Smartmatic, a voting technology company that is suing Fox News and supporters of President Trump for defamation, asserted in court papers on Tuesday that a federal indictment the administration had leveled against it amounted to a politically motivated counterattack.
In a filing, the company, based in London, said the criminal charges that the administration brought in October were part of Mr. Trump’s “campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies — chief among them those who undermine his mantra that the 2020 election was rigged.”
The motion was in response to money laundering and bribery charges filed in the Southern District of Florida, accusing the company of engaging in a foreign conspiracy in which three of its executives at the time sought to secure business in the Philippines.
The new salvo comes as the Justice Department under Mr. Trump is ramping up its criminal investigation into the 2020 election, executing a search warrant in January at an election hub outside Atlanta and serving a subpoena in Arizona in recent days for election records.
Even as the case involving Smartmatic touches on bribes that prosecutors said were paid a decade ago to a Philippines election official, it highlights the ever-growing legal battlefield over American elections, as well as Mr. Trump’s far-ranging efforts to sow doubt about his loss in 2020.
Smartmatic has long drawn Mr. Trump’s ire: He and his supporters have lobbed evidence-free accusations that the company was among those who rigged the 2020 election against him. Smartmatic, in turn, filed defamation lawsuits against Fox News and Mr. Trump’s allies, including the former Fox personality Jeanine Pirro, whom Mr. Trump appointed as U.S. attorney in Washington last May; the right-wing network Newsmax; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell.
Smartmatic has since settled with Newsmax for $40 million and the far-right broadcaster One America News for an undisclosed amount. A similar defamation lawsuit brought by another company, Dominion Voting Systems, led Fox News to pay a $787 million settlement in 2023.
Smartmatic, in its new filing, suggests that the Justice Department’s criminal case against it may be an effort to kill or slow-walk the lawsuits that Smartmatic has filed against Fox News and Mr. Trump’s allies. Fox, the court filing notes, has pointed to the criminal case as a reason to delay the pending lawsuit, and Mr. Trump has continued to publicly attack the company.
“On more than one occasion post-indictment, the president has reposted videos claiming that Smartmatic was involved in the rigging of elections around the world, including the U.S. 2020 presidential election,” the filing said.
It added, “Smartmatic USA has exercised its right to hold those individuals and entities legally accountable for their deluge of defamatory statements and the attendant damage inflicted on its business, putting it squarely in the cross hairs for retribution.”
Typically, motions accusing federal prosecutors of vindictive or selective prosecution are long shots, but judges have increasingly been willing to entertain such arguments, particularly in cases in which the president has lobbied for people he despises to be prosecuted.
Smartmatic is now asking the federal judge overseeing its criminal case to dismiss the indictment on similar grounds, or at least allow the company to pursue evidence of internal Justice Department communications that might confirm a vindictive motive.
As part of its filing, the company noted that it is accused of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that the president has publicly disparaged and ordered the Justice Department to retreat from.
Yet after the Biden administration chose not to charge the company, the Trump administration did so, citing the very law that it argued should be curtailed.
The Trump administration, Smartmatic said, “prioritizes targeting its enemies over the equal protection of the law.”
The case is the latest in which defendants charged by the Trump administration have argued that they have been targeted for unfair prosecution by the president or his administration.
In September, the president forced out a U.S. attorney in Virginia who did not believe that the evidence supported criminal charges against two of the president’s perceived enemies, the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James. After Mr. Trump publicly demanded the cases be pursued, indictments were handed up against both.
Mr. Comey and Ms. James, in pushing for the dismissal of their cases, countered that the administration had vindictively brought charges against them, citing the level of vitriol Mr. Trump has directed at them. A judge ultimately dismissed both cases, saying the prosecutor who brought them had been unlawfully appointed. No ruling was made on the question of vindictive prosecution.
Separately, a federal judge in Tennessee is considering whether the prosecution of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father in Maryland who was mistakenly deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, was the victim of a vindictive prosecution when the administration brought him back to the United States to face criminal charges.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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