ALERT: Dominion-Related Lawsuit Dismissed Against Patrick Byrne Over 'The Deep Rig' Film - No Legal Basis for Key Claim
A federal court in Florida has dismissed a lawsuit filed by an executive of Dominion Voting Systems against a man behind a documentary alleging fraud in the 2020 election.
In a pointed, 16-page opinion published Tuesday, Judge Tom Barber of the Middle District of Florida, found the executive, Eric Coomer, was unable to prove the claims made in the documentary were motivated by malice on the part of the defendant rather than a difference of opinion.
And without that malice, Barber ruled, there is no lawsuit.
Patrick Byrne, the defendant in the case as well as the founder and former CEO of the retail firm Overstock.com, publicized the news in a post
on the social media platform X.
NEWSFLASH: Dominion CTO Eric Coomer’s libel case against me for saying Dominion’s equipment rigs elections was just thrown out by the judge on summary judgment. Trial was supposed to start next Wednesday, but the judge read our evidence and realized I was correct. No libel.
— Patrick Byrne (@PatrickByrne) October 27, 2026
“Trial was supposed to start next Wednesday, but the judge read our evidence and realized I was correct,” Byrne wrote. “No libel.”
Byrne’s post had gotten more than 700,000 views by Wednesday afternoon and over 900 comments.
One of those respondents was former Gen. Michael Flynn, a man who’s learned more than most Americans about legal warfare in American politics.
This is superb news and you deserve a huge debt of gratitude from our entire nation. Your efforts to expose these crooks and the rigging of U.S. elections has been exceptional. Thank you!!!
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) October 27, 2026
“This is superb news and you deserve a huge debt of gratitude from our entire nation,” Flynn wrote. “Your efforts to expose these crooks and the rigging of U.S. elections has been exceptional.”
While the dismissal of the defamation suit was undoubtedly good news for Byrne, his characterization of Barber’s ruling as “no libel” was an exceptionally broad description of the judge’s legal reasoning.
Rather than ruling on the truth or falsity of the statements at issue, Barber — appointed in 2018 by President Donald Trump during Trump’s first term — ruled that Coomer lacked “clear and convincing evidence” that would meet a legal standard for malice that a defamation suit requires.
A plaintiff in a defamation suit, Barber wrote, must prove “the defendant actually knew his or her statements were false or seriously doubted their truth.” (Emphasis in the original.)
The lawsuit stemmed from the movie “The Deep Rig,” a work that, according to its description on the website IMDb, aimed to expose “the facts behind the headlines, to backroom scenes and through electronic networks designed to rig any election they conduct.”
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Byrne, an outspoken opponent of voting machines in American elections, is credited as the writer for the documentary, though Barber’s ruling noted that Byrne claims he only financed the production and did not determine its contents.
The movie, Barber wrote, included statements by conservative activist Joe Oltmann, who claimed that Coomer had spoken on a conference call of antifa activists, and that Coomer had assured other participants that Trump would not win the 2020 election because he had “made sure of it.”
Byrne also published a book of the same name in 2021, with the subtitle “How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him: (or what to send friends who ask, ‘Why do you doubt the integrity of Election 2020?’).”
That allegation was not included in Byrne’s book, Barber noted.
“Coomer denies participating in any such call or manipulating the results of the 2020 Presidential election and alleges that Oltmann’s story presented in the film was false and defamatory,” Barber wrote.
However, the truth of the allegation was not at stake, Barber wrote. What mattered for the purposes of the defamation case was whether Coomer could prove that Byrne either knew that Oltmann’s story was false, or that he himself had strong suspicions that it was not true.
“Under the actual malice standard, unless it can be proven that the speaker subjectively believed his or her statements to be untrue, the law imposes no liability,” Barber wrote.
There is no question that the 2020 presidential election, conducted amid the coronavirus pandemic, was riddled with irregularities. And even if the country accepted the results — and endured the disastrous four years of President Joe Biden’s administration that ensued — those memories lingered.
A 2021 Rasmussen poll found that 51 percent said cheating had affected the election’s outcome.
And few Americans on either side of the political divide are likely to change their opinions about the integrity of the vote that temporarily made Donald Trump a private citizen again — until he swept back to victory in 2024.
“As John Kenneth Galbraith observed, ‘[f]aced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof,'” Barber wrote in his ruling.
“Operating within an echo chamber while believing oneself to be well-informed and reasonable has become increasingly easy to do in the age of slanted news sources and targeted media constantly telling their constituencies what they want to hear.”
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