Voting technology firm Smartmatic filed a motion in Miami federal court Tuesday seeking to dismiss a criminal money laundering indictment, with attorneys arguing that President Donald Trump and his allies drove the prosecution as retaliation for the company’s role in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Trump’s media supporters.
The dismissal bid puts the Justice Department’s charging timeline under direct scrutiny. Smartmatic said it cooperated with federal investigators beginning in 2021—producing millions of pages of documents and making presentations to federal agents—before prosecutors reversed course and added the company to an existing indictment after Trump returned to the White House.
The Retribution Argument
Smartmatic’s UK-based parent company, SGO Corporation, was added last fall to a criminal indictment that had previously charged several company executives with paying $1 million in bribes to election officials in the Philippines. Attorneys for the company said a trial date for the executives had already been set and that Smartmatic believed it was no longer a target.
“The prosecution of SGO furthers their collective false narrative that President Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election,” Smartmatic said in the filing.
Attorneys said Trump’s administration reversed the Justice Department’s position after his return to the White House, driven by his demands to prosecute perceived enemies and by his claim—central to Smartmatic’s pending defamation suit—that the company helped rig the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Smartmatic attorneys also compared the prosecution to the Justice Department’s criminal charging of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a Salvadoran migrant whom prosecutors charged after he successfully sued the Trump administration over its decision to deport him.
Underlying Criminal Charges
The criminal case against Smartmatic and its executives stems from alleged payments made between 2015 and 2018 to obtain a contract with the Philippines government to help run that country’s 2016 presidential election. Co-founder Roger Pinate, who no longer works for Smartmatic but remains a shareholder, has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors have also sought court permission to introduce evidence they say shows that revenue from a separate $300 million Smartmatic contract with Los Angeles County to modernize its voting systems was allegedly diverted to a slush fund controlled by Pinate through overseas shell companies and fake invoices. Prosecutors further allege that Pinate bribed Venezuela’s longtime election chief by transferring to her a luxury home with a pool in Caracas, in an alleged attempt to repair relations following Smartmatic’s abrupt departure from Venezuela in 2017, when the company accused then-President Nicolás Maduro’s government of manipulating results in elections for a constituent assembly.
Background: Smartmatic and the 2020 Claims
Smartmatic was founded more than two decades ago by a group of Venezuelans who found early success running elections while the late Hugo Chavez, a devotee of electronic voting, was in power. The company later expanded globally, providing voting machines and election technology in 25 countries.
Smartmatic has said its business suffered severe damage after Fox News gave Trump’s lawyers a platform to claim the company had participated in a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election. Fox News said it was legitimately reporting on newsworthy events, but later aired a segment refuting the allegations after Smartmatic’s lawyers complained. In the pending defamation suit, Fox has argued in court that Smartmatic faced imminent collapse due to its own internal misconduct, not because of any negative coverage.