5 eye-popping revelations in newly released filing of Smartmatic's case against Fox News

On Friday, a court ruled that Smartmatic could submit a filing with fewer redactions in the interest of public transparency. On Monday, the company did exactly that, revealing new details in a 469-page filing related to its lawsuit against Fox Corp.

First, according to the document, new details include claims by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox's parent company, News Corp. In a March 27, 2024, court hearing, Murdoch stated that he didn't know how to send text messages during the 2020 election.

The direct quote is that Murdoch said he “didn’t know how to text at the time and he was later taught to do so by someone." The problem, Smartmatic's filing shows, is that there are text messages between Murdoch and other Fox employees, including host Sean Hannity and Fox CEO Suzanne Scott.

Murdoch was in a group text with Scott, Hannity, and his son, Lachlan Murdoch. The younger turned over the text messages on his phone that included the group text, though his father, Scott and Hannity did not have those messages on their phones.

Murdoch isn't the only one; top Fox officials ignored legal requirements to preserve documents, even when asked to do so.

“[Lauren Petterson] testified that Fox’s legal department instructed her to change the autodelete setting [on her phone] to 30 days," the filing says. She was asked by lawyers, "You did not take steps to maintain certain messages on your phone from November and December of 2020 to preserve that evidence for litigation related to the cases filed by Dominion and Smartmatic, correct?"

Petterson said, "I did not take steps. I got a phone call from our legal department at some point, I couldn’t tell you exactly when, but they called to ask me what my phone settings were on for my text messages. I didn’t know there were settings for text messages. They had to walk me through it and pull up my settings and show me that there’s a part in the phone where it says text messages can delete in 30 days, I think 60, and then never. And they asked me what is mine on and it said never. And they said can you please move it to 30 days, which I did exactly that.”

Another detail is that Tom Lowell, Fox's vice president and managing editor of news, told the court that he lost his phone in the ocean with all his text messages on it. When he was asked about the circumstances, Lowell said he "doesn’t recall the specifics” of how he “accidentally dropped his phone into the ocean.”

Marketing director John Fawcett said that he returned his phone, and before doing so, he “conducted a ‘factory reset’ on his Fox-issued phone."

Perhaps the most egregious example came from Hannity.

The long-time Fox host testified that he has a “routine practice of deleting [his] texts every day.”

However, Hannity was sent a notice by Dominion Voting Systems on December 22, 2020, saying, “Litigation regarding these issues is imminent. With this letter, you are on notice of your ongoing obligations to preserve documents related to Dominion’s claims for defamation based on allegations that the company acted improperly during the November 2020 presidential election and somehow rigged the election in favor of President-Elect Joe Biden.”

Hannity said that his attorneys told him to preserve all of his documents in December of 2020, but he continued to delete his texts manually every day.

Another host, Laura Ingraham, also suddenly didn't have any text messages from the "as-ordered time period." According to her testimony, Igraham "do[esen't] know when [her text messages] got deleted from [her] phone."

She was also asked why she had no data, testifying, “I don’t have a good recollection of that. ... I routinely had deleted text messages."

These are just a few of the long list of revelations in the public filing.