As the summer wound down, Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Newsmax heated up with both sides claiming small procedural wins:
- In August, a judge rejected Newsmax’s attempts to throw out parts of the lawsuit and allowed the case to proceed toward trial.
- In September, a judge allowed some claims to be dismissed because not all the allegedly defamatory statements had been proven false or proven to have been made with harmful intent, though Newsmax’s claims about Smartmatic’s voting machines altering the election were shown to be false.
- Newsmax’s article on that September ruling, however, was taken from an unidentified wire article but added a statement from Newsmax hyping “several public controversies involving Smartmatic, including its association with the murderous Chavez regime in Venezuela, allegations of corruption and bribery in the Philippines, and its more recent history of allegations of corruption that led to a criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and resulted in the indictment of three Smartmatic executives for violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” meaning that “Smartmatic can hardly claim that Newsmax’s coverage harmed its reputation.” It added that “This case is not about the left versus right, but about a free press being allowed to do its job,” even though Newsmax is indisputably a partisan right-wing website.
- Also in September, it was reported that Newsmax requested that the judge delay the trial after the Justice Department last month indicted Smartmatic executives over an alleged scheme to bribe officials in the Philippines to use Smartmatic election software.
When Newsmax won a “major ruling” in the lawsuit, an anonymously written Sept. 23 article hyped it and took potshots at the company, as it is wont to do:
The Superior Court of Delaware ruled Monday that Smartmatic will not be eligible for punitive damages in its defamation case against Newsmax.
This is a major ruling in favor of Newsmax.
The court ruled that since Newsmax had never engaged in express malice — meaning it never intended to harm Smartmatic — the election services company could not claim punitive damages.
Monday’s ruling means that to recover any damages, Smartmatic must prove to a jury that Newsmax’s coverage caused Smartmatic’s actual losses.
Newsmax’s reporting did not cause Smartmatic damages, and after extensive discovery Smartmatic has offered no evidence of such claimed damages.
The article then laughably insisted that “Newsmax covered both sides of the dispute after the 2020 election,” ignoring that its failure to actually do so is the basis of the Smartmatic lawsuit.
A couple days later, Newsmax put out an anonymously written explainer taking a further victory lap on this issue (and yet another shot at Smartmatic):
On the eve of its trial of Newsmax, Smartmatic has voluntarily reduced its claim for damages by over a billion dollars because it seeks to hide from the jury key evidence concerning allegations of criminal activities by its executives.
The Delaware Court has so far approved keeping this critical evidence from the jury, provided that Smartmatic does not argue that it lost any business opportunities after Dec. 31, 2023, due to Newsmax reporting.
[…]We remain perplexed that a company with such a sordid reputation as Smartmatic can put Newsmax on trial for allegedly harming its reputation.
For more than a decade, Smartmatic served as the exclusive election vendor of the brutal Chavez/Maduro regimes which has been continuously cited for its human rights violations, including murder, torture, repression of basic freedoms and other crimes.
Considering Smartmatic’s terrible reputation, this company can hardly claim Newsmax’s minor coverage after the 2020 election hurt its business.
The day after this, on Sept. 26, jury selection was set to begin in the trial — then, it was abruptly announced that Newsmax and Smartmatic had reached a settlement to end the lawsuit. With that, Newsmax swiftly clammed up about the lawsuit. A anonymously written Sept. 26 Newsmax article simply stated that “Newsmax is pleased to announce it has resolved the litigation brought by Smartmatic through a confidential settlement. More details to follow.” But Newsmax never released more details, and this article was never updated.
The only other reference to settlement at Newsmax is a Sept. 27 Associated Press article about it that included nothing else from Newsmax. The settlement is confidential, which you’d think a company that purports to be a news organization like Newsmax would be opposed to. Interestingly, a promotion at the end of the article hyped Newsmax’s upcoming planned IPO — which may be the reason Newsmax was amenable to a settlement and keeping the terms secret.
This scenario is a bit reminiscent of the battle between Newsmax and DirecTV after the latter dropped Newsmax’s TV channel in a dispute over fees, which Newsmax loudly (and falsely) framed as political bias. When Newsmax and DirecTV finally started negotiating over carriage, Newsmax suddenly went silent — and when they reached an agreement, Newsmax had to walk back all those partisan attacks that it was the victim of “censorship.”