The justice department is alleging in a new court filing that one of three Smartmatic executives indicted last year on bribery and money-laundering charges transferred money from a 2018 voting machine contract with Los Angeles county into “slush funds” that were originally set up to pay bribes to an election official in the Philippines to obtain and retain lucrative election contracts.
Prosecutors say one of the executives of the voting machine company transferred an undisclosed amount from the $282m LA county contract into the “slush funds” in 2019, but did not say if anyone actually received bribes from the county’s money at that point. The government is seeking to prove the Smartmatic executives were part of an alleged years-long scheme to pay bribes to the election official and kickbacks to at least one of the executives from Smartmatic, which sued Fox News for defamation after the 2020 election.
