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Fox is attempting to force George Soros to reveal any connections to a voting technology company suing the network for $2.7bn over its airing of election rigging conspiracies.
The move comes as the group behind Fox News and Fox Business seeks to limit the potential financial fallout from the defamation case under chief executive Lachlan Murdoch, whose father Rupert Murdoch stepped down as chair of Fox Corp’s board last month.
In a filing late on Wednesday, lawyers for the Murdoch-owned group claimed Soros’ association with Smartmatic — which hosts on Fox channels had falsely claimed had interfered with the presidential election even though its devices were only used in a single US county — stretched back “nearly a decade”.
Lawyers for Soros have called Fox’s request “unduly burdensome and oppressive” and “an abuse of process that constitutes harassment”.
The attempt to compel documents from Soros is the latest strategic move by Fox as it seeks to stave off outstanding litigation over its 2020 election coverage. The company paid $787.5mn earlier this year to settle a similar defamation case brought by Dominion, an election machine maker.
In its lawsuit, brought in 2021, Smartmatic claimed it was defamed on Fox by lawyers for Donald Trump, including Sidney Powell, who said “there are George Soros connections to this entire endeavour” — despite Fox research finding that the billionaire had no ownership stake in the company.
Lawyers for Fox are attempting to prove that such statements may not have been defamatory. They noted the chair of Smartmatic’s parent company in the lead-up to the election was Mark Malloch-Brown, who also served as a board member in the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations.
“Malloch-Brown had a decades-long personal and business relationship with George Soros going back at least to 2005,” Fox’s lawyers said. That same year, “while Malloch-Brown was serving in the United Nations, he resided at an apartment owned by Soros in New York City”, they added.
Malloch-Brown was indirectly invoked in one of the allegedly defamatory statements made on Fox by Rudy Giuliani. The former Trump lawyer took to the air in November of 2020, saying: “Well, the guy who was running [Smartmatic] was one of the . . . people who is number two or three in Soros’s ‘Change the World’ organisation — Open Society, right?”
A subpoena was first served to Soros in June, seeking documents and communications relating to Smartmatic, as well as communications between the billionaire and his charities with Malloch-Brown about Smartmatic.
Soros’s lawyers replied that Smartmatic’s complaint cites “only a handful of vague allusions, made by Fox personnel or their guests, to a purported ‘connection’ between Smartmatic and Soros”.
“This handful of stray, imprecise remarks does not provide grounds for the broad requests served on Mr Soros,” they added.
Smartmatic and Malloch-Brown did not respond to a request for comment. The Open Society Foundations declined to comment. Fox pointed to its statements in earlier filings.
*This story has been amended since initial publication to clarify Lachlan Murdoch’s role at Fox.
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