Smartmatic says Trump DOJ charged it for suing Fox, not for bribery

Smartmatic''s motion to dismiss, filed March 10, 2026, in the Southern District of 🌴Florida (case USA v. Donato Bautista, No. 1:24-cr-20343), argues that President Trump has ''openly waged a campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies — chief among them those who undermine his mantra that the 2020 election was rigged.'' The company''s attorneys, JKJenny Kramer and Christopher C. Marquardt, wrote that ''the only consequential changes in this case since 2024 were the President, his DOJ, and their well-documented crusade to unconstitutionally target their perceived political enemies, like Smartmatic.'' They are asking the judge to either dismiss the indictment outright or order discovery into the government''s charging decision.

Smartmatic has been falsely blamed by Trump and his allies for manipulating the 2020 US presidential election, which Biden won. Those claims have been debunked by courts, state election officials, and the Department of Justice itself. Smartmatic''s machines were used in only one US county during the 2020 election. The company responded to the disinformation campaign by filing a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Michael Lindell, among others.

The underlying criminal case involves alleged bribery tied to the 2016 Philippine presidential election. Federal prosecutors charged current and former Smartmatic executives in 2024, during the Biden administration, with paying approximately $1 million in bribes to Philippine government officials to win a contract to help run that country''s election system. Biden-era prosecutors did not charge Smartmatic''s corporate parent, SGO Corporation, at the time. The company was cooperating with the investigation, producing millions of pages of documents.

When the Trump administration took over in January 2025, the Department of Justice resumed corporate-level settlement negotiations with Smartmatic. Those talks proceeded for several months. They collapsed in September 2025, three days after Miami''s Trump-aligned US Attorney JRJason Reding Quiñones entered the discussions and shut them down. A superseding grand jury indictment adding SGO as a defendant was obtained three days later. Smartmatic argues this sequence is the core of its vindictive prosecution claim.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act corporate indictment is itself notable because the Trump administration simultaneously abandoned FCPA enforcement against most other defendants. The DOJ announced in early 2025 that it was scaling back FCPA enforcement and publicly dropped large numbers of active bribery and money laundering matters as part of its stated policy of limiting overseas enforcement. Smartmatic''s motion notes this selective treatment directly, arguing that the company was singled out for prosecution under a law the administration was otherwise abandoning.

According to Bloomberg Law, Smartmatic became the first corporate FCPA indictment in 15 years when SGO was charged in October 2025. The rarity of corporate FCPA indictments combined with the administration''s stated policy of pulling back from such cases makes Smartmatic''s treatment an outlier that the company argues can only be explained by political motivation.

The vindictive prosecution doctrine has rarely succeeded in court, but defendants who invoke it have won an important intermediate step: court-ordered discovery into the government''s charging motivations. KAKilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who sued the Trump administration over his deportation and was subsequently hit with criminal charges, persuaded a federal judge to order such a hearing after raising similar arguments. Former FBI Director James Comey and 🗽New York Attorney General Letitia James also made selective prosecution claims against Trump-era indictments, and both cases were dismissed before courts reached the merits.

Smartmatic''s attorneys drew parallels to Abrego Garcia''s case in their filing, arguing that the same pattern of post-lawsuit prosecution applies. Bloomberg Law noted that judges are ''increasingly questioning whether the administration is still entitled to the ''presumption of regularity,''' the judicial doctrine that assumes the government is acting in good faith. If the Miami judge grants Smartmatic discovery, the administration would be forced to produce internal communications about the charging decision — effectively putting the political architecture of the prosecution on trial.

Fox News has a direct financial interest in the outcome of the criminal case against Smartmatic. Fox is a named defendant in Smartmatic''s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit and has already cited the bribery indictment as a basis to delay that civil case and reduce any potential damages. Smartmatic''s motion notes that Trump ''on more than one occasion post-indictment'' reposted videos on social media claiming that Smartmatic rigged elections globally, including the 2020 US election — framing these reposts as ongoing political targeting rather than legitimate commentary on a pending prosecution.

JPJeanine Pirro, the current US Attorney for the 🏛️District of Columbia and a close Trump ally, is a named defendant in Smartmatic''s defamation lawsuit. The company argued in its motion that this creates a direct conflict of interest: current DOJ leadership has a personal financial and reputational stake in Smartmatic''s criminal prosecution, because a corporate conviction would undermine the defamation lawsuit''s damages calculation. The filing describes this as an additional reason the court should scrutinize the charging decision.

The DOJ did not publicly respond to Smartmatic''s motion as of March 12, 2026. If the judge allows the case to proceed without ordering discovery, Smartmatic''s vindictive prosecution claim will likely not succeed — courts rarely dismiss indictments solely on a defendant''s assertions. The more consequential question is whether the judge will order discovery, which would require DOJ prosecutors to justify their charging decisions in writing and under oath.

If the trial proceeds without dismissal, it is scheduled for 2027. In the meantime, both the criminal case and the $2.7 billion defamation case against Fox and other Trump allies will proceed in parallel. The civil defamation case could yield some of the largest damages in the history of American media law if Smartmatic prevails. The criminal case, if it results in a conviction, would likely be cited by Fox and other defendants in the civil case as evidence that Smartmatic''s claims about the 2020 election narrative had merit — a legal outcome that would benefit the company''s political adversaries.

The broader pattern of vindictive and selective prosecution claims against the second Trump administration reflects a constitutional argument that cuts across ideological lines. The due process protection against prosecutorial retaliation is meant to ensure that people and organizations exercise their legal rights — including the right to sue — without fear that the government will use its criminal law enforcement power to punish them for it. Legal commentators across the political spectrum have noted that if courts accept the government''s argument that a changed political environment is not sufficient to establish retaliatory motive, they effectively insulate the executive branch from accountability for using prosecutorial power as a political weapon.

Smartmatic''s case raises a specific sub-issue: the DOJ''s decision to prosecute a company that is simultaneously suing Trump allies for defamation, while the same DOJ was abandoning FCPA enforcement against everyone else. Even if prosecutors who brought the charges were not personally motivated by politics, Smartmatic argues the institutional pressure from political leadership is itself a constitutional problem — one that does not require proving individual bad faith to trigger due process concerns.