Fox News Media moved late Monday to dismiss a $2.7 billion defamation suit by voting-machine company Smartmatic USA Corp., arguing that claims of election fraud by President Trump and his legal team were newsworthy and that the network’s coverage of them was protected by the First Amendment.
The Smartmatic suit, filed last week in a New York court, focuses on a series of statements made about Smartmatic on Fox News and Fox Business by lawyers who supported former President Donald Trump’s claims as well as by certain Fox News Media hosts.
Smartmatic’s complaint claims that the segments on the Fox channels contained numerous errors involving the reliability of its technology, and that Fox knew that the statements about Smartmatic were untruthful. A group of federal and state officials have said there is no evidence that any voting system changed or deleted votes in the 2020 general election.
The Fox filing gives the first indications of its legal strategy in the high-stakes case.
“When a sitting President and his surrogates claim an election was rigged, the public has a right to know what they are claiming, full stop,” Fox argued in its motion to dismiss the suit. “If those surrogates fabricated evidence or told lies with actual malice, then a defamation action may lie against them, but not against the media that covered their allegations and allowed them to try to substantiate them.”
