Fox News Lawsuit: Smartmatic Demands More Than Dominion Settlement, Plus a Retraction

After paying over $700 million to Dominion, Fox News has to contend with Smartmatic's $2.7 billion lawsuit. However, unlike Dominion, it wants a retraction of Fox's election lies.

In its reporting, Fox News guests and personalities accused both Dominion and Smartmatic of tampering with the 2020 elections and spreading the "Big Lie" that these voting machine companies worked with the Democrats and the Venezuelans to steal the elections for Joe Biden.

Smartmatic lawyer Erik Connolly appeared on CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead."

He told Tapper, "They need to get an apology. They need to get a full retraction."

While Fox News' $787 million settlement with Dominion was historic, being one of the largest settlements in history, it had disappointed many as it did not require Fox News to own up to its lies and publicly retract statements made on air that the elections were stolen.

Fox News acknowledged in a press release that the judge who oversaw the case had concluded that all 20 on-air statements that Dominion sued over were false, but it never admitted so on air.

Smartmatic Wants To Take Fox News to Trial and a $787 Million Settlement Is Not Enough

In the CNN interview, Conolly stated that Smartmatic is "looking to take this case through trial" and wants "the vindication of a jury verdict in their favor." However, the company is well aware of the fact that Fox News might want to settle, as they did with Dominion.

If Fox News does try and settle, the Smartmatic attorney stated, "That set down a marker and it's a marker that we think we should be exceeding." He added that the damage done by Fox News' false reporting about their company was on a global scale as they operate globally.

"$787 million is a good start. But it's not the right finishing point," he stated in the interview with Tapper.

According to Vanity Fair, Conolly also talked about the Dominion case. "Dominion's litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox's disinformation campaign," he said. "Smartmatic will expose the rest."

In Smartmatic's case, Fox News insinuated that the voting machine company "somehow masterminded an ability to rig a national election when we were only in one county." However, Connoly pointed out that they only operated in Los Angeles County, a deeply Democratic area, in 2020.

The Smartmatic lawyer concluded, "We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025."

Fox News Reporting of Dominion Settlement Sparks Outrage

Meanwhile, Fox News has largely ignored the lawsuits in their news coverage, barely even mentioning the settlement in their programming. It did release a statement that spinned the settlement as a reflection of its "continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards."

The statement received much blowback from critics as the network largely went about as if nothing happened, and as if its leaked private messages did not exist.

According to MSNBC, critics are calling the Dominion settlement a "Pricey slap on the wrist," but noted that a jury cannot force a company to publicly apologize and can only award money.

Any retraction could cost Fox more as it might lose viewers to more far-right competitors. MSNBC pointed out that if Dominion had tried to add this to the settlement, it might have been a dealbreaker.

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Rick Martin

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