Voting Company: Fox News Knew It Was Airing Bogus Election-Fraud Claim

By Staff, Agencies

The voting-machine company falsely accused of rigging the 2020 US presidential election against Donald Trump said it uncovered “a mountain of direct evidence” that Fox News knew the conspiracy theory was bogus even as it broadcast the claims on numerous occasions.

Dominion Voting Systems said in a filing on Thursday, US time, that depositions of Fox Corp executives including Rupert Murdoch demonstrate network insiders were overwhelmed with doubt about the conspiracy theory. TV host Tucker Carlson said in a text after the election that former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, who was frequently appearing on Fox shows, was an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell.”

“Fox knew,” according to Dominion, which is seeking $US1.6 billion [$2.3 billion] in damages in its defamation suit. “From the top down, Fox knew ‘the dominion stuff’ was ‘total bs.’”

The lawsuit, set for trial in April, is part of the fallout from a vast conspiracy theory pushed by Trump and his allies after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. The claim helped trigger the Capitol riot by a mob of Trump supporters and remains part of the former president’s speeches as he makes a third run for the White House.

Dominion has for months been gathering evidence and testimony to help prove its allegation that Fox News and parent company Fox Corp recklessly allowed the network to repeatedly air provably false claims – that Dominion intentionally flipped millions of votes away from Trump in co-operation with corrupt Democrats, foreign hackers and software linked the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

“Privately, Fox’s hosts and executives knew that Donald Trump lost the election and that he needed to concede,” Dominion said. “But Fox viewers heard a different story – repeatedly.”

Thursday’s heavily redacted filing by Dominion – a so-called motion for summary judgment – asks the judge to grant victory to the company without a trial based on the evidence so far. Fox News and its parent are due to file a reply by February 27.

Fox News also filed a redacted motion for summary judgment, saying the suit isn’t warranted because the network is protected by the First Amendment and was covering valid news regardless.

“Fox News fulfilled its commitment to inform fully and comment fairly,” the company said in the filing. “Some hosts viewed the president’s claims skeptically; others viewed them hopefully; all recognized them as profoundly newsworthy.”

Fox News said in a statement that “Dominion’s motion for summary judgment takes an extreme and unsupported view of defamation law and rests on an accounting of the facts that has no basis in the record”.

A judge in June 2022 denied Fox Corp’s motion to dismiss, finding Dominion had properly alleged that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch may have acted with “actual malice” in directing the network to broadcast the conspiracy theory. The judge noted a report that Rupert Murdoch had spoken to Trump a few days after the election “and informed him that he had lost”.

On Thursday, Dominion said internal Fox email and text messages support its claim that the network pivoted to the conspiracy theory to retain and attract viewers who were upset when Fox became the first network on election night to call the vote count in Arizona for Biden.

“Despite the internal recognition that the election was over, Fox did not retract its claims about Dominion,” the voting-machine company said in the filing. “Instead, it kept defaming Dominion. To this day, Fox has never retracted the false statements it broadcast about Dominion.”

Fox News host Dana Perino described the conspiracy theory in texts and emails at the time as “total bs,” “insane,” and “nonsense,” according to the filing. Chris Stirewalt, who was Fox News politics editor during the election, testified he believed that by November 7, 2020, “there was no way anybody could think that Donald Trump had really won the election.”

Fox News and several of its personalities also face a lawsuit by Smartmatic Corp, a Dominion competitor that was also falsely accused on-air of rigging the election against Trump. A New York appeals court this week upheld a ruling denying Fox’s motion to dismiss the suit and reinstated claims that had been dismissed against Rudy Giuliani and Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro.