NEW YORK (AP) — An election systems worker driven into hiding by death threats has filed a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s campaign, two of its lawyers and some conservative media figures and outlets.

Eric Coomer, security director at the Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems, said he wants his life back after being named in false charges as a key actor in “rigging” the election for President-elect Joe Biden. There has been no evidence that the election was rigged.

His lawsuit, filed Tuesday in district court in Denver County, Colorado, names the Trump campaign, lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, the website Gateway Pundit, Colorado conservative activist Joseph Oltmann, and conservative media Newsmax and One America News Network.

“I have been thrust into the public spotlight by people with political and financial agendas but, at heart, I am a private person,” Coomer said in a statement.

“While I intend to do everything I can to recapture my prior lifestyle, I have few illusions in this regard,” he said. “And so, today, I put my trust in the legal process, which has already exposed the truth of the 2020 presidential election.”

Dominion, which provided vote-counting equipment to several states, has denied accusations that it switched Trump votes in Biden’s favor, and no evidence has emerged to back those charges up.

Dominion and another voting technology company, Smartmatic, have begun to fight back against being named in baseless conspiracy theories. After legal threats were made, Fox News Channel and Newsmax in recent days have aired retractions of some claims made on their networks.

There was no immediate comment from those named in the lawsuit.

His lawyers said Coomer has become “the face of the false claims.” Coomer’s name first got public exposure in a podcast by Oltmann, who claimed to have heard a strategy call of Antifa activists. When the prospect of a Trump victory was brought up, Oltmann said a man identified as “Eric from Dominion” supposedly said “don’t worry about the election, Trump is not going to win. I made … sure of that,” adding an expletive.

In an opinion piece written for the Denver Post, Coomer wrote that he has no connections to Antifa, was never on any call and the idea that there is some recording of him is “wholly fabricated.”

The fact-checking website Snopes said Oltmann hasn’t cooperated in any attempts to verify his claims.

Oltmann also claimed that Coomer made anti-Trump comments on Facebook. The lawsuit acknowledged that Coomer made comments critical of the president on his private Facebook page; he now says his page is inactive.

Oltmann’s charges spread after he was interviewed by Malkin and Gateway Pundit. Eric Trump tweeted about them. OANN, and its White House correspondent Chanel Rion, reported on them. Powell, misidentifying Coomer as working for Smartmatic, said at a news conference that Coomer’s “social media is filled with hatred” for Trump, and she later repeated her charges in a Newsmax interview.

Giuliani, at a news conference, called Coomer “a vicious, vicious man. He wrote horrible things about the president … He is completely warped,” according to the lawsuit.

Fox News Channel, another network popular with Trump supporters, is not being sued and Coomer actually uses Fox’s Tucker Carlson to buttress his case. The lawsuit notes a scheduled Powell appearance on Carlson’s show did not happen after she could not provide evidence for her charges.

Coomer told The Associated Press earlier this month that right-wing websites posted his photo, home address and details about his family. Death threats began almost immediately.

He said his father, an Army veteran, received a handwritten letter asking, “How does it feel to have a traitor for a son.”

“It’s terrifying,” Coomer said. “I’ve worked in international elections in all sorts of post-conflict countries where election violence is real and people are getting killed over it. And I feel that we’re on the verge of that.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department sued Walmart on Tuesday, accusing it of fueling the nation’s opioid crisis by pressuring its pharmacies to fill even potentially suspicious prescriptions for the powerful painkillers.

The civil complaint filed points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and Walmart’s own responsibility for the allegedly illegal distribution of controlled substances to the pharmacies at the height of the opioid crisis. Walmart operates more than 5,000 pharmacies in its stores around the country.

The Justice Department alleges Walmart violated federal law by selling thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances that its pharmacists “knew were invalid,” said Jeffrey Clark, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil division.

Federal law required Walmart to spot suspicious orders for controlled substances and report those to the Drug Enforcement Administration, but prosecutors charge the company didn’t do that.

“Walmart knew that its distribution centers were using an inadequate system for detecting and reporting suspicious orders,” said Jason Dunn, the U.S. attorney in Colorado. “For years, Walmart reported virtually no suspicious orders at all. In other words, Walmart’s pharmacies ordered opioids in a way that went essentially unmonitored and unregulated.”

The 160-page suit alleges that Walmart made it difficult for its pharmacists to follow the rules, putting “enormous pressure” on them to fill a high volume of prescriptions as fast as possible, while at the same time denying them the authority to categorically refuse to fill prescriptions issued by prescribers the pharmacists knew were continually issuing invalid invalid prescriptions.

The suit highlighted alleged problems in Walmart’s compliance department, which oversaw the dispensing nationwide of controlled substance prescriptions. In particular, even after Walmart pharmacists informed the compliance unit about “pill-mill” prescribers whose practices raised egregious red flags, Walmart allegedly continued to fill invalid prescriptions issued by those prescribers, according to the suit. The suit said that only later did Walmart allow pharmacists to do blanket refusals for these suspect practices.

Walmart fought back in an emailed statement to The Associated Press, saying that the Justice Department’s investigation is “tainted by historical ethics violations.” It said the “lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context.”

Walmart noted it always empowered its pharmacists to refuse to fill problematic opioids prescriptions, and said they refused to fill hundreds of thousands of such prescriptions. Walmart also noted it sent the Drug Enforcement Administration tens of thousands of investigative leads, and it blocked thousands of questionable doctors from having their opioid prescriptions filled at its pharmacies.

In a corporate blog post published late Tuesday, Walmart argued that many health regulators, medical groups, doctors and patients criticize the company for going too far in refusing to fill opioid prescriptions. Some even say Walmart is improperly interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, the company said.

AP reported the news of the lawsuit ahead of the Justice Department’s public announcement, citing a person who could not discuss the matter publicly before the announced move. The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Walmart filed its own preemptive suit against the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr and the Drug Enforcement Administration nearly two months ago.

In its lawsuit, Walmart said the Justice Department’s investigation — launched in 2016 — had identified hundreds of doctors who wrote problematic prescriptions that Walmart’s pharmacists should not have filled. But the lawsuit charged that nearly 70% of the doctors still have active registrations with the DEA.

“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place,” the company said in its statement.

Walmart’s lawsuit alleged the government was blaming it for the lack of regulatory and enforcement policies to stem the crisis. The company is asking a federal judge to declare that the government’s suit has no basis to seek civil damages. That suit remains ongoing.

The initial investigation was the subject of a ProPublica story published in March. ProPublica reported that Joe Brown, then U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas office, spent years pursuing a criminal case against Walmart for its opioid prescription practices, only to have it stymied after the retail giant’s lawyers appealed to senior officials in the Justice Department.

Two months later, Brown resigned. He didn’t give a reason for his departure except to say he would be “pursuing opportunities in the private and public sectors.” Brown went into private practice in the Dallas area.

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D’Innocenzio reported from New York.