Tucker Carlson (left) and President Donald Trump.Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty; Doug MIlls-Pool/Getty
Acourt filing made publicthis week reveals that Fox News hosts includingTucker Carlson,Sean Hannityand Laura Ingraham were privately critical of Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, with Carlson going so far as to call the former president “demonic.” Publicly, however, the network continued to offer a platform to Trump loyalists who amplified the false claims.
Th network filed an amended counterclaim on Thursday, with the spokesperson adding that Dominion “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
Below, some of the most explosive made public in the filing.
Sidney Powell.MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty
Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity called Trump attorney Sidney Powell “a complete nut”
Among the emails and text messages made public in the filing are several aboutSidney Powell, an attorney who worked for the Trump team during its failed attempts to overturn the election results, and was later dropped after making a number of outlandish and unsubstantiated claims.
“Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is,” Ingraham wrote in a text message sent to Carlson and Hannity on Nov. 15, 2020, per the filing.
“Sidney Powell is lying. F—ing b—-,” Carlson wrote to Ingraham on Nov. 18.
“Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani],” Ingraham responded.
Powell and Giuliani were two of the most vocal defenders of the false claim that the 2020 election was rife with fraud, holding several press conferences in which they made the claims but did not back them up with any evidence. The two were also front and center during the Trump campaign’s numerous unsuccessful legal challenges to the election, which found no widespread election problems in any state.
Tucker Carlson.Rich Polk/Getty
Carlson called Trump “a demonic force” and worried the president would “destroy” Fox News
Carlson, in other conversations in the wake of the election, privately took aim at Trump himself, calling the then-president “the undisputed world champion” of “destroying things,” and worrying that he would “destroy us if we play it wrong.”
By Jan. 6, hours after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Carlson was again criticizing Trump, texting a colleague that the then-president was “a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.”
Other messages made public in the filing demonstrate that Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch also expressed disbelief in Trump’s election fraud claims, which he called “really crazy stuff,” writing in an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that the claims were “damaging everybody, I fear.”
Scott, in a reply, wrote: “Yes Sean [Hannity] and even [Jeanine] Pirro agrees.”
Sean Hannity.Paul Zimmerman/Getty
Despite privately doubting the fraud claims, Fox News personalities worked to ensure the network didn’t publicly shoot them down
While Hannity and Carlson privately voiced their concerns about the election lies, they were also working behind the scenes to ensure the network didn’t appear to be doubting Trump’s claims, the complaint alleges.
After Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a Trump tweet about Dominion, noting there was no evidence that any votes had been destroyed, Carlson texted both Ingraham and Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the f—? It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
According to the filing, Fisher received a call from her boss, Washington Bureau Chief Bryan Boughton, immediately after she fact-checked Giuliani and Powell’s claims, “in which he emphasized that higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it, and that Fisher needed to do a better job of, this is a quote, ‘respecting our audience.’ "
According to Dominion’s legal filing, Fox News allowed Trump’s allies to peddle the false narrative about election fraud because it felt that viewers were revolting after the network correctlycalled the state of ArizonaforJoe Biden— a historic flip of a red state that infuriated Trump.
“Fox’s correct call of Arizona for Joe Biden triggered a backlash among its audience and the ‘network [was] being rejected.’ … So Fox went on war footing caring more about protecting its own falling viewership than about the truth,” Dominion argues in its complaint.
Maria Bartiromo.Fox Business
The network gave Sidney Powell a platform one day after learning that a source of her election fraud claims was an anonymous email from someone who claimed to be a ghost
Among the more bizarre revelations made public in the filing is that Fox agreed to have Powell as a guest on the network, despite learning that one of the sources of her voter fraud conspiracy was an email from a person who claimed to be a ghost and espoused a false conspiracy theory that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been murdered during a “weeklong human hunting expedition.”
Even the author of the email — entitled “Election Fraud Info” — described the information as “pretty wackadoodle,” adding: “Who am I? And how do know all of this? I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl was internally decapitated, and yet, I live. The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”
Fox News host Maria Bartiromo read that email on Nov. 7, 2020, the filing claims, and still interviewed Powell on her show just one day later.
Dominion found itself the target of conspiracies of widespread election fraud and other wrongdoing in the wake of the November 2020 presidential election,eventually suingseveral of Trump’s closest allies, including Fox News, for allegedly repeating lies about them.
Dominion lawyer Stephen Shackelford earlier toldThe New York Times, “Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies.”
In March 2021, Dominion sued Fox News Media in Delaware for $1.6 billion, according to a copy of the complaint shared with the press.
“Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” the complaint states.
source: people.com
