Right-wing cable news network Newsmax wants to take a chance on going to trial for voting equipment company Smartmatic's defamation suit — and it is unlikely to end well for them, a former federal prosecutor said Friday.
The trial is set to begin Sept. 30, unless the parties agree to settle beforehand.
"Newsmax doesn't want to retract the lies and pay damages; instead they'll roll the bones in court & hope against hope they can get out of it, which is very unlikely given the evidence that the stories about voting machines were false & outlets like Newsmax that ran them knew it," wrote former prosecutor Joyce Vance on X.
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Smartmatic is one of multiple election equipment companies that have filed defamation suits against right-wing media companies over false claims that their machines were rigged in the 2020 presidential election. Dominion Voting Systems filed similar litigation.
Fox News, confronted with over a billion in potential damages, settled just before jury selection was about to begin with a payout of almost $800 million.
In that case, Dominion had an avalanche of damning evidence against Fox, including that anchor Maria Bartiromo aired vote-rigging claims by pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, whose source for the claims was a woman who claimed to have obtained it through time travel.
All of this came as former President Donald Trump has pushed unfounded claims that the presidential election was rigged, which ultimately culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump is currently under prosecution in both a federal and a state case for his involvement in efforts to overturn the election.