Trump Foe Smartmatic Embroidered in US Overseas Bribery Case – BNN Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) — The president of Smartmatic Corp., the voting machine company battling Fox Corp. over debunked claims that it rigged the 2020 election against Donald Trump, was indicted in an unrelated bribery case.

Roger Piñate, a Venezuelan citizen and Smartmatic founder, was indicted Thursday in Florida, where he lives. He is accused of conspiring with two other executives to pay a $1 million bribe to win a contract for the 2016 Philippines election, the US Justice Department said in a statement. Smartmatic itself wasn’t indicted.

The charges aren’t related to the 2020 US election or to the claims about Smartmatic made on air at the time by Fox News guests and hosts. Even so, criminal allegations of bribery involving Smartmatic voting machines may provide a valuable talking point for Trump, who continues to claim without evidence that the US election was rigged, as he campaigns to return to the White House.

Smartmatic said in a statement that Piñate and another executive who was indicted, Elie Moreno, a dual citizen of Venezuela and Israel, have been placed on leave and that both are “innocent until proven guilty.” A third person, former Smartmatic executive Jorge Vasquez, was also charged. A lawyer for Vasquez couldn’t immediately be identified.

“No voter fraud has been alleged and Smartmatic is not indicted,” the company said in the statement. “Voters worldwide must be assured that the elections they participate in are conducted with the utmost integrity and transparency. These are the values ​​that Smartmatic lives by.”

The indictment is a twist in the legal saga surrounding Smartmatic, which was accused by Trump and his supporters of conspiring with another election technology company, Dominion Voting Systems Inc., to flip millions of votes away from Trump in the crucial battleground states where Dominion’s technology was in use.

The conspiracy theory was widely debunked in court as well as by Republican election officials. Smartmatic’s only contract in the US for the 2020 election was in Los Angeles County. The company filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox that is on track for trial next year. Fox denies wrongdoing.

Fox agreed to pay $788 million to settle a defamation suit by Dominion just as a jury trial was beginning. It denies wrongdoing in that case, too, arguing that its coverage of important claims made by a sitting president and his lawyers was protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.

Fox declined to comment on the announced charges. The indictment itself was not yet publicly available.

The Justice Department statement doesn’t mention Smartmatic by name or make any reference to the 2020 US election. In the statement, prosecutors say the executives funded the alleged bribes through a slush fund created by “over-invoicing the cost per voting machine” for the Philippines election and that the funds were laundered through bank accounts in Asia, Europe and the US.

Piñate was charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering, among other counts.

(Updates with comment from Smartmatic starting in fourth paragraph.)

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