Election-tech company Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Newsmax and other right-wing media for spreading lies about election fraud involving it after the 2020 presidential election has been slowly grinding forward. Newsmax has responded on its website by sniping at the company over allegations of elections using its equipment taking place in other countries such as Venezuela and the Philippines. An April 17 article by Michael Katz rehashed some of those right-wing attacks, even though it was ostensibly about fellow right-wing channel One America News reaching an out-of-court settlement with Smartmatic:
Smartmatic is not without controversy, however.
In March 2020, Politico reported on serious concerns over Smartmatic’s technology being used in Los Angeles.
Politico noted that Smartmatic’s system was found to have “numerous security flaws” with some election integrity experts calling for “barring the system” due to “multiple digital and physical vulnerabilities.”
Politico also claimed critics offered concerns that “the company was founded by three engineers from Venezuela and was at one time the subject of a Treasury Department inquiry into its potential ties to the Venezuelan government.”
“It also came under scrutiny in the Philippines, where authorities charged three of its employees with illegally altering code on an election server during that country’s 2016 national election,” Politico reported.
But Katz did not mention one revelation that may have inspired OAN to reach a settlement: a report that OAN sent a spreadsheet to then-Trump lawyer (and election denier) Sidney Powell containing the passwords of Smartmatic employees, which would have violated federal privacy laws.
Katz even regurgitated some of those old election-fraud attacks on Smartmatic, with only a tepid mention that none of it was substantiated:
After the 2020 election, Trump and his surrogates made a tenuous tie-in between Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.
Trump’s team claimed that software provided by Dominion Voting Systems had been manipulated, allowing for votes to be switched.
Dominion and election officials in multiple jurisdictions denied those claims, and Trump’s legal team never offered any evidence of software tampering by Dominion.
Trump’s legal team also alleged that Smartmatic, which had once owned Sequoia Voting Systems, sold key assets of the company to Dominion in 2010.
Noting Smartmatic’s close ties to the regimes of Venezuelan dictators Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, Trump’s team alleged that Dominion’s software was compromised.
The Trump team did not offer substantiation on these allegations.
Still, as the favored election company for over a decade of the brutal Chavez regime, Smartmatic has long been subject to criticism and scrutiny.
Of course, the reason Smartmatic is suing Newsmax is that it uncritically repeated many of those baseless attacks against the company without disclosing that there was no substantiation offered — which Katz failed to mention.
An anonymously written June 4 article actually focused on the lawsuit itself, albeit touting an action Newsmax was taking, citing allegations regarding the Philippines (which Fox News has also glommed onto):
Newsmax Media Inc. recently filed in Delaware Superior Court a motion seeking extensive financial and evidentiary sanctions against voting machine company Smartmatic.
Newsmax has argued that Smartmatic misled Newsmax, a special master, and the court about Smartmatic’s ability to produce discovery concerning the Department of Justice’s ongoing criminal investigation into the activities of Smartmatic and several of its senior executives related to an alleged international bribery scheme involving an election official in the Philippines.
In its motion, Newsmax asserts that for five months Smartmatic misled the court, the special master, and Newsmax to believe that DOJ was blocking critical discovery concerning the likelihood that Smartmatic and its executives may soon face serious, public, criminal bribery charges.
[Go here to read the publicly filed version of Newsmax’s motion detailing Smartmatic’s deception.]
The motion explains that Smartmatic and its counsel repeatedly informed the court that the DOJ was preventing Smartmatic from disclosing relevant information to Newsmax.
Newsmax notes in its motion that, as it turns out, Smartmatic — not the DOJ — was blocking this critical discovery.
[…]Newsmax contends that ongoing and future news reports about Smartmatic’s alleged involvement in an international bribery scheme is and will remain devastating to its defamation lawsuit against Newsmax.
Specifically, Newsmax says that these new revelations undermine Smartmatic’s claim that it will suffer damage to its future business prospects as a result of 2020 election coverage by Newsmax and others — as opposed to Smartmatic’s alleged role in the bribery scheme.
The article also repeated Newsmax’s lawyerly denial of Smartmatic’s legal claims:
Newsmax has denied Smartmatic’s defamation claim in its entirety, noting that it reported fairly on the 2020 election results by giving the public both sides of the dispute.
Newsmax also asserts that the Smartmatic lawsuit poses a danger to the First Amendment and the most basic right of press freedom.
The article didn’t mention, however, that a couple weeks earlier, Smartmatic accused Newsmax of deleting texts and emails from Newsmax executives, allegedly Newsmax had received notice to preserve evidence for the pending suit:
The new filing refers to specific text messages in which Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy referred to Trump’s attorney Sidney Powell, which Smartmatic says were deleted from Ruddy’s devices but saved by other witnesses and provided to the plaintiffs during discovery. Powell was a Newsmax guest and a source of false allegations about voting fraud by Smartmatic and other companies. The filing also alleges that the company lied under oath about the existence of its own journalistic guidelines.
Newsmax has denied Smartmatic’s claims, calling them “implausible inferences” and “nothing more than speculation.”
Later in June, Newsmax filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit entirely, claiming that “Smartmatic fails to meet its burden of proving that Newsmax published its news accounts with a knowing or reckless disregard of their falsity.” Newsmax hasn’t told its readers about that yet.