Trump Lawyer and Former OAN Host Subpoenaed in Smartmatic’s Election Defamation Lawsuits: Report

Smartmatic, the electronic voting company at the center of various debunked right-wing election conspiracies, subpoenaed Trump lawyer and former OAN host, Christina Bobb, on Tuesday as part of the company’s ongoing defamation lawsuits.

The subpoena requires Bobb to “provide records related to the 2020 presidential election as well as communications concerning the Trump administration, the Trump campaign, Fox News, and Rudy Giuliani,” Insider reported.

Smartmatic sued OAN, One America News Network, in federal court in November 2021. The lawsuit, which a judge ruled in June will continue to move forward despite challenges, alleges “the network ‘reported a lie’ and spread fraud claims about the company—whose machines were only used in California in 2020—knowing they were false,” reported Forbes.

Filed in New York state court, the subpoena is part of an evidence-gathering effort by Smartmatic’s legal team to make the case that various right-wing figures and news outlets knowingly defamed the company by pushing voter fraud allegations they knew to be false.

Insider noted that Bobb herself was involved in pushing election conspiracies while on-air with OAN:

Bobb was a correspondent at the far-right TV company One America News during the 2020 election. She aired an infamous interview with Ed Solomon, a Long Island-based swing-set installer who purported to be an “expert mathematician” who claimed Biden’s electoral victory in Georgia was impossible.

Bobb made headlines in recent months as she signed a certified letter declaring all materials taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago by former President Donald Trump had been returned to the National Archives, an action which could land Bobb in all kinds of legal trouble as that letter turned out to be false.

Forbes notes that Smartmatic is also suing Mike Lindell and Sydney Powell, as well as Fox News and its anchors Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo in February 2021, alleging they “engaged in a conspiracy to spread disinformation about Smartmatic.”

“New York Supreme Court Justice David B. Cohen ruled in March that the $2.7 billion lawsuit can move forward against those defendants—but not against anchor Jeanine Pirro, who was also named in the suit,” Forbes reported on the state of those suits.

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