Smartmatic Bribery Case Can’t Escape Election Conspiracy Shadow

The Justice Department’s bribery indictment of voting machine company Smartmatic reflects a rare alignment of career prosecutors with conspiracy theorists in Trump’s base and the president’s biggest media backer.

Smartmatic, which President Donald Trump’s allies falsely blamed for stealing the 2020 election, last month became the first corporation in 15 years to be charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, even as the administration has scaled back such enforcement.

The indictment—which came after Trump’s chief Miami prosecutor shut down settlement talks, according to multiple people familiar with the situation—prompted white collar lawyers to suspect politics played a role. Interviews with more than a dozen individuals familiar with the negotiations suggest it’s not so clear cut.

But following a pattern of Trump-directed retaliatory investigations in recent months, even well-intentioned prosecutors may have difficulty establishing the White House wasn’t a factor.

“Most judges and outside observers used to presume regularity on the part of federal prosecutors, but the growing view that DOJ has become politicized could impact this prosecution,” said James Koukios, a former bribery prosecutor who co-chairs the white collar defense group at Morrison Foerster.

DOJ alleges Smartmatic paid $1 million in bribes connected to a contract during the 2016 Philippine election—accusations first pressed against the company’s top executives late in Joe Biden’s administration. The UK-based election technology vendor will be arraigned in a Miami federal courthouse Thursday stemming from an investigation dating back to 2017.

The indictment bolsters Fox News Channel’s defense against Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation suit for broadcasting the baseless claims about the 2020 US election. The conservative media outlet has cited the bribery charges as grounds for delaying the defamation case and reducing any possible payout.

People familiar with Smartmatic’s perspective said the company has been improperly targeted by a Trump DOJ that wouldn’t bend from its original guilty plea offer. The company’s lawyers are considering making that selective prosecution argument in an upcoming motion to dismiss, added the people, who like most sources spoke anonymously about internal deliberations ahead of trial.

But apolitical line prosecutors and mid-level supervisors—not just political leaders—have been pushing for the corporate indictment, other individuals said. The career lawyers have argued the company withheld key evidence to protect corrupt executives and didn’t present reasonable counter-offers.

Meanwhile, the taint of politicization may undermine department officials’ intention of deterring corporate crime by proving they’re willing to take a company to trial. Multiple corporate attorneys said they’ve been reluctant to advise clients that the Smartmatic prosecution indicates further bold DOJ enforcement.

Prosecutor’s Role

Inside the privately held election machine multinational, executives were optimistic through the first half of 2025 that the government wasn’t interested in charging the company itself. But over the summer, prosecutors renewed interest in a corporate resolution, conditioned on a guilty plea and multimillion-dollar fine, the individuals said.

Defense lawyers countered by offering to sign a deferred prosecution agreement, provided the charges against executives were dismissed—a nonstarter for DOJ, the people said.

As it became apparent the government wasn’t budging on its threat to press charges, the Smartmatic legal team hired a well-connected lawyer to try lobbying DOJ leadership, several of the people said.

Michael Purpura, a veteran of Trump’s first-term White House counsel’s office with professional ties to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, advocated to Blanche that the case fell outside the administration’s narrower approach to overseas bribery enforcement.

He gained little traction, as Blanche deferred to the judgment of acting Criminal Division chief Matthew Galeotti.

Late in the process, Miami US Attorney Jason Reding Quinoñes entered the negotiations shortly after being sworn into office. He demonstrated a desire to charge Smartmatic without entertaining eleventh-hour offers, multiple people said.

Reding Quinoñes, who’s separately been ramping up cases against people who’ve previously investigated Trump, alarmed Smartmatic representatives with an Oct. 13 email that said, “I will not be accepting any of the offers presented” and “I consider the matter closed,” the individuals added.

A grand jury indictment followed three days later.

A spokesperson for Reding Quinoñes’ office declined to comment on whether Fox News or the White House asked him to intervene.

Timing Spurs Suspicions

The US attorney’s approach resulted in an outcome line prosecutors support.

Smartmatic remains mystified as to why DOJ would want to complicate the trial of executives that was on track for next April by adding in a new co-defendant, said individuals with knowledge of the company’s views.

A federal judge expressed irritation with prosecutors at a hearing last month for failing to give her notice of their intentions to seek a superseding indictment against the company. She rejected the lead prosecutor’s position that April 2026 remained a reasonable trial time frame, some of the people said.

The indictment’s timing, which benefited Fox News just as its lengthy defamation case was nearing a summary judgment ruling, also raised suspicions.

But people familiar with the government’s perspective said the Fox case never entered the equation. They said the company wasn’t fully cooperating and DOJ had first considered charging it alongside the executives in 2024.

When DOJ charged Smartmartic the following year instead, it jolted a defense bar accustomed to more than a decade of DOJ always coming to terms with companies determined to avoid a risky bribery trial.

Whether it was a coincidence that Smartmatic wound up the company to end that streak may now be sorted out in court.

If the company files a selective prosecution claim, as it’s contemplating, and the judge were to grant discovery, that could reveal the true motivation, said Ellen Podgor, a white collar crime professor at Stetson University College of Law.

“We may find that there is nothing political here at all, and it is corruption,” Podgor said. “Or we may find that it suddenly got activated because of politics. We don’t know. But I do think that discovery ought to be granted more in these cases.”