trump allies did little to investigate uncorroborated claims of election fraud before repeating them on the public stage. The discovery Coomer was entitled to at the motion-to-dismiss stage produced a Trump campaign memo -- written days before Giuliani and Powell held their infamous RNC news conference where they promoted election fraud claims -- that debunked several of the allegations the Trump lawyers went on to make," adding, "As part of the motion to dismiss, Powell, Guliani and others who boosted Trump's lies about election fraud sat for depositions in which they said they only minimally reviewed the claims about Coomer before touting those allegations in front of a national audience."
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