Pro-Trump network OAN’s president solicited more info after receiving ‘stolen’ Smartmatic passwords, court documents allege

By Marshall Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — The president of the far-right cable network One America News solicited additional information from an anonymous tipster who provided “stolen” passwords of Smartmatic employees after the 2020 election, according to emails recently disclosed in court and new allegations from the voting technology company.

The revelation builds on CNN’s previous reporting that OAN President Charles Herring forwarded the purported Smartmatic passwords to ex-Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell within days and later passed it to Mike Lindell. At the time, the two prominent Trump allies were falsely claiming on OAN and other right-wing networks that Smartmatic rigged the election to put Joe Biden in the White House.

Smartmatic claims these email exchanges are evidence of potential crimes by OAN executives, including violations of data privacy and hacking laws, which the network vehemently denies.

Smartmatic is suing OAN for defamation stemming from the 2020 election lies. OAN denies defaming Smartmatic or anyone else, and its lawyers say nobody at OAN broke the law in connection with the alleged passwords.

In a recent court filing, Smartmatic publicly disclosed – for the first time – the original email that OAN received on January 5, 2021, containing the alleged passwords.

The anonymous email was sent to a generic OAN inbox, claiming to contain information about Eric Coomer, an employee of Dominion Voting Systems, another election technology company at the center of baseless 2020-related conspiracy theories.

About one hour later, Herring personally responded to the anonymous message, saying, “Thank you! If you come across any addition (sic) information, please pass along,” according to emails made public in court filings.

The tipster said he was providing a research dossier on Coomer, his friends and his colleagues – and encouraged OAN to “send these to other defendants / researchers / investigators / collaborators in order to effectively manage the workload.” Just three days later, Herring did exactly that, forwarding the material to Powell, CNN previously reported.

The sender also encouraged OAN to keep the information “quiet for now,” according to the filing.

The email referenced multiple attached Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Smartmatic’s lawyers said in a filing that the spreadsheets contained “stolen information” and “stolen passwords,” as well as “an appalling amount of personal information about Eric Coomer, Mr. Coomer’s friends and contacts… and Smartmatic employees.”

The contents of the spreadsheets haven’t been made public, and CNN has not independently reviewed the files. A source familiar with the material said one of the tabs on the spreadsheet contained a list of individuals and a column with corresponding “passwords,” though it didn’t say what the passwords were for.

It’s not clear if Herring viewed the spreadsheets before soliciting more information from the tipster. It’s common for journalists to ask sources to provide information about people or companies they’re looking into. But Herring’s highly unorthodox decision to pass along the source’s materials to Powell, who was in Trump’s legal orbit, is yet another example of how OAN has repeatedly blurred the lines between bona fide journalism and brazen pro-Trump advocacy.

Smartmatic maintains that the “nature of the information” in the anonymous email would’ve given Herring enough “reason to believe” that the alleged passwords in the spreadsheet were “uncovered through hacking activity,” potentially crossing a legal red line.

‘That is a crime,’ Smartmatic alleges

The potentially explosive emails and other internal OAN communications are at the center of a legal dispute between the two companies in the DC-based federal defamation case.

OAN handed over the emails to Smartmatic last year, but later claimed they were privileged and should be returned. Instead of returning the files, Smartmatic referenced them in a public filing. OAN asked a judge to sanction Smartmatic’s lawyers because, in their view, Smartmatic had no legal right to make those details public.

Smartmatic insists the emails aren’t privileged and that they boost its defamation claims. They have further alleged in redacted court filings that the emails show how OAN “participated in a crime by soliciting, reviewing, and disseminating information designed to assist bad actors with hacking into Smartmatic’s email communications.”

“This communication is one person providing illegally obtained information to another person,” Smartmatic’s lawyers wrote, later adding, “That is a crime, not a privileged communication.”

They added, “OANN’s internal and external discussions about the Stolen Passwords represent circumstantial evidence that OANN intended to harm Smartmatic and intended to undermine people’s confidence in the 2020 election.”

Despite saying in court filings that materials contained “stolen information,” Smartmatic’s legal team declined to comment when asked by CNN if the passwords were, in fact, authentic.

In a letter to Smartmatic in November that was recently made public, lawyers for the far-right network denied that their staff was involved in obtaining the supposed passwords. They further said they don’t know the identity of the “anonymous source” who sent the information in the first place.

“Neither OAN nor its employees took any part in creating or gathering any of the information contained in the Spreadsheet,” OAN lawyer Carl Butzer wrote. “No OAN employees used the information in the Spreadsheet and no OAN employees attempted to access any accounts listed in the Spreadsheet.”

Court filings from a separate defamation case indicate that the anonymous tipster sent the same opposition research, and spreadsheets, to other right-wing media figures.

A frustrated judge

The underlying defamation case is still in the discovery phase. At a court hearing Monday, a federal judge expressed deep frustration with both sides, chiding them for bogging down the discovery process with tit-for-tat disputes over documents.

While the fight over the spreadsheet didn’t come up at the hearing, there was a long list of related document standoffs to hash out.

“Sanctions will very much be on the table going forward” if either side is abusing the discovery process to hide information or improperly slow the case down, said Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya of the US District Court in DC. “These are things that you guys can work out among yourselves.”

During the hearing, OAN pressed for Smartmatic to turn over more materials about how it estimated that it lost more than $2 billion from the 2020-related disinformation campaign on OAN and other right-wing networks like Fox News and Newsmax.

OAN’s lead lawyer Charles Babcock said OAN was “a small, family-owned cable TV channel,” and that even a $500 million damages payout “would wipe them out.” (Fox News paid $787 million to settle the Dominion defamation case last year.)

Upadhyaya shot back, saying, “I’m looking at your counsel table and I think you have a sophisticated team,” referring to the highly regarded First Amendment lawyers representing OAN, including at least six who attended Monday’s hearing. Babcock has previously represented Oprah Winfrey, Bill O’Reilly, and Dr. Phil, according to his official biography.

He told the judge that OAN has insurance against defamation lawsuits, and that “the insurance company has taken a very aggressive posture” to defend itself by hiring top-tier attorneys.

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