Smartmatic says Trump and Bondi's 'vindictive' prosecution streak is showing, and should end bribery case 'with prejudice'

Smartmatic claims there's ample reason to believe that President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi have vindictively and selectively "singled out" the voting machine company for prosecution as a consequence of its defamation lawsuits against MAGA allies in the wake of the 2020 election.

That election year, the company's technology was used only in Los Angeles County, which then-candidate Joe Biden easily won. Nonetheless, then-President Trump's allies, some of them on cable news, pushed the notion that the company was tied to deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and could have played a role in stealing the election. This led Smartmatic to file defamation suits against those it accused of "destroying its business." While some cases have settled, a suit against Fox News remains pending, as does Smartmatic's attempt to collect on more than $56,000 in sanctions from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

For having the audacity to defend its reputation against false stolen election claims, Smartmatic now says it is being punished and "singled out" for prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) despite Trump and Bondi's pointed shift in the opposite direction on pardons and policy.

Much like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, James Comey, and Letitia James, the defendant company is trying to put the DOJ in the position of rebutting a judge's finding of a "presumption of vindictiveness." The cases against the ex-FBI director and New York's attorney general never got that far before they were dismissed for reasons separate from their revenge prosecution claims. Abrego Garcia's case in Tennessee, on the other hand, has demonstrated how the Trump administration might try to resist having certain officials testify under oath about the origins of the case, how the evidentiary hearing could be delayed for months, and how testimony might eventually unfold in a courtroom.

Smartmatic referred to each of these cases and others in staking a claim for "discovery and a hearing" on the vindictive or selective prosecution issue.

In recent weeks and months, the Trump administration has executed a raid in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize all 2020 election ballots, sued across the country for states' voter rolls, and, most recently, eyed Maricopa County, where "Sharpiegate" fever broke in court in 2020 and in the aftermath, but evidently has not entirely gone away.

For Smartmatic, there's a connection between Trump's "fixation" on 2020 ahead of the 2026 midterms and the DOJ's October indictment of the company for alleged bribery and money laundering in the Philippines in 2016.

"To secure the Constitution's promise of due process, an indictment's accusations must follow only from fair and impartial decision-making, free from improper political motives or the desire to arbitrarily punish someone the Executive Branch dislikes. But since returning to office, 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—and demanded the Department of Justice  take up the sword," Smartmatic asserted, calling itself the "latest victims of this punitive and unconstitutional use of prosecutorial power."

Although the outcome of Garcia's claim is still unclear, Smartmatic cited each of these examples — as well as other cases that involve Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, a recurring figure in matters of interest to Trump in South Florida — to assert that the administration is prosecuting the company to further the "collective false narrative that President Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election" and "provide[] perceived defenses and delay excuses for his allies in their defamation cases."

For instance, Smartmatic has tried for over a year now to get Lindell to pay up for filing some "frivolous" claims against the company after Dominion Voting Systems sued him in Washington, D.C., federal court. In a recent court filing claiming an inability to pay the sanctions, Lindell suggested Smartmatic's indictment was relevant to his noncompliance with a court order to pay sanctions.

Smartmatic told U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, a Barack Obama appointee, that the Biden administration "chose not to prosecute" in 2024, and the only factor that changed is Trump.

Thus, the company said, it was swept up into a "well-documented" revenge streak, even as Trump separately "pardoned at least 38 individuals charged with or convicted of a total of fraud, corruption, and money laundering offenses," and as Bondi decided to "shift focus away from" FCPA cases that didn't involve a "human smuggling and the trafficking of narcotics and firearms" connection.

As a result, Smartmatic demanded the case be dismissed "with prejudice," so it can't be brought again, or the judge allow discovery of Trump and his allies' "improper involvement in the DOJ's decision" to prosecute for retaliatory reasons.

"President Trump's new DOJ took the exceedingly rare action of indicting the company for allegedly violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — a step the DOJ had not taken against any company for 15 years. That charging decision directly conflicted with the Department's new policies and was not supported by a change in the law or the evidence. Instead, 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," the filing concluded. "Because such an abuse of prosecutorial discretion offends the Constitution and the rule of law, this Court should dismiss the superseding indictment with prejudice. At a minimum, the Court must permit discovery as to President Trump and his political allies'—many of them highly motivated defendants in the defamation cases brought by Smartmatic who face potential damages in the billions—improper involvement in the DOJ's decision to vindictively and selectively target SGO for prosecution."

That discovery should include "all communications between the White House, and any of its agents or representatives, and the DOJ" about whether the charging decision was punishment for Smartmatic's "exercis[e of] its legal rights to bring the defamation lawsuits," the filing added.