Trump was not allowed on-air by Fox News executives during the January 6 attack
Fox News Defamed Smartmatic in a High-Dimensional Court of Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis’s Case against Dominion
Fox is being sued for more than a billion dollars in a monster defamation lawsuit and that is very bad news for the news channel.
Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis, a 12-year veteran of the state’s bench and former corporate attorney, has often sought to temper emotions in the contentious proceedings between the broadcasting giant and Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-technology company. Each side repeatedly has accused the other of acting in bad faith.
“If he were to be given a name in culture, it would be Cool Hand Luke,” says Joseph Hurley, a criminal defense attorney based in Wilmington who has argued before Davis but has no involvement with the case. “In court, he never shows any emotion, and I mean that in a good way.”
In a statement, Fox pushed back against Dominion’s legal standing, saying the company’s lawsuit “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny.”
Finally, Davis ruled that Smartmatic could reasonably allege that Newsmax defamed the company even in statements that did not name it. He said Newsmax “seemingly wants the court to make a hyper-literal reading of every statement.”
Like Dominion, Smartmatic was the subject of false claims that its software had switched Trump votes to Joe Biden. Those claims were broadcast on Newsmax, Fox News and elsewhere.
“Here, Smartmatic’s well-pled allegations support the reasonable inference that Newsmax’s reporting was neither accurate nor disinterested/unbiased,” Davis said.
Professor John Culhane of Delaware Law School says the judge should not have been having any Newsmax arguments.
Culhane cautions against drawing any conclusions from the Newsmax ruling but says Davis is very clear in his approach to the law.
The Fox News Era Revisited: How Fox Corp. Defeated Corrupt Claims of Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Campaign
Fox News let lies about the presidential contest to be promoted on air, even though its highest-ranking executives privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, according to a Thursday court filing.
Smartmatic also has sued Fox for $2.7 billion, but that suit is not as far along as Dominion’s. Several of Fox’s stars were not dismissed from the Smartmatic case as the New York state court rejected the motion to have it thrown out. The ruling dismissed claims against parent company Fox Corp, saying no cause was stated.
Smartmatic attorney Erik Connolly said it would file an amended complaint that “details the involvement of [Fox Corp. leaders] Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch.”
Lawyers for Newsmax in New York and Delaware cite a legal privilege, known as neutral reportage, allowing it to present unprecedented allegations without adopting them as true, so that the public could draw its own conclusions.
He states the “First Amendment is not unlimited” because it protects reporters in order to guarantee a robust and unintimidated press. He said a neutral reportage principle does not protect a publisher who “deliberately distorts” statements to “launch a personal attack of [its] own on a public figure.”
Yet a panic set in as pro-Trump viewers abandoned Fox News following the Arizona call. And when hosts scrambled to promote Trump’s false claims of fraud, Fox News executives seized on it as a valuable strategy, according to the evidence presented by Dominion, even as at least two of Fox’s corporate directors and a top corporate official took exception.
The Fox case: Reply to Robert A. Davis’s apology to the attorneys defending Trump’s liars in the Fox case
In both cases, the stakes are much higher. Davis does not wish to amplify his own profile. (Indeed, his court declined to make a photo of him available for this story.) The Delaware legal bar has a hallmark air of comity around proceedings, and the judge has sought to ensure that.
In a Feb. 8 court hearing in the Fox suit, Davis apologized to the other legal teams, saying that he did not know what he was talking about.
He pinned it on his use of a pat phrase. That’s a typical sarcastic thing that judges say? Davis asked. Don’t tell me I’m wrong, if I’m wrong. It means that I’m making some kind of statement. That was not the reason I was doing it.
The messages also revealed that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, did not believe Trump’s election lies and even floated the idea of having Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham appear together in prime time to declare Joe Biden as the rightful winner of the election.
He called Sidney Powell a bit nuts. Carlson used a profanity for women to describe her when he demanded evidence from Powell. A top network programming executive wrote privately that he did not believe the shows of Carlson, Hannity and Jeanine Pirro were credible sources of news.
The material presented in the remarkable 178-page brief reflects there were no illusions that there was heft to the allegations of election fraud even among those Fox figures who gave the most intense embrace to Trump allies peddling those lies.
This lawsuit is about “protecting the integrity of our public discourse itself,” Dominion lawyer Rodney Smolla said, adding cases like these “protect the public from deliberate falsehoods.”
The Fox News News Story: Critical Reaction on Fact-checked Election Deception and Election Correlations in the Fox News Era
In multiple instances, Fox News executives and hosts expressed worry over the matter and started to crack down on those at the network who fact-checked election lies. In one case, after White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a Trump tweet pushing election fraud, Carlson said he wanted her fired.
A person with knowledge of the case told CNN that Heinrich was not aware that the hosts were trying to have her fired when she read the legal filing.
In one instance, when host Neil Cavuto cut away from a White House press gaggle where misinformation about the election was being promoted,Fox News leadership was told it was a brand threat.
Scott wrote to Murdoch that Fox needs to retain the audience who loves and trusts them. They need to be sure that we aren’t abandoning them. And she wrote to Lachlan Murdoch that the network would “highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”
The court filing also revealed that Fox News executives had criticized some of the network’s top talent behind the scenes. Jay Wallace, the network president, said that “the North Koreans” did a “more nuanced show” than then-host Lou Dobbs. Jerry Andrews, the executive producer of “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” referred to host Jeanine Pirro as “nuts.”
Jason Koerner/Getty Images; Jason Koerner/Getty Images; Carolyn Kaster/AP; Alex Brandon/AP; Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images; Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
The Fox News Insider Report on the January 6, 2016 Capitol Attack: After Ailes’s Ouster, President Donald Trump Taped into Fox News
The network’s stars, producers and executives said that they were “mind-blowingly nuts”, were “Totally off the rails” and were ” completely bs” off the air.
Fox said it had hired an outside lawyer to look into Grossberg’s concerns. It says that it has changed the network’s culture. The late Roger Ailes was ousted from Fox News in 2016 after a number of accusations of sexual harassment.
Bartiromo excitedly replied, “I endorsed the information in the memo during a conversation with one of Trump’s sons.”
The cable network’s attorneys stated in a separate filing released to the public that the damages request by Dominion is intended to generate headlines and enrich the owner of the company.
Under the high legal bar of actual malice, defined in that 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving The New York Times, Dominion has to show Fox acted either with knowledge that what it was broadcasting to the public was false, or that it acted with reckless disregard of the truth.
Clark and Baier told Wallace that Bartiromo was pushing false claims of fraud on social media.
He said one of Fox’s arguments “doesn’t seem to be intellectually honest.” At another point, he openly questioned how Fox News could argue that former host Lou Dobbs had engaged in legally protected “neutral” reporting when he signed many of his tweets with a MAGA hashtag.
Sammon refused to comment on his departure because it was termed a retirement by Fox News.
Former President Donald Trump tried to call into Fox News after his supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but the network refused to put him on air, according to court filings from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against the company.
The House select committee that investigated the January 6 attack did not know that Trump had made this call, according to a source familiar with the panel’s work.
The panel sought to piece together a near minute-by-minute account of Trump’s movements, actions and phone calls on that day. His newly revealed call to Fox News shows some of the gaps in the record that still exist, due to roadblocks the committee faced.
“The afternoon of January 6, after the Capitol came under attack, then-President Trump dialed into Lou Dobbs’ show attempting to get on air,” Dominion lawyers wrote in their legal brief.
Fox executives had veto power over the decision, according to the filing. Why do you do that? Not because there was a lack of good news. January 6 was an important event by any measure. The key figure that day was President Trump, he was also the sitting President.
The allegations of election fraud that a woman who admits she’s pretty wackadoodle, put forth in the 2020 president’s race turned out to be a key source of accusations that Fox News presented to millions of viewers late in the fall.
On Nov. 7, just four days after Election Day, Powell sent Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and Bartiromo the memo. Powell appeared on Dobbs’s show that day to push easily discredited conspiracy theories involving the CIA and Dominion. That night, Fox News followed other networks in projecting that Biden had won the presidential election.
The draft version of her civil complaint was shared by her law firm with the network.
The woman, who wasn’t named in the legal brief, wrote that she knew Antonin Scalia had died during a hunting trip at an elite social club. (Scalia, a favorite of many Fox News hosts, died in 2016 of a heart attack, according to local officials in Texas, where he died.)
The woman claimed that Murdoch and Ailes huddle most days to determine how best to portray Trump as badly as possible. By the time the woman wrote her memo, Ailes had been dead for more than three years.
“Who am I? And how do I know all of this?… I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl,” the woman wrote in the email shared by Powell with Bartiromo and Dobbs. “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”
Fox News and the Fate of Bartiromo: After a Month, Fox News Tuned in to Explain the Phenomenology of MSNBC
Murdoch confirmed under oath that the suggestion by a lawyer that Fox was trying to straddle the line between conspiracy theories and being factual was true.
“[T]hat whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second,” Hannity said in a deposition conducted nearly two years later by Dominion’s lawyers.
Grossberg, who indicated she was passed over for a top job on Bartiromo’s show because the network preferred it be filled by a male, said Fox News executives referred to the “Sunday Mornings Futures” host as a “crazy b**ch” and “menopausal.”
While senior executives did not believe in Bartiromo, that did not stop them from blocking her program or airing it hours later.
Bartiromo had shared the memo with a senior producer and top booker and they also received it.
Grossberg said she did not trust the producers at Fox with whom she worked. She now would answer: “No, I don’t trust all of [the] producers at Fox.” She said that they are activists, not journalists, and impose their political agendas on the programming.
Two days after the fateful Bartiromo appearance, Powell turned up on Fox’s air once more, this time on Ingraham’s primetime Fox News show. Powell stated that there were obvious, statistical and computer evidence of hundreds of thousands of votes being injected into the computer systems.
She didn’t. Republican and Democratic state and local officials disputed and disproved her claims. The Trump administration’s election integrity officials as well as some Fox News journalists did. No matter. Powell frequently showed up on Fox News and the Fox Business Network with people implicating the company.
A New Look at MyPillow, a Successful South Carolina Governor’s First U.N. Ambassador to the Capitol, and a Major Blow to Fox News’ First Amendment Law
On Nov. 29, Bartiromo told Trump, “We cannot allow our elections to be corrupted because this is disgusting.”
Carlson invited the founder of MyPillow to be on his show three weeks after the U.S. Capitol siege, during which Trump supporters sought to block congressional certification of Biden’s win.
The Fox hosts and Murdoch family were happy to take away our ability to peacefully and legitimate transfer power, if it would increase their ratings and stock value.
I’ve never met Haley, but from afar it seemed that she had a reasonably good story to tell — a successful South Carolina governor from 2011 to 2017, Trump’s first U.N. ambassador and the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her mother, Raj, studied law at the University of New Delhi, and after immigrating to South Carolina, earned a master’s degree in education and became a local public-school teacher. Her father, Ajit, earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia and then taught as a biology professor at Voorhees College for 29 years. On the side, they even opened a clothing boutique.
While the legal experts cautioned that there wasn’t much they could see in Fox News’ formal response to the filing, they all agreed that the evidence in the filing represents a serious threat to the channel.
“It’s a major blow,” attorney Floyd Abrams of Pentagon Papers fame said, adding that the “recent revelations certainly put Fox in a more precarious situation” in defending against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.
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The evidence collected in a defamation case against Fox was enormous, and RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor and media law scholar at the University of Utah, had never seen it before.
Tushnet said that she had never seen such incriminating evidence during the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit. “I don’t recall anything comparable to this,” Tushnet said. “Donald Trump seems to be very good at generating unprecedented situations.”
David Korzenik, an attorney who teaches First Amendment law and represents a number of media organizations, said the filing showed that the case against Fox News was serious.
“The dream for a plaintiff’s attorney is what Dominion claims to have here,” Jones said, “smoking-gun internal statements both acknowledging the lie and deciding to forge ahead with perpetuating it.”
“This ‘out of the horse’s mouth’ evidence of knowing falsity is not something we often see,” Jones added. “When coupled with the compelling storyline that Dominion is telling about motivation — the evidence that at least some key players in the organization were actively looking to advance some election denialism in order to win back viewers who had departed — it makes for a strong actual malice storyline.”
Instead, Murdoch, the network’s controlling owner, followed the lead of the network’s senior executives in sidestepping the truth for a pro-Trump audience angered when confronted by the facts.
“Some of our commentators were endorsing it,,” Murdoch said, according to the filing, when asked about the hosts’ on-air positions about the election. He said that he wanted us to be stronger in condemning it.
Emails and other communications included in the case show that Murdochs and other Fox Corp. senior figures are involved in the network’s editorial path.
Murdoch said in the deposition that he’s a journalist at heart. I enjoy being involved in these things.
He was adamant that Fox News was right to call the key state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Murdoch testified that he could hear Trump shouting in the background as the then-president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told him the situation was “terrible.”
And Dinh was warning Lachlan Murdoch, Scott and a top deputy that “Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.” Murdoch warned that if Trump refused to concede graciously, “we should watch Sean especially and others don’t sound the same.”
Scott forwarded his recommendation to the top executive over prime-time programming, Meade Cooper. They were afraid the guests would say the election was being stolen and if she pushed back, it would be just a token.
Raj Shah, a senior vice president at Fox Corp., was advising Lachlan Murdoch, Scott and Dinh of the “strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox that we are working to track and mitigate.” He said that Fox News viewers had a lower positive impression after the election.
Anne Dias, board director at Fox Corp., wrote to the Murdochs. “I believe the time has come for Fox News or for you, Lachlan, to take a stance. It is an important moment for the country and for Fox News as a brand.
Voting technology companies seek $4.3 billion in damages from the network in two defamation lawsuits. Fox Corporation has $4 billion in cash, according to its latest earnings statement.
“This is one of the most devastating depositions that I’ve ever seen,” CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen said Monday. If you go beyond reporting and your chairman admits that there was endorsement, you can be held liable under the malice standard.
There is strong evidence that Fox decided to go with an alternate narrative after knowing the truth.
A Fox News producer earlier this week also filed a lawsuit against the network, alleging that the right-wing network’s lawyers coerced her into providing misleading testimony in the case.
When asked about the reason behind Grossberg’s firing, a Fox spokesperson said on Monday: “Like most organizations, FOX News Media’s attorneys engage in privileged communications with our employees as necessary to provide legal advice. Last week, our attorneys advised Ms. Grossberg that, while she was free to file whatever legal claims she wished, she was in possession of our privileged information and was not authorized to disclose it publicly.”
The “Unrelated litigation” statements are confidential, according to Fox. Fox News aired false claims that the company helped rig the presidential election for Joe Biden. There is a trial scheduled for next month.
The complaints came after a performance review according to Grossberg and her attorney.
The lawsuits from Grossberg, who has since been placed on administrative leave by Fox, were filed in Delaware Superior Court and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“Fox just does not care,” Grossberg added. Everything is summarized perfectly. They do not care about their employees or their viewers.
When asked about Clark in her September deposition, Grossberg had told Dominion attorneys that it was “not fair to say” she disliked him. Grossberg now says Clark created a hostile work environment and discriminated against women at Fox News.
The environment was horrible when she began working on Carlson’s show. On her first day, she learned that the workspace was decorated with large photos of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a plunging bathing suit.
The lawsuit continued to describe a culture at Carlsons show in which jokes about Jewish people and crude terms were used by women. Carlson and members of his staff were named in the lawsuit.
The Dominion Voting System vs. Fox News: Summary Judgment for a First-Forbidden High-Dimensional Election
Grossberg told CNN that he has covered many stories there. Dominion is just a small fraction of the total. I have watched it from the very beginning until my final day of work last week.
“It’s constant,” she added. “Ratings are very important to the shows, to the network, and to the hosts. It is a business and that is what drives coverage.
Lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems argued on Tuesday that there is little need for a trial in their case against Fox News, and the judge followed up with some challenging questions for the right-wing outlet.
The parties went to Delaware Superior Court for a second day of arguments regarding summary judgment, after an all-day hearing on Tuesday. Both sides want Judge Eric Davis to rule in their favor now, so that a jury trial won’t happen next month. The judge will likely issue a written ruling at a future date.
“They made the decision to let it happen,” Nelson said, referring to the litany of baseless claims about the voting company that got airtime on Fox News in late 2020.
Lawyers for the right-wing network said live testimony at a trial would only add to the media’s interest. This is a trial, not a public relations campaign.
A President who lost an election might have made false allegations about widespread fraud because of it, Davis mused.
Instead, “all we ever did was provide viewers with the true fact that those allegations were being leveled by the siting President and his lawyers, all throughout the country,” she told the judge.
“Some of our commentators were endorsing it,” he said, when asked about the hosts’ on-air positions about the election. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight.”
Carlson and Fox News: Correspondence to Epps on the January 6 Capitol Attack and Campaign against Trump’s Importance of Professional Accountability
In previous court filings, Dominion has said that its calculation are proper. The company hired experts to evaluate its books and lost business opportunities, and that’s how they reached the $1.6 billion figure.
The consequences of your lies have to be understood, according to a letter written by Teters to Carlson and Fox News. “Mr. and Mrs. Epps have been subjected to threats, intimidation, and harassment, resulting in significant economic and emotional damages. Each time Mr. Carlson and Fox News spreads more misinformation about Mr. Epps, the harm redoubles.”
Conspiracy theorists baselessly suggested that the January 6 attack on the US Capitol was a staged operation by the federal government to make Donald Trump’s supporters look bad.
As part of that conspiracy theory, some right-wing figures baselessly claimed Epps was part of a secret FBI plot to orchestrate the attack. Carlson has been giving attention to those conspiracies by his high rated program. Carlson plays footage from January 6th of Epps at the Capitol frequently on his show.
In a private deposition with the House committee that investigated January 6, Epps denied that he ever worked for the FBI or for federal law enforcement, according to a transcript of his interview. He told the committee that he supported Donald Trump in 2020 because he was concerned about voter fraud.
The lawyer for the client said that the conspiracy theories had been discredited by people who attended the January 6th events.
This is only the second time that Teter has addressed the legal issues from January 6. He has called for professional accountability against lawyers who spread election lies. He is the managing director of the 65 Project, a group that is trying to take disciplinary action against Trump-aligned attorneys who pushed bogus falsehoods about the election.
A Star Witness in a Fox News Defamation Suggestion: A Response to Grossberg’s Insistence that Fox had no Obligation to Correct False Claims
A former senior producer for Fox News is trying to be a star witness in a $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network.
Grossberg states that there was no evidence to link the reporting with the actions of the government.
She also alleges that Fox executives, including Clark, denied her repeated requests for support and passed her over for promotions, instead favoring male colleagues.
In her new legal filing, Grossberg recanted her sworn statement to Dominion attorney Davida Brooks that Fox did not have an obligation to correct false claims made on the network’s shows. “[A]lthough our guests had the right to answer how they pleased, it was Maria’s responsibility to push back against untrue statements with facts, or follow-up questions,” Grossberg said in what she presented as the answer she should have given.
She acknowledges getting many messages from Dominion but says it was too much to do on the show and she did not read all of them, because they all looked the same.
