Lou Dobbs claimed that voter fraud was to blame after Donald J. Trump lost the election. A new culprit in a supposed scheme to rig the election was the maker of election technology, which was designed to be inaccurate.
Nancy Pelosi has an interest in this company according to Maria Bartiromo. Thousands of mail-in ballots could have been affected by the technical glitch in the software.
The Fox Corporation is accused of airing false, far-fetched and exaggerated allegations about the company and its role in a plot to steal votes from Donald Trump.
One of the most extraordinary libel suits brought against an American media company in more than a century is centered on those bogus assertions that were made day after day.
The case is rare in libel law. ADefamation claim usually involves a single disputed statement. Many of the false statements were made after the facts were known. The First Amendment protects free speech and high-powered lawyers are available to a major media company like Fox. They are usually settled out of court to spare both sides the expense of a trial.
The case against Fox has been progressing steadily in Delaware state court this summer. Interviews with people involved in the case show that there have been no moves towards a settlement. Two companies are combing through years of each other's emails and text messages to find documents.
The Murdochs are expected to sit for depositions this month.
Fox is the most powerful conservative media company in the country. Legal scholars say that it has the potential to deliver a powerful verdict on the kind of pervasive and harmful falsehoods that undermine the country's faith in democracy.
Lee Levine is a First Amendment lawyer who has argued several major media defamation cases. In this case, you are taking very recent events and going through a process which could potentially lead to the declaration of what the correct version of history is.
There are a lot of inquires. Since Donald J. Trump left office, he has been the subject of several different civil and criminal investigations. Some notable cases are listed.
There were investigations in January. A powerful account of Mr. Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election was laid out in a series of hearings. This evidence could be used to indict Mr. Trump.
The Georgia election interference case is pending. The district attorney of Fulton County in Georgia is looking into whether Mr. Trump and others interfered with the 2020 election. The former president and his associates are at immediate risk.
The case has caused a lot of uneasiness at the Fox News Channel. In order to prove that network employees knew that ballot rigging was false, they had to give over months of private emails and text messages. The current and former hosts of Fox are among those who have been deposed or will be this month.
The Murdochs are the focus of a case that is being built by Dominion. Senior Fox executives hatched a plan after the election to lure back viewers who had switched to rival hard-right networks, which were initially more sympathetic than Fox was to Mr. Trump's voter- fraud claims.
Lying isn't protected by law. It leaves room for the media to cover people who are breaking news. Fox is saying that it protects it from liability. A Fox Corporation spokesman said it would be a pointless fishing expedition to place the Murdochs front and center. A spokeswoman for Fox News said it was ridiculous to say that the network was chasing viewers from the far right.
Fox is expected to argue that $1.6 billion is an excessive amount for damages, as it has in a defamation case filed by another voting machine company.
A spokesman for the company wouldn't say anything. The company's lawyers wrote that lies have consequences.
To convince a jury that Fox should be held responsible for defamation, it has to clear an extremely high legal bar known as the "actual malice" standard. If they want to show that people inside Fox knew what hosts and guests were saying about the election technology company was false, they need to show that they ignored information proving that the statements in question were incorrect.
A judge recently ruled that the malice standard had been met, allowing it to expand its case against Fox and seek evidence from the company's senior executives.
Judge Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court denied Fox's motion to exclude the parent company from the case. The most profitable parts of Murdoch American media are run by Murdoch's elder son, Lachlan, who is also the chief executive.
A sign that the chances of the case going to trial have increased is that Fox replaced its outside legal team with one of the country's most prominent trial lawyers soon after.
One person with direct knowledge of the case said that some of the questioning in depositions focused on the decision-making hierarchy at Fox News in the hours after it projected that Donald Trump would lose Arizona. The president and his loyalists were incensed by the call and it caused a ratings crash for Fox.
The person said that the questions were about placing Lachlan Murdoch in the room when the decisions were being made. The younger Murdoch didn't try to pressure anyone at Fox News to reverse the call, but he did ask detailed questions about the process that Fox's election analysts had used after the call.
The kind of speech that any media organization could make is protected by the First Amendment.
The trial lawyer brought in by Fox several weeks ago said that when the president and his lawyers make allegations, it's news. I don't believe a jury would buy that. That is what the people are saying.
A South Dakota meat manufacturer is in a lawsuit against ABC for a report about the safety of low-cost processed beef, also known as "pink slime." There was a settlement in the case.
Fox has been looking for evidence that could prove the conspiracy theories weren't actually conspiracy theories. Behind the scenes, Fox's lawyers have pursued documents that would support numerous false claims about the company, including that it was connected to the late Hugo Chavez and that it was designed to make it easier to manipulate votes.
According to court filings, the words and phrases that Fox has asked to be searched for in internal communications going back more than a decade include "Cha Chavez" and "Hugo."
The MyPillow founder and Mr. Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, were given a platform by Fox News and Fox Business. In one interview, Mr. Giuliani said that the company was formed to fix elections in Venezuela. The man who founded minion in Canada wanted to make it easier for blind people to vote.
Mr. Dobbs told Mr. Giuliani that he believed he was witnessing a four-and-a-half-year effort to overthrow the president. The Fox Business show was canceled last year, though it has never apologized for any of the commentary.
Both Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell have been sued.
In its complaint, the company says that in the weeks after the election, people left violent voice mail messages at its offices and threatened to blow up the headquarters. Someone threw a brick through a window. The company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on security and lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
It said that the harm to it from the lies told by Fox is unprecedented and irreparable.
The company tried to link those false statements to the Capitol siege. The company said in the complaint that the lies didn't hurt the company. They had a negative impact on democracy. The idea of credible elections was hurt by them.
The most indelible image from the Jan. 6 attack is a man holding zip ties in his left hand. In the suit is a photo of a man with a shotgun and a television in the background. The television is on.
The hurdle is whether a jury can be convinced that people at Fox knew what they were doing.
Ron Nell Andersen Jones is a law professor and First Amendment scholar at the University of Utah. It has to be a true story.
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