Smartmatic isn't stopping with Fox

In the wake of the 2020 election, the president of the far-right network One America News sent a potentially explosive email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings.

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OAN has established itself as perhaps the most extreme of the pro-Trump news outlets.

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The little-watched network regularly gives airtime to baseless conspiracy theories that support Trump. The channel even worked closely with Russian operatives on a propaganda-style documentary during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 over allegations he pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. One of its correspondents, who is also an attorney, even worked with Trump’s legal team to subvert the 2020 election results.

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Lawyers from Smartmatic told a federal judge that the email, and the attached spreadsheet, suggest OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” because they “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy.”

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According to court filings, the supposed passwords were shared around the same time that Powell, her associates and other Trump supporters were trying to improperly access voting systems across the country, to prove their false claims of voter fraud.

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The revelations were surfaced by Smartmatic as part of an effort to convince the judge in its case against OAN that the network is withholding key documents in the discovery process.

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Smartmatic has sued OAN, Powell, and other Trump allies and right-wing outlets, seeking billions of dollars in damages for their 2020 election lies. After former President Donald Trump lost the election, they spread baseless claims that election software from Smartmatic and another company flipped millions of votes from Trump to Joe Biden.

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OAN settled a defamation suit in September with former Dominion executive Eric Coomer, whose case revealed how the network worked closely with Powell and others to lie about the election. DirecTV has also dropped the far-right network from its lineup, dealing a significant blow to the outlet, hitting the network’s viewership and revenue.

  CNN

Maybe Smartmatic's lawsuit will put the final nail in OAN's coffin.

Meanwhile in Fox News troubles

Recall that Fox agreed to settle with Dominion voting machines company to the tune of $787.5 million in that defamation suit April last year to avoid a possible jury verdict awarding them the $1.6 billion Dominion was asking for.  

JFC, do NONE of these assholes pay their attorneys?

Or their taxes...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We'll see

Is this a bid to steal Dominion's customers?  Or maybe just an attempt to soften up Fox.  I have a hard time believing the company would risk losing in court.  Granted, that is probably even less likely since Dominion's big settlement win.

Don't forget

Fox is also being sued by the Smartmatic voting machine company.

Dominion lawsuit against Fox revelations

[A] newly unsealed court filing [...] which pulls from a host of internal communications from Fox News employees involved in election coverage, includes comments and quotes revealing that producers, executives and stars of the network knew that the election wasn’t stolen and that many fraud claims were bogus.

The filing is the latest made public in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of U.S. voting equipment, against Fox News for $1.6 billion.

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Even certain hosts who sometimes embrace conspiracy theories on their shows said in private that they knew that Sidney Powell, who filed election lawsuits to stop multiple states that Joe Biden won from certifying their elections, was not telling the truth, according to the filings.

Dominion is also suing Powell for defamation.

Tucker Carlson told a producer soon after the election that Powell “is lying,” the documents show.

Sean Hannity said, according to the legal filing: “That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing. I did not believe it for one second.”

  NBC

But he pushed it on Fox audiences anyway.

Even Fox’s internal fact-checks after the election found that claims of election fraud were “incorrect” and “not evidence of widespread fraud.”

$1.6 billion isn't enough. When they lose this case and have to pay up, do you suppose Fox News will tell its viewers?

A top network programming executive wrote privately that he did not believe the shows of Carlson, Hannity and Jeanine Pirro were credible sources of news.

Even so, top executives strategized about how to make it up to their viewers - among Trump's strongest supporters - after Fox News' election-night team correctly called the pivotal state of Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden before other networks. A sense of desperation pervades the private notes from Fox's top stars, reflecting an obsession with collapsing ratings.

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The audience started to erode severely that fall, starting on Election Night itself. Fox executives and stars equally obsessed over the threat posed by the smaller right-wing network Newsmax. Hannity texted Carlson and Ingraham that Fox's Arizona call "destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable." Carlson shot back that it was "vandalism."

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After Fox's correct projection of Arizona for Joe Biden, network leaders schemed to woo back Trump supporters. Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott texted Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corp co-chairman, that "the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them."

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The claims against the election tech company recurred on Fox News despite Dominion sending thousands of communications dissecting and disproving the false claims - even taking to the opinion pages of Fox News' corporate cousin, the Wall Street Journal, to do so. (Both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are part of the Murdoch family's media empire.)

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On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Bret Baier, the network's chief political anchor texted a friend: "[T]here is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations - stories. Twitter. Bulls---."

The following week, a producer for Ingraham sent a note conveying similar disgust. "This dominion s--- is going to give me a f---ing aneurysm."

In answering questions from Dominion's attorneys under oath, former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said he had never "seen any verifiable, tangible support" that Dominion was owned by a second voting-tech company Smartmatic. Yet that claim was repeatedly said on air by Fox hosts and guests. Dobbs also said he was aware of no evidence that Dominion rigged the election, according to Dominion's legal filings.

On the air, Dobbs was among the most muscular proponents of Trump's baseless claims of election fraud. He was forced out of Fox the day after Smartmatic filed its own $2.7 billion defamation case against the network.

Meanwhile, fixated on the erosion of viewers to smaller right-wing rivals, Fox News executives purged senior journalists who were fixated on reflecting the facts. In a note to the network's top publicity executive, Fox News CEO Scott denounced Sammon, the former Washington managing editor. Scott wrote Sammon did not understand "the impact to the brand and the arrogance" in projecting Arizona for Biden, saying it was Sammon's job "to protect the brand."

  NPR

Word at election time was that Trump would call Hannity for advice about what to do.  Apparently he didn't always do it.

In their counterclaim, Fox attorneys wrote that when voting technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials, while some Fox News hosts offered protected opinion commentary about Trump’s allegations.

Fox’s counterclaim is based on New York’s “anti-Slaap” law. Such laws are aimed at protecting people trying to exercise their first amendment rights from being intimidated by “strategic lawsuits against public participation”, or Slapps.

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Fox attorneys warn that threatening the company with a $1.6bn judgment would cause other media outlets to think twice about what they report.

  Guardian

Other outlets that spew propaganda knowingly, like OAN and Newsmax, perhaps. And that would be a good thing.

A trial is set to begin in mid-April.

Oh, THAT's rich, Tucker. 

September 25, 2020:

Fox News got to claim victory on Thursday after a new ruling in a lawsuit brought against the company came out in its favor, but the win arrived at a steep cost. To deflect an allegation of defamation, the network was forced to claim that one of its highest-profile personalities can't reasonably be expected to consistently provide accurate information to viewers.

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Federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found:

This "general tenor" of the [Tucker Carlson] show should then inform a viewer that he is not "stating actual facts" about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in "exaggeration" and "non-literal commentary." . . . Fox persuasively argues . . . that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer "arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism" about the statements he makes.

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Fox News' official position is that its lead commentator cannot be counted on to be accurate when discussing the news of the day, even when he says he's simply stating the facts of a case.

  Yahoo

Well good

And ask for big bucks.

Second voting machine company files lawsuit

A voting technology company swept up in baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election filed a monster $2.7 billion lawsuit on Thursday against Fox News, some of the network's star hosts, and pro-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, alleging the parties worked in concert to wage a "disinformation campaign" that has jeopardized its very survival.

The lawsuit, filed in New York state court, accused Fox, Giuliani, Powell and hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro of intentionally lying about Smartmatic in an effort to mislead the public into the false belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

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In the immediate aftermath of his loss, Trump falsely asserted that the election had been rigged against him. His allies, including Fox, Giuliani, and Powell, promoted various conspiracy theories about Smartmatic, which only provided its services to Los Angeles County in the 2020 general election, to support Trump's false claims.

The baseless conspiracy theories peddled about Smartmatic, which mimicked those pushed against Dominion, falsely suggested that the company's technology was used throughout the country and allowed the November vote to be rigged against Trump.

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Giuliani and Powell have also been sued by another voting technology company, Dominion Voting Systems, for promoting their voter fraud conspiracies.

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Some strains of the conspiracy theory pushed on Fox aimed to tie the company to the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Other strains suggested that Dominion used Smartmatic's voting software in swing states and that votes were exported out of the country to be tabulated; both assertions were false and Smarmatic pointed out in its lawsuit that it doesn't work with Dominion as the two companies are competitors.

  MSN

When Trumpland lies, they go big.

America 2020 has jumped the shark

UPDATE:

Last month, [Antonio Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer,] initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.

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But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.”

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Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.

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Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business reported on Nov. 15 that “one source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor.”

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Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.

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Last week, [Mugica's] lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017.

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“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.

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Mr. Mugica isn’t the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has [...] threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign.

  NYT

Hit 'em hard or it won't hurt.q

These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new “Trump TV,” a giant new media company in the president’s image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.

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OAN and Newsmax have been avidly hyping Mr. Trump’s bogus election claims. OAN has even been trying to get to Newsmax’s right, by continuing to reject Joe Biden’s status as president-elect. But their own roles in propagating that lie could destroy their businesses if Mr. Mugica sues.

Do it, Tony. Do it for the world.

[Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most prominent First Amendment lawyers,] noted that “truth is always a defense” and that, failing that, the networks may defend themselves by saying they didn’t know the charges were false, while Ms. Powell may say she was simply describing legal filings.

“It is far too early to predict how the cases, if commenced, will end,” he said. “But it is not too early to say that they would be highly dangerous to those sued.”

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Fox News and Fox Business, which have mentioned Dominion 792 times and Smartmatic 118 times between them, according to a search of the service TVEyes, appear to be taking the threat seriously. Over the weekend, they broadcast one of the strangest three-minute segments I’ve ever seen on television, with a disembodied and anonymous voice flatly asking a series of factual questions about Smartmatic of an expert on voting machines, Eddie Perez, who debunks a series of false claims. The segment, which appeared scripted to persuade a very literal-minded judge or jury that the network was being fair, aired over the weekend on the shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, where Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell had made their most outlandish claims.

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I’m reluctant to cheer on a defamation case against news organizations, even networks that appear to be amplifying dangerous lies. Companies and politicians often exploit libel law to threaten and silence journalists, and at the very least subject them to expensive and draining litigation.

And defamation cases can also collide with subjects of genuine public interest, as in the most prominent case I’ve been involved in, when a businessman sued me and my colleagues at BuzzFeed News for publishing the Steele Dossier, while acknowledging that it was unverified. There, a judge ruled that the document was an official record that BuzzFeed was entitled to publish.

If a news organization is guilty of defamation, it should be sued.

Mr. Mugica wouldn’t say whether he has made up his mind to sue. Mr. Connolly said that he has “a lot of people watching a lot of videos right now,” and that he’s researching whether to file in New York, Florida or elsewhere. I asked Mr. Mugica if he’d settle for an apology.

“Is the apology going to reverse the false belief of tens of millions of people who believe in these lies?” he asked. “Then I could be satisfied.”

I think we know the answer to that question.

UPDATE:  Newsmax is on it, too.