As part of Fox News’ continuing legal battle with voting equipment vendor Smartmatic, Fox News’ lawyers asked a New York court to subpoena billionaire George Soros.
On Monday, Justice Cohen of the Manhattan Supreme Court denied Fox’s motion to force Soros to submit testimony and other records in the network’s discovery process.
Reports show that Fox filed a motion in early October to depose Mark Malloch Brown, the president of the Open Society Foundation and the former chair of Smartmatic’s parent business, which George Soros partly funded.
In 2021, Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox, claiming that the network deliberately provided Sidney Powell and ex-President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani with a platform to ‘promote lies’ about Smartmatic’s software after Trump’s 2020 election.
In a court filing, Fox claimed that Smartmatic is using the case to solicit business.
To fight Smartmatic’s “very absurd” demand that it pay billions in damages, Fox has not just defended its reporting but also filed a lawsuit accusing the company of unfairly attempting to limit free expression.
The network published a statement after the verdict saying they were relieved that Soros and Smartmatic’s lawyers admitted at the recent court hearing that the company had ties to Soros, which are supported by internal Smartmatic papers and the public record.
The Smartmatic lawsuit is not likely to go to trial until 2025 at the earliest.
This April, Fox settled defamation allegations over the network’s coverage of the 2020 election by paying $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems.
Reports show the long-awaited research by Professor J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan was released in June after being sealed by Judge Amy Totenberg.
In June, Prof. Halderman tweeted that his team discovered severe problems, including an arbitrary code execution vulnerability, and that these holes had not been fixed. Although CISA has issued a security alert, the vulnerability will not be addressed until after the 2024 presidential election.
