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- Internal messages show Fox News brass knew 2020 election fraud claims were bunk.
- They still tried to chase an audience fleeing to rival Newsmax, Dominion said in a court filing.
- A new Dominion filing revealed messages among Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and more.
After a mob stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Rupert Murdoch wondered whether Fox News was to blame.
He asked Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, whether "high-profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen" as rioters sought to force Congress to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Murdoch sympathized with Sean Hannity, a Fox News opinion host who was upset his friend Donald Trump lost the election, but worried he gave his millions of viewers the wrong impression.
"All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump but what did he tell his viewers?" he asked Scott.
Hannity's support for Trump, on one level, was understandable. The Fox News audience were fervent supporters of Trump.
When the network declared on November 5 that Biden won the crucial swing state of Arizona, its viewers rebelled. "Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me," Tucker Carlson wrote in a text message to his producer Alex Pfeiffer. Carlson worried Trump would "destroy" the network.
"What [Trump]'s good at is destroying things," he told Pfeiffer. "He's the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong."
The communications from Murdoch, the chairperson of Fox Corporation, and Tucker Carlson, its highest-profile host — as well as messages from Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and numerous other Fox News hosts and producers — were cited in a 200-page motion made public Thursday in a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company at the center of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
After Trump lost the election to now-President Joe Biden, he denied the results and tasked members of his legal team with overturning them.
His two highest-profile lawyers at the time were Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who both pushed a false conspiracy theory that Dominion and a rival election technology company, Smartmatic, secretly worked together to flip votes from Trump to Biden.
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The conspiracy theories were obviously false and were roundly rejected when Powell took her theory to the courts. In addition to suing Giuliani and Powell for defamation, Dominion also lodged a lawsuit against Fox News, asking for $1.6 billion in damages. It argued the media organization and individual hosts either perpetrated the false conspiracy theories or failed to tell viewers they were lies.
In Thursday's motion, Dominion asked the judge overseeing the lawsuit, in a Delaware state court, to skip a trial and hand them an automatic victory.
"Normally defamation cases involve a single defamatory statement. Here, Fox defamed Dominion not once. Not twice. Not three times. But continually. Over a months-long timeframe," lawyers for Dominion wrote. "And while defamation cases often involve matters of public concern, the false statements here — in the words of Fox host Tucker Carlson — 'would amount to the single greatest crime in American history.'"
Fox News and its parent company Fox Corporation have defended themselves, arguing it fairly reported on a massive news story: That the sitting president of the United States was making claims of widespread voter fraud.
The $1.6 billion claim, Fox News said, was "pulled out of thin air" and has a chilling effect on free speech.
"Dominion's motion for summary judgment takes an extreme and unsupported view of defamation law and rests on an accounting of the facts that has no basis in the record," a Fox News spokesperson told Insider. "Dominion has 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."
Fox News producers and hosts knew the election fraud claims were garbage
Cognizant of their rabid pro-Trump viewership, leaders at Fox News tried to figure out how to keep their audience while acknowledging he lost reelection.
Murdoch was worried about Hannity siding with Trump and pushing election lies, Dominion's lawyers wrote in Thursday's filing.
"If Trump becomes a sore loser we should watch Sean especially and others don't sound the same," Murdoch wrote in a message to Suzanne Scott.
The messages and deposition testimony obtained through the lawsuit's discovery process show Fox News brass always thought claims of election fraud were bunk, Dominion argued.
Tucker Carlson said Powell was "lying" and called her a "fucking bitch." Laura Ingraham said in a group text with Carlson and Hannity that Powell was "a bit nuts." Hannity said he "did not believe it for one second" when he heard Powell's claims.
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David Clark, a Fox News executive, said he did not believe Jeanine Pirro — who Dominion said pushed falsehoods about the company on Fox News airwaves — was a "credible source of news," Dominion's lawyers wrote.
Ron Mitchell, another executive, likened the allegations to "the Bill Gates/microchip angle to voter fraud" and called Powell and Rudy Giuliani "clowns," according to Dominion's filing.
Carlson, Pirro, and other hosts and producers said in deposition excerpts cited in a different Thursday filing, from Fox Corporation, that they didn't take orders from Murdoch and came to their own conclusions independently.
In the aftermath of Trump's election loss, Dominion sent 3,600 fact-checking messages to the company, which it said were widely circulated within the network.
Clark "received Dominion's fact check so many times that on November 14 he wrote a colleague: 'I have it tattooed on my body at this point,'" Dominion lawyers wrote in the Thursday filing.
After hearing host Lou Dobbs ran false information about election fraud, one producer responded, "Jesus Christ. Does anyone do a fucking simple google search or read emails?"
"Not a single Fox witness testified that they believe any of the allegations about Dominion are true," Dominion lawyers wrote. "Indeed, Fox witness after Fox witness declined to assert the allegations' truth or actually stated they do not believe them."
Fox worried about the rise of Newsmax
As Fox News called the 2020 election for Biden, Trump tweeted support for Newsmax and One America News, two conservative media organizations more entrenched in the right-wing fringe.
Leadership at Fox News worried about Newsmax hoovering up their viewers. In the aftermath of the election, ratings for Fox News were down, Murdoch wrote in a message to Scott.
"Getting creamed by CNN! Guess our viewers don't want to watch it," Murdoch said.
When Laura Ingraham pushed fraud claims on her show and on Twitter — despite privately believing they weren't credible — her producer Tommy Firth complained that she needed to stop trying to get on Trump's good side.
"This dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm," Firth wrote in a text message obtained by Dominion.
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Carlson and Hannity fretted that Newsmax could pose a threat to Fox News's dominance of conservative media. (Dominion and Smartmatic have separate pending defamation lawsuits against Newsmax and One America News.) Hannity worried that Fox News declaring Biden's victory "destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable."
"Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem. Imho they need to address but wtf do I know," Hannity wrote in a text message, referring to Newsmax.
"Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we've lost with our audience? We're playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us," Carlson told his producer.
When Carlson and Hannity saw a Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checking Trump's falsehoods about the election on Twitter, they tried to get her fired, messages obtained by Dominion show.
"Please get her fired. Seriously...What the fuck?" Carlson wrote in a text message. "I'm actually shocked...It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."
Hannity sent Heinrich's tweets to Scott, and her tweet was deleted.
"She has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted," Scott wrote.
Some hosts pushed election lies they should have known were wrong, Dominion says
The internal documents obtained by Dominion depict a particularly damning portrait of hosts Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, both of whom allowed Powell to take up significant airtime.
The two of them spoke to Powell, the filing said, on the strength of an email she forwarded to them that claimed to present evidence of widespread election fraud.
That email, Dominion's lawyers wrote, came from an unnamed author who claimed to be a beheaded ghost who talks to the wind.
The email's author claimed that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia "was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp…during a weeklong human hunting expedition" and that former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, had almost-daily conversations with Murdoch "to determine how best to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible."
While the email should have been a blinding red flag that Powell couldn't trusted, Dobbs and Bartiromo persisted anyway, Dominion's lawyers said.
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On November 12, Dobbs invited Giuliani on his show for another serving of defamation, Dominion said, and endorsed his remarks.
"When Giuliani spewed lies about Dominion, Dobbs responded: 'It's stunning…they have no ability to audit meaningfully the votes that are cast because the servers are somewhere else….This looks to me like it is the end of what has been a four-and-a-half—the endgame to a four-and-a-half year-long effort to overthrow the president of the United States,'" Dominion's lawyers wrote.
Carlson, too, tried and failed to "thread his own needle" where he'd denounce Powell but try to demonstrate he supported Trump, according to Dominion.
But Carlson erred, Dominion said, in inviting Mike Lindell, who maintains a different set of false conspiracy theories about how Dominion rigged the 2020 election. (Dominion has yet another defamation lawsuit pending against Lindell.)
"Carlson knew Lindell was making his Dominion machine fraud claims 'every single day of the year on his website and any interview that he does' and that 'it is universally known by people who know anything about Mike Lindell' that he holds these bogus beliefs," Dominion's lawyers wrote, quoting messages from Carlson.
Fox News executives even tried to court Lindell after he criticized Fox News on Newsmax, sending him "a gift along with a handwritten note from Suzanne Scott" so as to not alienate him from the network, Dominion said.
The notion that Fox News simply wanted to report on newsworthy events, Dominion argued, doesn't hold water.
After the Capitol came under attack on January 6, 2021, Trump "dialed into Lou Dobbs' show attempting to get on air," Dominion's lawyers wrote. But Fox executives "vetoed that decision," according to Dominion.
"Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. January 6 was an important event by any measure. President Trump not only was the sitting President, he was the key figure that day," Dominion's lawyers wrote. "But Fox refused to allow President Trump on air that evening because 'it would be irresponsible to put him on the air' and 'could impact a lot of people in a negative way.'"
Correction: February 21, 2023 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a Fox News opinion host. It is Laura Ingraham, not Lauren.