New Smartmatic Filing Reveals Fox News Staffers Admitted Election Claims Were ‘So F***ing Cray’ and ‘MINDBLOWINGLY NUTS’

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File

In the wake of Dominion Voting Systems’ stunning $787.5 million settlement in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, all eyes turned to Smartmatic, another voting technology company that had filed its own lawsuit making similar claims that Fox News had made false and defamatory accusations that Smartmatic had engaged in fraud during the 2020 election.

This week, the Smartmatic litigation revealed another similarity with the Dominion case: discovery that has unveiled blunt and shocking admissions by Fox employees that they knew the election fraud claims made by President Donald Trump and his attorneys, surrogates, and other key supporters were false — along with a multitude of synonyms for crazy.

Both sides have filed motions for summary judgment, seeking to convince the judge that the other side’s case is too flawed and should be thrown out ahead of trial. The dueling motions have significant redactions, mostly done at Fox’s insistence and over Smartmatic’s objection. In a press release, Smartmatic addressed the arguments it was making in its latest pleadings and addressed the issue of redacted information in the parties’ motions:

[M]ost of the important information in the motions is currently redacted. Smartmatic has told the court that it supports transparency and believes most, if not all, of the information should be unredacted and available to the public. Fox has not. The New York Times recently filed a motion to gain access to the filings, a motion Smartmatic supports.

Fox’s motion attacks Smartmatic by accusing the company of building its complaint on “a myth” by seeking a “windfall” from “allegations that mostly concerned Dominion Voting Systems” and “negative public sentiment about the 2020 elections,” and claiming that Smartmatic was “a failing company that had not turned a meaningful profit in many years and had no real business prospects.”

This new motion was filed by Smartmatic’s legal team, led by Erik Connolly, and specifically opposes the factual claims and legal arguments in the motion for summary judgment filed by defendants Fox News Network, Fox Corporation, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, and the estate of Lou Dobbs (who passed away in July 2024), by arguing that defendants have misrepresented the facts and law in the case and omitted relevant evidence, including the specific quotes by Fox employees that were revealed in discovery.

Similarly, pre-trial discovery in the Dominion litigation revealed a trove of documents in which Fox’s on-air personalities and top executives exchanged emails and text messages acknowledging Trump had lost the 2020 election, that his claims the election was stolen from him via fraud were unfounded, and lamenting the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. An additional set of documents with previously redacted comments was released in March 2023. The case ended up settling the very morning trial was set to begin.

One more detail about the Dominion litigation that may be giving Fox’s legal team anxiety-induced insomnia is the summary judgment motion that Dominion won against Fox, in which the judge brought the hammer down on the media giant and ruled that all twenty of the “statements” that were aired on either Fox News or Fox Business about Dominion were statements of fact and not protected opinion, and further that it was “CRYSTAL clear” (emphasis in original) they were all false and constituted defamation per se. That ruling also rejected several of Fox’s legal defenses and efforts to limit damages, finding it a matter for the jury.

Unsurprisingly, Smartmatic cited the Dominion ruling to argue that that court had “already held many of the same statements [in dispute in the Smartmatic litigation] were false as a matter of law,” and accuses Fox of lying about that court holding and misstating New York law on this issue.

Smartmatic’s motion is scathing in its description of Fox’s defense strategy (to “bury the truth under an avalanche of misdirection and strawmen”) and seeks to focus the case on “a very simple truth: Fox knowingly lied about a company that did nothing wrong,” arguing that Fox’s defenses about freedom of the press are “misdirection” from the cable news network’s “damning patterns of misconduct so egregious” they justify ruling in Smartmatic’s favor to remedy “the assassination of a company by a media giant that traded truth for ratings, causing immeasurable harm to both Smartmatic and democracy itself.”

The motion goes on to argue that Fox’s “lies” were “particular reprehensible” because they were “deliberate deception,” accusing company owners Rupert Murdoch and his family of having “orchestrated a calculated campaign of lies,” even as their internal communications showed they knew President Joe Biden had legitimately won:

Fox executives and showrunners privately ridiculed the very conspiracy theories they publicly amplified, creating a huge gulf between what they knew and what they published. This wasn’t journalism—it was strategic deception. Fox executives and showrunners recognized their viewers’ disappointment over Trump’s loss and cynically exploited it, feeding them comforting lies rather than uncomfortable truths. The network prioritized viewer retention over integrity, treating facts as irrelevant and their audience as pawns in a ratings game.

According to Smartmatic, Fox’s defamation “wasn’t a one-day story but a month-long assault” that “included 66 television broadcasts and over 100 publications with social media” made on its “massive global platform” reaching “hundreds of millions” of people around the world. “Most damaging of all, Fox has never retracted these lies, allowing them to fester in the public consciousness years later,” Connolly added.

In the section addressing Fox’s defenses for actual malice claims, Connolly blasts the Fox attorneys for their “lies about the legal standard for actual malice by omitting the parts that establish its liability as a matter of law,” and argues that Smartmatic has “overwhelming” evidence that the defendants “did not just doubt the claims — it ridiculed them in private while promoting them in public”:

Not a single Fox witness testified they believed Smartmatic helped rig the 2020 election. In fact, all admitted they do not believe it. And there is both direct and circumstantial evidence that Fox executives and showrunners doubted the veracity of Giuliani and Powell and their incredible claims. Fox whitewashes the record by omitting all mention of the words its employees actually used to describe the claims they put on air and their sources: “crazy,” “really crazy,” “fucking crazy,” “[t]ons of crazy,” “so fucking cray,” “bullshit,” “bs,” “bonkers,” “kooky,” “wacky,” “bananas,” “more than fantastical,” “comic book stuff,” “insane,” “INCORRECT,” “conspiracy theories,” “ridiculous conspiracy theories,” “a complete nut,” “a bit nuts,” “so nuts,” “totally nuts,” and “just MINDBLOWINGLY NUTS.”

“If that does not prove actual malice, nothing does,” wrote Connolly.

Fox News released a statement in response to Smartmatic’s latest motion:

Smartmatic’s motion confirms that it does not have the facts to support its claims, and their rhetoric-first approach to summary judgment is a grotesque distortion of the record that is contrary to well-established New York and First Amendment law. There is no basis for liability, as today’s filing proves. Smartmatic was a failing company that had not turned a meaningful profit in many years and had no real business prospects heading into the 2020 election.

The claim in that statement that Smartmatic “was a failing company” with no “meaningful profit” and “no real business prospects” was quoted from Fox’s motion and was countered by arguments in Smartmatic’s motion, which states that before the allegedly defamatory attacks from Fox, “Smartmatic was the largest election technology and services company in the world” and “had earned nearly $3 billion in operating revenue,” including being able “to capture the largest contract in U.S. history when, in 2018, it was selected to partner with LA County for the 2020 election.”

Smartmatic’s motion also counters the claim that it had “no real business prospects” by arguing it “was poised to earn billions in operating revenue after the 2020 election as the industry entered another ‘buy-cycle’ for election technology and services,” a future that was “robbed” from the company by Fox when it promoted election fraud lies for a month “using the largest worldwide megaphone of any news organization in history.”

“Ironically,” wrote Connolly, “Fox made an identical argument against Dominion — a much smaller company — before paying $787.5 million to settle a week after the court denied Fox’s motion for summary judgment on damages.”

Mediaite reached out to Smartmatic for comment on the motion and Fox’s defenses, and Connolly issued the following statement:

First, Fox uses its lies to disrupt American democracy and public trust in the election system, and now it is attempting to cover up those lies by misrepresenting basic constitutional law. Simply put: the First Amendment does not protect intentional lies. Fox has found themselves trying to justify the unjustifiable — they knowingly lied to their viewers and the public for profit.

Read Smartmatic’s Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment below.

2025.06.18 DKT 2397 Smartmatic’s Mem. in Opp. to Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment (REDACTED) by sarahrumpf

This article has been updated with additional information.