In the days following the 2020 election, the president of wingnut propaganda mill One America News sent an email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings. Via CNN:
The existence of the spreadsheet was recently disclosed by Smartmatic, which is suing OAN for defamation. CNN pieced together who was involved in the email exchanges by examining court records from three separate cases stemming from the 2020 election.
Lawyers from Smartmatic told a federal judge that the email, and the attached spreadsheet, suggest OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” because they “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy.”
The court records don’t say how OAN obtained the spreadsheet, or whether the supposed Smartmatic passwords were authentic. Nobody from OAN has been charged with any crimes. But it came at a time when OAN, Powell and others in their orbit were aggressively peddling false claims that there was massive voter fraud in 2020, and that Smartmatic was to blame.
According to court filings, the supposed passwords were shared around the same time that Powell, her associates and other Trump supporters were trying to improperly access voting systems across the country, to prove their false claims of voter fraud.
Well! This seems bad for OAN:
The revelations were surfaced by Smartmatic as part of an effort to convince the judge in its case against OAN that the network is withholding key documents in the discovery process.
“Discovery from the (OAN) executive team is critical to establishing actual malice because the (OAN) executive team may have engaged in criminal activities to further the election fraud claims generally and Smartmatic fraud claims specifically,” Smartmatic lawyers wrote in a December court filing that mentioned the spreadsheet.
The company’s lawyers further alleged that, “discovery to date has also uncovered that certain members of the (OAN) executive team appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy in connection with promoting election fraud claims.”
Smartmatic’s top attorney, Erik Connolly, said in a sworn affidavit that the email exchange with the spreadsheet was among “members of the (OAN) executive team” and “an individual who has already pled guilty to crimes relating to the 2020 election.”
