Fox Business host Lou Dobbs aired a segment on his show on Friday night that debunked several claims that Fox News has made suggesting that voter machine fraud was responsible for President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden.
The segment follows a 20-page legal threat received by Fox News from the voting technology company Smartmatic, which accused Fox of participating in a “disinformation campaign” by peddling the rumors that their company had created voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election.
Dobbs, a Trump-supporter, gave an introduction prior to the segment, stating that “there are lots of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and voting software,” and then introduced Edward Perez, who works with the Open Source Election Technology Institute. Dobbs explained that Perez would be giving “his assessment of Smartmatic and recent claims about the company.”
Perez answered questions from an unidentified interviewer throughout a previously recorded segment, debunking one conspiracy at a time.
“I have not seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to delete, change, alter anything related to vote tabulation,” said Perez.
Perez, who felt the way the interview was conducted was strange, said later that he did not know that the interview would be airing on Dobbs’ show.
“I was never informed that the contents would be for Mr. Dobbs’ show,” said Perez to CNN. “And my reaction was to observe as many other have how kind of strange and unique that particular way at presenting the facts was.”
The legal threat from Smartmatic was also sent to Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN), and asked the companies for a “full and complete retraction of all false and defamatory statements and reports.” Several statements that Dobbs had made in the past were included as examples of the statements that Smartmatic deemed as false.
