Smartmatic, the voting company accused of manipulating the 2020 election tally for President Joe Biden, subpoenaed four Fox Corp. board members as part of its $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
The company notched a small court victory now that the move will force Anne Dias, Jacques Nasser, Chase Carey, and Roland Hernandez to produce critical documentation, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The board members are supposedly key to Smartmatic's case alleging that executives at Fox not only were privy to repeated and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud made by allies of former President Donald Trump were bogus but were unwilling to move a finger to pull back on the perpetuation of them.
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“The Board members witnessed Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s control of Fox News; exchanged relevant emails that Smartmatic has used in depositions and will mark as trial exhibits; attended meetings during and after Fox News broadcast the defamatory publications; and discussed the 2020 election and the competitive threats Fox News faced to its brand,” Smartmatic lawyers wrote to Judge David Cohen earlier this year.
“Accountability and responsibility do not stop with Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch,” the company's lead attorney J. Erik Connolly, told The Post. “Smartmatic plans to pursue Fox’s board members as well to determine why they allowed the company’s most valuable asset, Fox News, to spread disinformation about the 2020 election.”
Smartmatic brought a lawsuit against Fox in 2021. It accused some of its personalities and guests (such as attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell) of undermining the company's reputation as a trustworthy voting steward.
Fox has tried to suggest its network’s First Amendment-protected right to permit coverage of the election, and that happened to involve voting fraud questions.
It joined Dominion Voting Systems to debunk suggestions it had rigged the election against Trump.
In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to dodge a trial that likely would have exposed how the network promoted unsubstantiated stories that the 2020 presidential election was corrupted.
Notably, Fox won the right to file a counterclaim accusing Smartmatic of filing a defamation lawsuit to debilitate Fox News' reporting.
“Such headline-grabbing claims are designed to serve as a warning to others to think twice before exercising their own free speech rights, lest the cost of doing so prove too heavy to bear,” according to Fox's counterclaim.
Smartmatic tried to get the counterclaim tossed, arguing that its defamation case wasn't frivolous.
In April, the voting tech giant already settled its defamation suit against right-wing news outlet One American News Network over false claims about rigged voting machines in the 2020 election.