Fox News on Tuesday will face another instance of deja vu: trying to prevent a judge from letting a case litigating its coverage of the 2020 election from going to trial.
During a Tuesday hearing, lawyers from the cable news network will ask a New York state judge in Manhattan not to let a jury hear election software company Smartmatic’s defamation case against it. Smartmatic sued the network in 2020 and claimed its hosts and guests repeatedly — and falsely — claimed it tampered with voting machines to switch votes meant for Donald Trump to Joe Biden. It sued Fox News for $2.7 billion.
The case is one of a number of defamation cases against Fox News and its ultra-conservative peers that popped up after the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump has falsely claimed was rigged against him. Fox News settled one of the cases, brought by voting software company Dominion Voting Systems, for $787.5 million in 2023, just as the case was about to go to trial.
Emails revealed in the discovery phase of the Smartmatic case showed that both Fox News hosts and executives wanted to appease their audience’s frustration over Trump’s loss. Tucker Carlson, then a primetime host for the network, sought to help the audience make sense of the reality — or grill the network’s elections guru about the results — while primetime host Sean Hannity criticized Carlson’s questioning of Trump attorney Sidney Powell for not providing evidence to back up her claims of election fraud.
Smartmartic did not have an immediate comment.
Fox News said in a statement that the “evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers on Fox News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech.”
Fox News in October tried to delay the case until after a federal criminal case against Smartmatic, which was accused of paying more than $1 million in bribes to a Philippine government official over its elections in 2016. The company denied the claims, and a federal judge refused to delay the defamation case.
“Now, in the aftermath of Smartmatic being criminally charged with bribery in the Philippines and the Government’s motion to include evidence of Smartmatic’s business dealings in Venezuela and Los Angeles County, we are eager and ready to continue defending our press freedoms at the Summary Judgement hearing,” Fox News continued in its statement.
