“Sidney Powell is lying,” Tucker Carlson wrote to a producer about the Trump lawyer, who once claimed in a guest spot on Fox that voting technology companies “flipped” Trump votes to Biden.
“Terrible stuff damaging everybody,” wrote company founder Rupert Murdoch, about wild claims raised by Powell and fellow Trump adviser, Rudy Giuliani. The recipient of his note, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, agreed.
And of Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, Fox’s prime time roster seemed to share a common opinion during these fraught weeks.
“[He’s] acting like an insane person,” wrote Sean Hannity, star of the network’s 9 p.m. show, while his 10 p.m. colleague Laura Ingraham concurred: “Such an idiot.”
The messages are part of a cache of internal correspondence and deposition testimony released Thursday in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network filed by Dominion, one of the election software company at the center of the conspiracy theories.
The documents provide a rare window into the inner workings of the cable news network and show how publicly Trump-friendly personalities were privately repulsed by the president’s post-election actions, with Carlson referring to Trump as a “demonic force,” according to the filings.
The filing in Delaware State Superior Court ahead of an April trial is meant to bolster Dominion’s argument that Fox leadership was aware that the claims of election fraud were untrue but nonetheless “spread and endorsed” them, the company argued.
“Not a single Fox witness testified that they believe any of the allegations about Dominion are true,” Dominion argued in the filing. “Indeed, Fox witness after Fox witness declined to assert the allegations’ truth or actually stated they do not believe them, and Fox witnesses repeatedly testified that they have not seen credible evidence to support them.”
In a statement, Fox News downplayed the revelations from the correspondence.
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” a spokesperson said, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
