Could the $1.6 billion lawsuit by Dominion against Fox News be the door opening to the exposure of a fraudulent 2020 presidential election?
A February 16 filing by Dominion Voting Systems — part of the Denver-based voting firm’s ongoing defamation lawsuit against Fox News seeking $1.6 billion in damages — has stirred a media frenzy with new allegations that top personalities at the network, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, “deliberately lied” about believing claims of voting irregularities made by former President Donald Trump’s attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, calling the allegations “insane,” “unbelievably offensive,” and “cruel and reckless.”
Dominion filed the brief in support of its motion for summary judgment against Fox in the Superior Court of Delaware. The redacted public version cites fragments of testimonies, private text messages, and email exchanges between high-ranking producers and hosts at Fox appearing to admit privately that the claims of election fraud were false and unfounded.
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson told fellow prime-time host Ingraham on Nov. 18, according to the filing.
The Fox network has claimed the voting firm is “cherry-picking” statements, though each side is being extra careful in how it is disclosing information about the other.
In court documents from Dominion, the company states it has “overwhelming direct evidence [that] establishes Fox’s knowledge of falsity, not just doubts.” The brief goes on to detail the alleged “false statements” made by Fox personalities, drawing on the words of hosts like Carlson to suggest the Rupert Murdoch–owned corporation committed “the single greatest crime in American history” by suggesting “millions of votes [were] stolen in a day.”
As Dominion scrambles to get money from Fox News, it also seeks to change the narrative, from one of suspicion after voting machines suddenly stopped counting votes by 10:00 p.m. on Election Night and ballots were pulled out from under cloth-covered tables, to one of Fox plotting to destroy the company’s reputation and profit margin.
In turn, Fox News alleges Dominion has trampled its constitutionally protected rights to free speech and freedom of the press. In a scathing response, Fox News filed its own brief on February 17, claiming the network was simply doing its job of reporting claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and upholding the “newsworthiness” of the mounting allegations by President Trump and his legal team that the election was compromised.
“An attempt by a sitting President to challenge election results and reverse the outcome of his re-election bid is as newsworthy as it gets,” read the document. “Media outlets around the country and the world thus provided extensive coverage of and commentary on the President’s allegations and lawsuits.”
Fox has called Dominion’s lawsuit an “assault on the First Amendment and the free press.”
“Fox News did what the press is free to do in a nation that values the First Amendment: provide a forum for testing newsworthy claims and denials in the crucible of robust debate,” read the court documents.
The network went on to challenge Dominion’s claims of reputational and financial loss owing to Fox’s propagation of “spreading lies” and “disinformation” meant purposely to mislead viewers, stating the company is financially doing better than ever.
Coomer Admits Machines “Riddled With Bugs”
Leaked emails in the brief show Dominion confirmed the voting machines were not free of glitches during the November 2020 election, noting that several employees voiced concern over the security of the machines. According to one internal document, Dominion sales manager Mark Beckstrand stated that third parties “have gotten a hold of [Dominion’s] equipment illicitly” in the past. Beckstrand cited machine malfunctions in Georgia and North Carolina, and testified that a machine was “hacked” in Michigan.
Another exchange exposes Dominion’s director of product strategy and security Eric Coomer’s doubts about the company’s products. “Our s**t is just riddled with bugs,” Coomer writes in one email. In another email, dated 2019, he bemoans that “almost all” of Dominion’s technological failings were “due to our complete f— up installation. Yet another document identifies a “*critical* bug leading to INCORRECT results…. It does not get much worse than that.” And while many companies might have resolved their errors, Coomer lamented that “we don’t address our weaknesses effectively!”
Irregularities with voting machine counts in Georgia required Dominion employees to restart and reprogram the machines, according to the brief. Further stoking suspicions of election fraud was the altering of the voting process in the months leading up to the November 2020 election, allegedly owing to concerns over Covid-19.
Early calls from the Fox News Decision desk announcing Joe Biden as the winner of the battleground state of Arizona before polls in the state closed set off a firestorm of suspicion among Trump supporters, who wondered how the network could call the race so early when voter lines were still wrapped around precincts. President Trump pledged to investigate the unprecedented failures of Election Night, when supposedly Biden received more votes than Barack Obama.
As both lawsuits wend their way through the courts, and both sides try to clear their names, Americans may be getting closer to the truth that exposes the fraudulent election and the role Dominion Voting Systems played in compromising the election process.
