A court in New York rejected a bid from Fox News‘ parent company to toss a lawsuit from voting systems company Smartmatic against the company.
The New York appeals court on Thursday upheld a previous ruling denying Fox Corp.’s request to have the case dismissed, according to multiple reports.
Smartmatic sued Fox for $2.7 billion after the 2020 election, arguing the network maliciously aired false information about its software being promoted by allies of President-elect Trump after the election.
The outlet has defended itself in court by saying the allegations against Smartmatic, which were being promoted by Trump and his allies, were newsworthy and has also argued Smartmatic is inflating its financial valuation.
“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial,” the network said in a statement to The Hill. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”
The voting systems company is going after Fox board members.
Smartmatic subpoenaed four members of Fox Corp.’s board of directors in connection with its ongoing lawsuit against Fox News. (RELATED: Report: Smartmatic Subpoenas Fox Board Members In Defamation Lawsuit)
In motions filed with the Supreme Court of New York, Smartmatic requested relevant documents from four members of Fox’s board of directors: Anne Dias, Charles Carey, Roland Hernandez and Jacques Nasser.
“Accountability and responsibility do not stop with Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch,” J. Erik Connolly, Smartmatic’s attorney on its case, said in a statement to The Washington Post, which first reported on the subpoenas. “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.”
In 2023, Fox agreed to pay $787 billion to settle a separate defamation lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems. (RELATED: Report: Fox News Reaches Last-Minute Settlement With Dominion Voting Systems)
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I DON’T GET IT!!! IN A COURT IN GEORIGA I BELIEVE, IT WAS PROVEN THAT THE DOMINION VOTING MACHINE COULD BE TAMPERED WITH!!
University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Alex Halderman was called by the plaintiffs to discuss his findings on the machines. Halderman was one of the authors of the so-called “Halderman Report” on the Dominion machines, in which he picked one of the vote tabulators apart and analyzed all the various ways in which the machines could be hacked to change vote totals. That report was hidden from the public under a court order for years because it offers further proof that the 2020 election was stolen. Halderman used the fountain pen to push the machine’s power button in for approximately 7 seconds. This allowed him to boot the machine into “safe mode.” Once it was in safe mode, he was able to quickly change vote totals and start moving files around on the machine. “So, you can actually install something that you’ve already pre-programmed, or you can program it at that point to do whatever you tell it to do. So that can be anything from if they vote for George Washington, that it could then be recorded… or actually displayed as Benedict Arnold.”
AS FOR SMARTMATIC: A federal grand jury in South Florida indicted Venezuelan-American executive Roger Piñate, founder and president of the voting machine company Smartmatic, on charges of involving a bribery and money-laundering scheme used to secure elections contracts in the Philippines. These are the same machines that MADRAUO (Venezuela) used to get elected!!!
FOX has bad lawyers.