Fox News Isn’t Out of the Woods Yet: $2.7 Billion Smartmatic Defamation Lawsuit Looms Larger Than Dominion

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Why would Fox News settle with Dominion only to turn and fight Smartmatic? An email obtained by TheWrap shows it making the same mistakes

The Fox News legal teams leaves a Delaware court.
WILMINGTON, DELAWARE – APRIL 18: Members of the Fox News legal team, including lawyer Dan Webb (C), leave the Leonard Williams Justice Center after settling a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems in Delaware Superior Court on April 18, 2023 in Wilmington, Delaware. According to reports, FOX will pay Dominion $787.5 million. Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion in damages because it claimed it was defamed by FOX when the cable network broadcast false claims that it was tied to late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, that it paid kickbacks to politicians and that its voting machines were 'rigged' and switched millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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You’d think Rupert Murdoch would just keep the checkbook out: No sooner than Dominion Voting Systems stepped out of the courtroom with a $787.5 million settlement prize, in stepped Smartmatic, whose separate but related $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit over 2020 election claims will soon have its own moment of reckoning.

Troublingly for Fox, its lawyers seem to be making mistakes similar to the ones that weakened its position in the Dominion case, TheWrap has learned.

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