The Byers Branch Library, now a Denver landmark, opened in 1918 at 675 Santa Fe Drive; it was named for William Byers, who d founded the
Rocky Mountain News sixty years earlier. Also coming under scrutiny was the Ross-Barnum Branch Library, at 3550 West First Avenue, which gets half of its name from the so-called “Greatest Showman,” P.T. Barnum, who in 1878 bought the land where the library now sits for a subdivision. The Ross-Barnum Library opened in 1954.
But today, DPL sees a need for change. In his newspaper, Byers openly advocated for a few months of active extermination against Indigenous people, whom he referred to as the red devils. Front-page stories applauded the Sand Creek Massacre, the November 29, 1864, assault led by Colonel John Chivington on a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho in the southeast corner of the Colorado territory that killed at least 200 members of the tribes, including many chiefs.
On the second weekend in January, in the dead of winter, Zach Snavely and Corinne Hancock fought their first wildfire. The Littleton couple watched flames rising about twenty feet into the air, eating up snow-covered piles of fuel and radiating heat, as they and their teammates dug a preventative fireline into the dirt on the grounds near Salida’s Colorado Firecamp.
Just days before, Snavely, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard and has been working as an international military consultant, and Hancock, a leadership coach who has devoted much of her career to foreign aid projects, had no professional firefighting experience. But they were moved to change that after COVID-19 hit and several historic wildfires including the Cameron Peak fire and East Troublesome fire near Rocky Mountain National Park, which collectively burned more than 350,000 acres raged through the state in 2020.
And the threats directed at Coomer keep on coming, despite the fact that he did not write the code for Dominion machines ironically, a large portion of his work has centered on an effort to ensure that Dominion machines in Colorado can be audited by the state s risk-limiting audit process, widely praised for its effectiveness in ensuring fair elections. Coomer has also worked to improve access for third-party researchers to evaluate and analyze voting systems.
Coomer didn t wait on Dominion. On December 22, he filed a defamation lawsuit against a long list of defendants, including Oltmann, Powell, the Trump campaign and several right-wing media outlets. He did so from hiding, where we caught up with him to discuss what life has been like since November 3.
The Dominion Voting Systems employee who went into hiding after social media users placed a $1 million bounty on his head has made a virtual appearance in the courts and his 52-page lawsuit filed December 22 in Denver District Court targets President Donald Trump’s campaign, multiple media outlets, former Trump attorney Sidney Powell and an outspoken Castle Pines businessman, among other defendants.
Eric Coomer works as director of product security and strategy for Dominion Voting Systems, the Denver-based company that s been the subject of nationwide scrutiny amid rumors that it rigged the election in favor of President-elect Joseph Biden. Although everyone from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials to outgoing U.S. Attorney General William Barr has said that there is no evidence of widespread, election-altering fraud (and Dominion has repeatedly debunked the allegations on its Setting the Record Straight website page), the rumors continue.
A week after Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold certified the results of the state vote, and a day after the electoral college voted to confirm that Joe Biden had won the presidential race, Colorado Representative Lori Saine convened a meeting of the Legislative Audit Committee on December 15, when lawmakers listened to eight hours of testimony loosely tied to the broad topic of election fraud.
The lineup included everyone from Jenna Ellis the former (and fired) Weld County deputy district attorney who now works as Trump’s lawyer and testified from Washington, D.C. to county clerks and Colorado secretaries of state past and present. One person who didn t make it to the mic: conservative businessman Joe Oltmann, a Castle Pines resident who is CEO of PIN Business Network, a data-driven customer-growth company, and an outspoken critic of Dominion Voting Systems, the Denver-based company that s been the focus of many vote-fraud rumors.