Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News in March 2022, alleging that the Fox News network made false accusations that the company rigged its voting machines in the 2020 presidential election. The Dominion voting machines were a hot topic on Fox News in 2021 and most likely boosted ratings.
“Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” Dominion stated in its complaint.
Fox News responded by saying that freedom of the press protects their reporting and that the damage claims are “outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs.”
Last week, former Attorney General William Barr was subpoenaed in the lawsuit. Dominion has also subpoenaed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who Trump tried to pressure in an effort to change the Georgia vote count.
Barr’s response will likely reflect the comments he made in his videotaped testimony in front of the House’s January 6 Committee, where he said that the allegations that Dominion machines switched votes from Joe Biden to Trump were baseless, “complete nonsense” and “amongst the most disturbing.” There was no ambiguity in his testimony.
Barr said in his testimony that the conspiracy theory that Trump and his team were pushing was, “crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on it, and they were doing a great disservice to the country. I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people.”
Subpoenas have also been issued within the last week to Christopher Krebbs, the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whom Trump fired when Krebbs refuted the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, and Benjamin Hovland, the former chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission.
Dominion has also filed lawsuits against Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, among others, whom Dominion alleges pushed false accusations against the company.
Sidney Powell’s response to the accusations against her was, “No reasonable person” would have believed her theories were “truly statements of fact.”
Giuliani’s response to the lawsuit? He called it “another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left-wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech, as well as the ability of lawyers to defend their clients vigorously.”
Even though investigations debunked the allegations against Dominion, the company claimed the damage was done and pursued the lawsuits.
Will Fox News have to pay damages?