I get it, you’re tired of replaying the last two presidential elections. But what a great week we just had for the rule of law!
Last Thursday, a grand jury of ordinary citizens indicted Trump for one of his 2016 electoral cheating schemes. A day later, a pro-Trump Twitter troll was found guilty of conspiracy, by a jury of his peers in federal court, for a ’16 vote-suppression plot that targeted Hillary Clinton voters. And that same day, to top things off, a judge eviscerated Fox News, ruling that its on-air hosts lied over and over when they “reported” with zero proof that the Dominion balloting company rigged their 2020 machines for Joe Biden.
As you may recall – perhaps because I’ve twice written about it – Dominion’s $1.6-billion defamation case against Fox continues to gift us new evidence of the network’s serial grifts. The latest twist came the other day when the judge said two important things: (1) Fox must go on trial, starting next month, and (2) Jurors will be told, right off the bat, that Fox’s MAGA-style claims about Dominion were all lies.
Here’s what Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis wrote in his Friday ruling: “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that (it) is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
I do love how he all-capped CRYSTAL. And stay with me, the best is yet to come:
To win its defamation case against Fox, Dominion will need to persuade jurors that the propaganda outlet aired its lies with “actual malice.” The judge explained the term: “Actual malice means that a defendant published false information about a plaintiff with knowledge that it was false, or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. To satisfy the reckless disregard standard, a plaintiff must establish that a defendant entertained serious doubts as to the truth…or had a high degree of awareness of probable falsity.”
Is there any proof that Fox knew it was lying on the air about Dominion? Wait until the jurors get a load of the evidence, like the text that one of Laura Ingraham’s producers sent to a Fox executive: “This dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm – as many times as I’ve told Laura it’s bs, she sees shit posters and trump tweeting about it.” Indeed, when Trump tweeted lies about Dominion, and an on-air Fox reporter tried to do the right thing – by fact-checking the defeated president – Tucker Carlson went nuclear. He texted Sean Hannity and said, “Please get her fired. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”
But here’s the fun part. One reason why Dominion will go to trial with the wind at its back is because the judge, in his Friday ruling, highlighted one particular gem that Dominion managed to unearth. This passage, on page 17, is so delicious I can almost taste it:
“FNN (Fox News) has a centralized research department called the Brainroom that conducts internal
fact-checking. On November 13, 2020, the Brainroom completed a fact-check regarding the
Dominion allegations, which stated:
*There was “no evidence of widespread fraud.”
*”Claims about Dominion switching or deleting votes are 100% false,” and claims that
Dominion votes for Former President Trump were deleted are “mathematically impossible.”
David Clark, a Fox senior vice president, was later questioned under oath by Dominion’s lawyers. They asked him about those findings. Judge Davis, in his new ruling, shares this with us: “Mr. Clark confirmed that if the Brainroom concluded that the allegations against Dominion were false, the allegations should not have been aired.” But they were aired, because Brainroom’s findings were forwarded to the brain dead.
Fox’s lawyers, hoping against hope that the judge would throw out the defamation case prior to trial, insisted that even if Fox hosts and executives knew behind the scenes that the Dominion allegations were lies, it was still cool to report them because they were “newsworthy” (Trump’s Dominion lies was “news”), and because Fox commentators were merely voicing their “opinions” that the allegations were true.
Judge Davis nuked that argument, too. He pointed out that the “opinions” were based on the lies that masqueraded as reported fact. His ruling is chockablock with examples, like this riff that Lou Dobbs delivered 11 days after the Brainroom cleared Dominion: “I think many Americans have given no thought to electoral fraud that would be perpetrated through electronic voting – that is, these machines, these electronic voting companies , including Dominion, prominently Dominion, at least in the suspicions of a lot of Americans.”
The suspicions of a lot of Americans…The Fox game plan, in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 defeat, was to protect its business model and stock price by continuing to knowingly pump lies into the pliable brains of its viewers. Bravo to Dominion for exposing the rot at the heart of the con.