Smartmatic Wants More Than Money From Fox News

A top lawyer for Smartmatic, the voting technology company whose defamation lawsuit against Fox News is still pending, said Thursday that he won’t accept any settlement smaller than the $787 million Fox agreed to pay Dominion, and that his client needs a “full retraction” from the right-wing network disavowing the lies it spread about the 2020 presidential election, reports CNN.

“They need to get an apology. They need to get a full retraction,” Smartmatic lawyer Erik Connolly told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.”

That is something Dominion Voting Systems wasn’t able to extract from Fox as part of its historic $787 million settlement, which was clinched last Tuesday, as the trial was on the brink of opening statements.

Connolly said Smartmatic is “looking to take this case through trial” and wants “the vindication of a jury verdict in their favor.” But if there were to be an out-of-court settlement, the deal would need to include the retraction plus a payout larger than the massive sum that Dominion got.

The $787.5 million settlement Fox agreed to pay is a lot. But its net cost will likely be much less.

“That set down a marker and it’s a marker that we think we should be exceeding,” Connolly said. “The scope of the damage done to Smartmatic is a global scale, because we operate globally… $787 million is a good start. But it’s not the right finishing point.”

He blasted Fox for perpetrating the myth that Smartmatic “somehow masterminded an ability to rig a national election when we were only in one county” in 2020 — Los Angeles County — adding, that level of “recklessness is something you don’t normally see.”

Fox denies wrongdoing and is fighting the lawsuit, which is unfolding in New York state courts. Smartmatic wants $2.7 billion from Fox and other Trump allies that it named in the lawsuit.