Pro-Trump network OAN execs may have ‘engaged in criminal activities’ while promoting 2020 election lies, Smartmatic alleges

In the wake of the 2020 election, the president of the far-right network One America News sent a potentially explosive email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings.

The existence of the spreadsheet was recently disclosed by Smartmatic, which is suing OAN for defamation. CNN pieced together who was involved in the email exchanges by examining court records from three separate cases stemming from the 2020 election.

Lawyers from Smartmatic told a federal judge that the email, and the attached spreadsheet, suggest OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” because they “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy.”

The court records don’t say how OAN obtained the spreadsheet, or whether the supposed Smartmatic passwords were authentic. Nobody from OAN has been charged with any crimes. But it came at a time when OAN, Powell and others in their orbit were aggressively peddling false claims that there was massive voter fraud in 2020, and that Smartmatic was to blame.