Smartmatic accuses Fox News of destroying evidence in defamation case
- Smartmatic has filed claims against Fox News asserting that key text messages were deleted intentionally by executives.
- The accusation suggests that these actions created a significant lack of evidence that could undermine Fox's defense.
- This legal battle highlights ongoing concerns about the intersection of media practices and electoral integrity in the U.S.
In a significant ongoing legal battle in the United States, Smartmatic, a voting technology company, has brought a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News. In this lawsuit, Smartmatic makes serious allegations against Fox executives, claiming they deliberately destroyed critical evidence, specifically text messages, that originated in the months following the controversial 2020 presidential election. These text messages, which allegedly contained information about the network's knowledge regarding misinformation related to Smartmatic's voting technology, were supposedly deleted by top executives, including Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch. According to court filings, Smartmatic asserts that Fox News orchestrated the systematic destruction of these messages, which would have shed light on how executives at the network understood the legitimacy of the conspiracy theories being propagated on air. Smartmatic argues that this destruction of evidence was neither accidental nor isolated; it claims that this action created an