Conservative network Newsmax agrees to pay $67m in defamation case over 2020 election claims

Settlement comes after Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle similar lawsuit in 2023

Newsmax saw a business opportunity in catering to viewers who believed Donald Trump won. AFP

The conservative network Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defaming a voting equipment company by spreading lies about President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, according to documents filed on Monday.

The settlement comes after Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle a similar lawsuit in 2023 and Newsmax paid what court papers say was $40 million to settle a libel lawsuit from a different voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which also was a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories on the network.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis had ruled earlier that Newsmax did defame the Denver company Dominion Voting Systems by airing false information about the company and its equipment. But Mr Davis left it to a jury to eventually decide whether that was done with malice, and if so how much Dominion deserved from Newsmax in damages. Newsmax and Dominion reached the settlement before the trial could take place.

The disclosure came as Mr Trump, who lost his 2020 re-election bid to the Democrat Joe Biden, vowed in a social media post on Monday to eliminate mail-in ballots and voting machines such as those supplied by Dominion and other companies. It not known how the Republican President could achieve that.

The same judge also handled the Dominion-Fox News case and made a similar ruling that the network repeated numerous lies from Mr Trump’s allies about his 2020 loss despite internal communications showing Fox officials knew the claims were bogus.

“How long are we going to play along with election fraud?” the Newsmax host Bob Sellers said two days after the 2020 election was called for Mr Biden, according to internal documents revealed as part of the case. Newsmax took pride that it was not calling the election for Mr Biden and, the internal documents show, saw a business opportunity in catering to viewers who believed Mr Trump won.

At Newsmax, employees repeatedly warned against false allegations from pro-Trump guests such as lawyer Sidney Powell, according to documents in the lawsuit. In one text, even Newsmax's owner Chris Ruddy, a Trump ally, said he found it “scary” that Mr Trump was meeting with Ms Powell.

Dominion was at the heart of many of the wild claims aired by guests on Newsmax and elsewhere. The network retracted some of its more bombastic allegations in December 2020.

Though Mr Trump has insisted his fraud claims are real, there is no evidence that they were, and the lawsuits in the Fox and Newsmax cases show that some of the President’s biggest supporters knew they were false at the time. Mr Trump’s attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

Mr Trump and his backers lost dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud, some before Trump-appointed judges. Numerous recounts, reviews and audits of the election results, including some run by Republicans, turned up no signs of significant wrongdoing or error and affirmed Mr Biden’s win.