Newsmax Targets Smartmatic (Which Is Suing Newsmax) With Ham-Handed Sniping, Defensiveness

Eric Mack used a Sept. 25 Newsmax article to repeat a CNN report about voting-tech company Smartmatic: “A voting technology company at the center of legal action against former President Donald Trump’s lawyers and others over the 2020 presidential election reportedly finds itself implicated in a bribery scheme with a top Filipino election official.” Fully half of Mack’s story, though, is about Newsmax defending itself against the lawsuit filed against it by Smartmatic and fellow voting-tech company Dominion. First up, denial and distancing:

Alleging defamation, Smartmatic is suing Newsmax, Fox News, OAN, several individual Fox hosts, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and others.

All have denied wrongdoing.

[…]

The Trump team alleged a tenuous connection between Dominion and Smartmatic, noting that Smartmatic had once owned Sequoia, a U.S. voting machine company. Dominion acquired Sequoia in 2010.

Newsmax has denied the defamation allegations of Smartmatic, claiming its lawsuit is an attack on a free press and Newsmax’s right to report on what major officials and other public officials are stating publicly.

In December 2020 Newsmax issued a statement on its coverage of the 2020 election, making clear that network had “no evidence Dominion uses Smartmatic’s software or vice versa.”

The statement also added that Newsmax found that “no evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic used software or reprogrammed software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.”

Mack also stated:

Smartmatic has long had ties with the regime of Venezuelan strongmen Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, handling the country’s presidential and congressional elections for over a decade.

Mack failed to mention that Smartmatic left Venezuela in 2018 after the country’s election officials were caught by Smartmatic manipulating vote totals in a 2017 election. That would seem to disprove Mack’s suggestion that Smartmatic is corrupt because it had worked with “strongmen.”

Mack waited until the third-to-last paragraph of his 24-paragraph article to concede that “Smartmatic was not accused in the criminal complaint of having tampered with elections in the Philippines or elsewhere, according to CNN.”