Recent court filings from voting technology company Smartmatic allege that One American News president, Charles Herring, sent a spreadsheet containing Smartmatic employee passwords to Sidney Powell, the former lawyer of Donald Trump.
Smartmatic filed a defamation lawsuit against OAN in 2021 that accused it of “disinformation campaigns” following the 2020 presidential election. The most recent court filing reportedly noted that the emailed spreadsheet suggests executives of the network “may have engaged in criminal activities” and “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy.”
The existence of the email came to light in the discovery process.
The email exchanged between Herring and Powell allegedly occurred on Jan. 8, 2021, at a time when members of the Trump campaign and his allies believed in the conspiracy that voting machines in certain counties across the country had been breached to favor current President Joe Biden. They wanted to examine these machines to validate fraudulent theories.
Whether the passwords contained in the spreadsheet are valid and belong to Smartmatic employees is unknown now. Still, Smartmatic is using this information from its most recent revelations to show that OAN is withholding key documents in the discovery process.
In a statement to CNN, OAN’s attorney Charles Babcock said, “OAN denies that its executive team ‘may have engaged in criminal activities.’ This vague accusation is a clumsy attempt to smear OAN and to divert attention from Smartmatic’s own misconduct.”
Meanwhile, in another recent court filing from an ex-Dominion employee stemming from a case against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, OAN founder Robert Herring, Charles Herring’s father, allegedly sent the same or a similar spreadsheet to Lindell in April 2022.
The troubles for OAN are not just concentrated with Smartmatic, as the right-wing news network has also been sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems.