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      Newsmax Apologizes for False Claims of Vote-Rigging by a Dominion Employee

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      The right-wing news site said it had found “no evidence” for pro-Trump conspiracy theories about Eric Coomer, who was Dominion’s director of product strategy and security.The conservative news outlet Newsmax formally apologized on Friday for spreading baseless allegations that an employee of Dominion Voting Systems had rigged voting machines in an effort to sink President Donald J. Trump’s bid for re-election last year.In a statement posted on its website, Newsmax acknowledged that it had found “no evidence” for the conspiracy theories advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, supporters and others that the employee, Eric Coomer, had manipulated Dominion voting machines, voting software and the final vote counts in the election.“On behalf of Newsmax, we would like to apologize for any harm that our reporting of the allegations against Dr. Coomer may have caused to Dr. Coomer and his family,” the statement said.Mr. Coomer, director of product strategy and security for Dominion, sued Newsmax and several pro-Trump figures in December, after he had been roundly vilified in the right-wing media sphere. In his lawsuit, which also names the Trump campaign, Rudolph W. Giuliani and the One America News Network, Mr. Coomer claimed that he had suffered harm to his reputation, emotional distress, anxiety and lost earnings as false accusations spread throughout the pro-Trump world that he was plotting to rig the election.Among the accusations was a claim that Mr. Coomer had said on a phone call with antifa activists that he would ensure a victory for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the lawsuit said. In fact, Mr. Coomer did not participate in an “antifa conference call” and did not take any action to subvert the presidential election, the lawsuit said.Nevertheless, hashtags calling for Mr. Coomer to be arrested and exposed trended on social media, the lawsuit said. Mr. Trump’s son Eric posted a photo of Mr. Coomer on Twitter, alongside the false claim that Mr. Coomer had said he would ensure a Biden victory. Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, said at a news conference that Mr. Coomer was a “vicious, vicious man” who was “close to antifa,” the lawsuit said.And Sidney Powell, who was also one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, replied, “Yes, it’s true,” on Newsmax when she was asked if Mr. Coomer had said, “Don’t worry about President Trump, I already made sure that he’s going to lose the election,” according to the lawsuit.As a result, Mr. Coomer received an onslaught of offensive messages, harassment and death threats, according to the lawsuit, which names Ms. Powell as a defendant.“These fabrications and attacks against me have upended my life, forced me to flee my home, and caused my family and loved ones to fear for my safety, and I fear for theirs,” Mr. Coomer wrote in an opinion column published in The Denver Post in December.In its statement on Friday, Newsmax said it wanted to “clarify” its coverage of Mr. Coomer.“There are several facts that our viewers should be aware of,” the statement said. “Newsmax has found no evidence that Dr. Coomer interfered with Dominion voting machines or voting software in any way, nor that Dr. Coomer ever claimed to have done so. Nor has Newsmax found any evidence that Dr. Coomer ever participated in any conversation with members of ‘antifa,’ nor that he was directly involved with any partisan political organization.”Mr. Coomer’s lawyer, Steve Skarnulis, said he could not comment on the statement, “as the terms of settlement are strictly confidential.”Newsmax said it does not comment on litigation.“Our statement on the website is consistent with our previous statements that we have not seen any evidence of software manipulation in the 2020 election,” a Newsmax spokesman said.In December, Newsmax posted a statement renouncing a number of false claims about Dominion and Smartmatic, another election technology company that had become the focus of conspiracy theories. The statement came after Smartmatic said it had sent Newsmax legal notices and letters demanding retractions for publishing “false and defamatory statements.”Newsmax’s statement acknowledged that “no evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic used software or reprogrammed software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.”In February, a Newsmax host, Bob Sellers, cut off Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a vociferous Trump supporter, when he began attacking Dominion on air. As Mr. Lindell continued to talk, Mr. Sellers read a prepared statement saying the election results had been certified in every state.“Newsmax accepts the results as legal and final,” Mr. Sellers said. “The courts have also supported that view.”Mr. Coomer’s lawsuit, which had been filed in Colorado, is separate from a number of lawsuits that Dominion Voting Systems has filed against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Lindell. More

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      Half a Year After Trump’s Defeat, Arizona Republicans Are Recounting the Vote

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      An audit of the vote in Arizona’s most populous county was meant to mollify angry Trump voters. But it is being criticized as a partisan exercise more than a fact-finding one.PHOENIX — It seemed so simple back in December.Responding to angry voters who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, Arizona Republicans promised a detailed review of the vote that showed Mr. Trump to have been the first Republican presidential nominee to lose the state since 1996. “We hold an audit,” State Senator Eddie Farnsworth said at a Judiciary Committee hearing. “And then we can put this to rest.”But when a parade of flatbed trucks last week hauled boxes of voting equipment and 78 pallets containing the 2.1 million ballots of Arizona’s largest county to a decrepit local coliseum, it kicked off a seat-of-the-pants audit process that seemed more likely to amplify Republican grievances than to put them to rest.Almost half a year after the election Mr. Trump lost, the promised audit has become a snipe hunt for skulduggery that has spanned a court battle, death threats and calls to arrest the elected leadership of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.The head of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm that Republican senators hired to oversee the audit, has embraced Mr. Trump’s baseless theories of election theft and has suggested, contrary to available evidence, that Mr. Trump actually won Arizona by 200,000 votes. The pro-Trump cable channel One America News Network has started a fund-raiser to finance the venture and has been named one of the nonpartisan observers that will keep the audit on the straight and narrow.In fact, three previous reviews showed no sign of significant fraud or any reason to doubt President Biden’s victory. But the senators now plan to recount — by hand — all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, two-thirds of the entire vote statewide.Critics in both parties charge that an effort that began as a way to placate angry Trump voters has become a political embarrassment and another blow to the once-inviolable democratic norm that losers and winners alike honor the results of elections.“You know the dog that caught the car?” said Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the Republican-dominated Maricopa Board of Supervisors. “The dog doesn’t know what to do with it.”After a brief pause on Friday ordered by a state court judge, the audit continues without clarity on who will do the counting, what it will cost and who will pay for the process, which is expected to last into mid-May. The One America network is livestreaming it, and Mr. Trump is cheering from the sidelines.In an email statement on Saturday, he praised the “brave American Patriots” behind the effort and demanded that Gov. Doug Ducey, a frequent target of his displeasure, dispatch the state police or National Guard for their protection.Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, a Democrat, was less enthused.“My concern grows deeper by the hour,” she said in an email on Friday. “It is clear that no one involved in this process knows what they are doing, and they are making it up as they go along.”The Senate president, Karen Fann, said in December that the audit had no hidden agenda and could not change the settled election results in Arizona, regardless of what it showed.“A lot of our constituents have a lot of questions about how the voting, the electoral system works, the security of it, the validity of it,” she said, and so the senators needed experts to examine voting processes and determine “what else could we do to verify the votes were correct and accurate.”Officials unloaded election equipment at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the state fairgrounds in Phoenix on Wednesday.Matt York/Associated PressOther state legislatures have looked into bogus claims of election fraud. But the Arizona audit, driven in part by conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, is in a league of its own. Experts say it underscores the sharp rightward shift of the Legislature and the state Republican Party even as the state edges toward the political center.“I get why they’re doing it, because half of the G.O.P. believes there was widespread fraud,” said Mike Noble, a Phoenix pollster who got his start in Republican politics. “The only problem is, a majority of the electorate doesn’t believe there was widespread fraud.“The longer they push this,” he said, “the more they’re alienating people in the middle.”In Arizona, the state party is headed by Kelli Ward, a former state senator who has rejected Mr. Biden’s victory and supports the audit. Under her leadership, the party in January censured Mr. Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain for being insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump.The 16 Republicans in the State Senate reflect the party’s lurch to the right. November’s elections ousted the Senate’s two most moderate Republicans, replacing one with a Democrat and another with a Republican who claims lifetime membership in the Oath Keepers, the extremist group that helped lead the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.Another self-proclaimed Oath Keeper, State Representative Mark Finchem, proposed in January to give the Legislature the power to reject presidential election results and choose new electors by a majority vote. (The proposal went nowhere). Mr. Finchem since has become a vocal backer of the audit.“The people in the Legislature are more prone to believe in the conspiracy theories and are more prone to espouse them” than in the past, said Barrett Marson, a Phoenix campaign consultant and a former Republican spokesman for the Arizona State House.Kelli Ward, the staunchly conservative chair of the Arizona Republican Party, is a strong supporter of the Maricopa County audit. Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressMs. Fann, Mr. Farnsworth and Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for interviews.The Senate’s rightward drift is simply explained, political analysts say. Most of the 30 Senate districts are so uncompetitive that the Democratic and Republican primaries effectively choose who will serve as senators. Because most voters sit out primary elections, the ones who do show up — for Republicans, that often means far-right Trump supporters — are the key to getting elected.Responding to stolen-election claims, through tougher voting laws or inquiries, is by far those voters’ top issue, said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican campaign strategist in Phoenix.“They’re representing their constituency,” he said. “The whole process was built to produce this.” The senators warmed to the notion of a Maricopa County audit from the first mention of it in early December.Before long, they sent subpoenas to the county seeking the 2.1 million ballots, access to 385 voting machines and other equipment like check-in poll books, voting machine passwords and personal details on everyone who voted. The supervisors resisted, calling the election fraud-free, and said they wanted a court ruling on the subpoenas’ legality.The reaction was immediate: The four Republicans and one Democrat on the Board of Supervisors were deluged with thousands of telephone calls and emails from Trump supporters, many from out of state, some promising violence.“All five supervisors were receiving death threats,” said Mr. Gallardo, the Democratic supervisor. Two police officers were posted outside his home.Though three previous checks showed no sign of cheating, Arizona senators now plan to recount — by hand — all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, two-thirds of the entire vote statewide. Pool photo by Ross D. FranklinHoping to head off a dispute, the supervisors hired two federally approved firms to conduct a forensic audit of the county’s voting machines. The audit concluded that the equipment had performed flawlessly.Ms. Fann, who in the past had been seen as a moderate conservative, said the Senate wanted a stricter review. Senators said they had hired “an independent, qualified forensic auditing firm” for the task.Then it developed that their selection, Allied Security Operations Group, had asserted that Arizona voting machines had been hacked in an “insidious and egregious ploy” to elect Mr. Biden.The senators backtracked, but Jack Sellers, the chairman of the Maricopa County supervisors, charged in a Facebook post that they had chosen “a debunked conspiracy theorist” for the audit.Tempers flared, and all 16 Republican senators proposed to hold the supervisors in contempt, potentially sending them to jail.But that fell apart after Senator Paul Boyer, a Phoenix Republican, backed out after deciding he could not jail the supervisors for disobeying a subpoena they considered illegal.As he stood on the Senate floor explaining his stance, his cellphone began buzzing with furious texts and emails. Some were threatening; some mentioned his wife’s workplace and their toddler son.“It was like, ‘You’d better watch your back — we’re coming for you,’” Mr. Boyer said. The family spent days in hiding before returning home with a 24-hour police guard.Just two weeks later, on Feb. 27, a county court ruled the Senate subpoenas legal.Workers tabulating ballot results at the Maricopa County recorder’s office in Phoenix on Nov. 5.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe Senate, seemingly caught unawares, initially refused to accept delivery of the subpoenaed material for lack of a secure place to store it. Officials rented a local coliseum, but the county sheriff’s office refused to provide security, calling the job outside its scope. The second firm hired to analyze the audit results, Cyber Ninjas, says it is an industry leader. But The Arizona Republic soon reported that the company’s chief executive, Doug Logan, had posted a litany of stolen-election conspiracy theories on a Twitter account that he had deleted in January.Among them was a retweeted post suggesting that Dominion Voting Systems, a favorite target of the right, had robbed Mr. Trump of 200,000 votes in Arizona. Dominion says Cyber Ninjas is “led by conspiracy theorists and QAnon supporters who have helped spread the “Big Lie” of a rigged election.Mr. Logan, at a news conference last week said the company was committed to a fair, transparent process. “It’s really, really important to us that we have integrity in the way we do this count and in the results that come out of it,” he told reporters. Ms. Fann has said that the firm and others it will oversee are “well qualified and well experienced.”But unease about the audit has continued to mushroom. Ms. Hobbs, the secretary of state, asked the state attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to investigate the Senate’s handling of the procedure, citing a lack of transparency about security of ballots. She noted that some of the Legislature’s furthest-right firebrands have had free access to the coliseum even as it remained unclear whether reporters and impartial election experts would be allowed to observe the proceedings.He declined.Greg Burton, the executive editor of The Arizona Republic, said in a statement on Friday that “Senate leaders have throttled legitimate press access and handed Arizona’s votes to conspiracy theorists.”Amid the growing uproar, the Republican senators who have approved and stood behind the audit since its beginning have largely been silent about concerns over its integrity.Alain Delaquérière and Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      I Used to Think the Remedy for Bad Speech Was More Speech. Not Anymore.

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      I used to believe that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Now that seems archaic. Just as the founders never envisioned how the right of a well-regulated militia to own slow-loading muskets could apply to mass murderers with bullet-spewing military-style semiautomatic rifles, they could not have foreseen speech so twisted to malevolent intent as it is now.Cyber-libertarianism, the ethos of the internet with roots in 18th-century debate about the free market of ideas, has failed us miserably. Well after the pandemic is over, the infodemic will rage on — so long as it pays to lie, distort and misinform.Just recently, we saw the malignancies of our premier freedoms on display in the mass shooting in Boulder, Colo. At the center of the horror was a deeply disturbed man with a gun created for war, with the capacity to kill large numbers of humans, quickly. Within hours of the slaughter at the supermarket, a Facebook account with about 60,000 followers wrote that the shooting was fake — a so-called false flag, meant to cast blame on the wrong person.So it goes. Toxic misinformation, like AR-15-style weapons in the hands of men bent on murder, is just something we’re supposed to live with in a free society. But there are three things we could do now to clean up the river of falsities poisoning our democracy.First, teach your parents well. Facebook users over the age of 65 are far more likely to post articles from fake news sites than people under the age of 30, according to multiple studies.Certainly, the “I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true” sentiment, as the Bill Maher segment has it, is not limited to seniors. But too many older people lack the skills to detect a viral falsity.That’s where the kids come in. March 18 was “MisinfoDay” in many Washington State high schools. On that day, students were taught how to spot a lie — training they could share with their parents and grandparents.Media literacy classes have been around for a while. No one should graduate from high school without being equipped with the tools to recognize bogus information. It’s like elementary civics. By extension, we should encourage the informed young to pass this on to their misinformed elders.Second, sue. What finally made the misinformation merchants on television and the web close the spigot on the Big Lie about the election were lawsuits seeking billions. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two election technology companies, sued Fox News and others, claiming defamation.“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.”In response to the Smartmatic suit, Fox said, “This lawsuit strikes at the heart of the news media’s First Amendment mission to inform on matters of public concern.” No, it doesn’t. There is no “mission” to misinform.The fraudsters didn’t even pretend they weren’t peddling lies. Sidney Powell, the lawyer who was one of the loudest promoters of the falsehood that Donald Trump won the election, was named in a Dominion lawsuit. “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” her lawyers wrote, absurdly, of her deception.Tell that to the majority of Republican voters who said they believed the election was stolen. They didn’t see the wink when Powell went on Fox and Newsmax to claim a massive voter fraud scheme.Dominion should sue Trump, the man at the top of the falsity food chain. The ex-president has shown he will repeat a lie over and over until it hurts him financially. That’s how the system works. And the bar for a successful libel suit, it should be noted, is very high.Finally, we need to dis-incentivize social media giants from spreading misinformation. This means striking at the algorithms that drive traffic — the lines of code that push people down rabbit holes of unreality.The Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6 might not have happened without the platforms that spread false information, while fattening the fortunes of social media giants.“The last few years have proven that the more outrageous and extremist content social media platforms promote, the more engagement and advertising dollars they rake in,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr., chairman of the House committee that recently questioned big tech chief executives.Taking away their legal shield — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — is the strongest threat out there. Sure, removing social media’s immunity from the untruthful things said on their platforms could mean the end of the internet as we know it. True. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.So far, the threat has been mostly idle — all talk. At the least, lawmakers could more effectively use this leverage to force social media giants to redo their recommendation algorithms, making bogus information less likely to spread. When YouTube took such a step, promotion of conspiracy theories decreased significantly, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who published their findings in March 2020.Republicans may resist most of the above. Lies help them stay in power, and a misinformed public is good for their legislative agenda. They’re currently pushing a wave of voter suppression laws to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.I still believe the truth may set us free. But it has little chance of surviving amid the babble of orchestrated mendacity.Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and author, most recently, of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Dominion Sues Fox News, Claiming Defamation in Election Coverage

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      Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company, accused the news channel of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business.Fox News and its powerful owner, Rupert Murdoch, are facing a second major defamation suit over its coverage of the 2020 presidential election, a new front in the growing legal battle over media disinformation and its consequences.Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that was at the center of a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy about rigged voting machines, filed a lawsuit on Friday that accused Fox News of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business.Dominion, which has requested a jury trial, is seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages. The lawsuit comes less than two months after Smartmatic, another election tech company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and named several Fox anchors, including Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, as defendants.In a 139-page complaint filed in Delaware Superior Court, Dominion’s legal team, led by the prominent defamation firm Clare Locke, portrayed Fox as an active player in spreading falsehoods that Dominion had altered vote counts and manipulated its machines to benefit Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the election.Those claims were false, but they were relentlessly pushed by President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, in public forums, including appearances on Fox programs. In January, Dominion sued Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell for defamation. The company also sued Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a Trump ally who was also a frequent guest on Fox programs, as well as shows on other conservative media outlets. Each of those suits seeks damages of more than $1 billion.“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in Friday’s complaint against Fox. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”In a statement on Friday, Fox said that its 2020 election coverage “stands in the highest tradition of American journalism” and pledged to “vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Fox Corporation previously filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic lawsuit, arguing that the false claims of electoral fraud made on its channels were part of covering a fast-breaking story of significant public interest. “An attempt by a sitting president to challenge the result of an election is objectively newsworthy,” Fox’s legal team wrote in the motion.The narrative that Mr. Trump and his allies told about Dominion was among the more baroque creations of the president’s monthslong effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and persuade Americans that Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate.Dominion, which was founded in 2002, is one of the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment in the United States, and its machines were used by election authorities in at least 28 states last year, including several states carried by Mr. Trump.Allies of Mr. Trump falsely portrayed the company as biased toward Mr. Biden and argued, without evidence, that it was tied to Hugo Chávez, the long-dead Venezuelan dictator. John Poulos, Dominion’s founder, and other employees received harassing and threatening messages from people convinced that the company had undermined the election results.Fox News and Fox Business programs were among the mass-media venues where Mr. Trump’s supporters denounced Dominion. The lawsuit also cites examples where the Fox hosts, including Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Dobbs, uncritically repeated or actively vouched for the false claims made by Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” Dominion wrote in the lawsuit. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”Dominion’s lawyers on Friday also cited an unusual argument made by Ms. Powell in a motion, filed on Monday, to dismiss the separate Dominion suit against her.In that motion, Ms. Powell’s lawyers asserted that because political language is often inexact, “reasonable people” would not accept Ms. Powell’s baseless claims as facts. Ms. Powell — who never allowed in public appearances that she was anything less than confident in her assertions — was essentially arguing that her conspiratorial claims were self-evidently hyperbolic and therefore not defamatory.Dominion says it recently lost major contracts with election officials in Georgia and Louisiana, adding that the company is now facing “the hatred, contempt, and distrust of tens of millions of American voters.”Right-wing media has already faced a reckoning of sorts from the threat of defamation litigation, a relatively novel tactic in a battle against disinformation that had previously been limited to ad boycotts and liberal public pressure campaigns.In February, two days after Smartmatic filed its suit, Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” its highest rated program. Newsmax, a pro-Trump cable channel also facing potential legal action, cut off Mr. Lindell when he repeated falsehoods about rigged voting machines. More

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      MyPillow C.E.O. Mike Lindell Sued Over Election Fraud Claims

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyWhite House Adjusts Rules to Encourage More Loans for Tiny Businesses: Live UpdatesDominion sues Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief, over election fraud claims.Feb. 22, 2021, 8:45 a.m. ETFeb. 22, 2021, 8:45 a.m. ETSeveral retailers have stopped selling MyPillow’s products in recent weeks. Twitter has suspended his account.Credit…Alex Brandon/Associated PressDominion Voting Systems sued Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, on Monday, alleging that he defamed Dominion with baseless claims of election fraud involving its voting machines; it is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages.The complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Mr. Lindell “exploited” false claims about election fraud to support sales of his own business. Representatives for MyPillow could not immediately be reached to comment on the suit.“Lindell — a talented salesman and former professional card counter — sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows,” the suit states, arguing that the company’s “defamatory marketing campaign” — with promo codes like “FightforTrump” and “QAnon” — increased MyPillow sales by 30 percent to 40 percent.The company says it wrote to Mr. Lindell “multiple times,” putting him on “formal written notice of the facts” and informing him of “death threats” its employees have received.“Instead of retracting his lies, Lindell — a multimillionaire with a nearly unlimited ability to broadcast his preferred messages on conservative media — whined that he was being ‘censored’ and ‘attacked’ and produced a ‘docu-movie’ featuring shady characters and fake documents sourced from dark corners of the internet,” the suit states.Several retailers, including Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s have stopped selling the company’s products in recent weeks. Twitter has permanently suspended his account.Defamation suits against individuals and networks who shared former President Donald J. Trump’s election conspiracies have become a new front in the war against misinformation.Dominion also filed defamation suits last month against two of the former president’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Another voter technology firm, Smartmatic, filed its defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire in early February, saying its anchors Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro harmed its business and reputation. Fox has filed a motion to dismiss that suit.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Lawsuits Take the Lead in Fight Against Disinformation

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLawsuits Take the Lead in Fight Against DisinformationDefamation cases have made waves across an uneasy right-wing media landscape, from Fox to Newsmax.Lou Dobbs, whose show on Fox Business was canceled on Friday, was one of several Fox anchors named in a defamation suit filed by the election technology company Smartmatic.Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesFeb. 6, 2021, 5:05 p.m. ETIn just a few weeks, lawsuits and legal threats from a pair of obscure election technology companies have achieved what years of advertising boycotts, public pressure campaigns and liberal outrage could not: curbing the flow of misinformation in right-wing media.Fox Business canceled its highest rated show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on Friday after its host was sued as part of a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit. On Tuesday, the pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax cut off a guest’s rant about rigged voting machines. Fox News, which seldom bows to critics, has run fact-checking segments to debunk its own anchors’ false claims about electoral fraud.This is not the typical playbook for right-wing media, which prides itself on pugilism and delights in ignoring the liberals who have long complained about its content. But conservative outlets have rarely faced this level of direct assault on their economic lifeblood.Smartmatic, a voter technology firm swept up in conspiracies spread by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, filed its defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire on Thursday, citing Mr. Dobbs and two other Fox anchors, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, for harming its business and reputation.Antonio Mugica, Smartmatic’s chief executive.Credit…Henry Nicholls/ReutersDominion Voting Systems, another company that Mr. Trump has accused of rigging votes, filed defamation suits last month against two of the former president’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, on similar grounds. Both firms have signaled that more lawsuits may be imminent.Litigation represents a new front in the war against misinformation, a scourge that has reshaped American politics, deprived citizens of common facts and paved the way for the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Fox News, for instance, paid millions last year to settle a claim from the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member falsely accused by Fox hosts of leaking emails to WikiLeaks.But the use of defamation suits has also raised uneasy questions about how to police a news media that counts on First Amendment protections — even as some conservative outlets advanced Mr. Trump’s lies and eroded public faith in the democratic process.“If you had asked me 15 years, five years ago, whether I would ever have gotten involved in a defamation case, I would have told you no,” said Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer who is representing Mr. Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, and the writer E. Jean Carroll in defamation suits against the former president.The defamation suits raise the question of how news organizations should present public figures. Sidney Powell was a conspiracist but she was also a member of President Donald J. Trump’s legal team.Credit…Jonathan Ernst/ReutersLike other prominent liberals in her profession, Ms. Kaplan had long considered defamation suits a way for the wealthy and powerful to try to silence their critics. Last year, Mr. Trump’s campaign sued multiple news organizations for coverage that the president deemed unfavorable or unfair. The technology billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s suit against the gossip blog Gawker that ultimately bankrupted the business.“What’s changed,” Ms. Kaplan said, “and we’ve all seen it happen before our eyes, is the fact that so many people out there, including people in positions of authority, are just willing to say anything, regardless of whether it has any relationship to the truth or not.”Some First Amendment lawyers say that an axiom — the best antidote to bad speech is more speech — may no longer apply in a media landscape where misinformation can flood public discourse via countless channels, from cable news to the Facebook pages of family and friends.“This shouldn’t be the way to govern speech in our country,” Ms. Kaplan said. “It’s not an efficient or productive way to promote truth-telling or quality journalistic standards through litigating in court. But I think it’s gotten to the point where the problem is so bad right now there’s virtually no other way to do it.”Mr. Trump’s rise is an inextricable part of this shift. His popularity boosted the profits and power of the right-wing commentators and media outlets that defended him. In November, when Mr. Trump cast doubt on the outcome of the presidential election despite no credible evidence, it made commercial and editorial sense for his media allies to follow his lead.The Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly refused to accept Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president-elect and was rewarded with a surge in ratings. Fox News was more cautious — the network declared Mr. Biden the next president on Nov. 7 — but some Fox stars, including Mr. Dobbs, Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Pirro, offered significant airtime to his lawyers, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, and others who pushed the outlandish election-fraud narrative.In one example cited in the 276-page complaint filed by Smartmatic, Mr. Dobbs’s program broadcast a false claim by Ms. Powell that Hugo Chávez, the former president of Venezuela, had been involved in creating the company’s technology and installed software so that votes could be switched undetected. (Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013, did not have anything to do with Smartmatic.)Smartmatic also cited an episode of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” in which Mr. Giuliani falsely described the election as “stolen” and claimed that hundreds of thousands of “unlawful ballots” had been found. Mr. Dobbs described the election as the end to “a four-and-a-half-year-long effort to overthrow the president of the United States,” and raised the specter of outside interference.“It has the feeling of a cover-up in certain places, you know — putting the servers in foreign countries, private companies,” Mr. Dobbs said.Fox has promised to fight the litigation. “We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court,” the network said in a statement the day before it canceled Mr. Dobbs’s show.Executives in conservative media argue that the Smartmatic lawsuit raises uncomfortable questions about how news organizations should present public figures: Ms. Powell was a conspiracist, but she was also the president’s lawyer. Should a media outlet be allowed to broadcast her claims?“There’s a new standard created out of this that is very dangerous for all the cable channels,” Christopher Ruddy, the owner of Newsmax and a Trump confidant, said in an interview on Saturday. “You have to fact-check everything public figures say, and you could be held libelous for what they say.” Mr. Ruddy contends that Newsmax presented a fair view of the claims about election fraud and voting technology companies.Newsmax personnel, though, were made aware of the potential damage stemming from claims that appeared on their shows. In an extraordinary on-air moment on Tuesday, Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and a staunch Trump ally, began attacking Dominion — and was promptly cut off by a Newsmax anchor, Bob Sellers, who read a formal statement that Newsmax had accepted the election results “as legal and final.”Fox executives revealed their own concerns in December, after Smartmatic sent a letter signaling that litigation was imminent. Fox News and Fox Business ran an unusually stilted segment in which an election expert, Edward Perez, debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud that had recently been aired on the networks. The segment ran on three programs — those hosted by Mr. Dobbs, Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Pirro. (Newsmax, which also received a letter from Smartmatic, aired its own clarifications.)This fear of liability has rippled into smaller corners of the right-wing media sphere. Mr. Giuliani, who hosts a show on the New York radio station WABC, was caught by surprise on Thursday when his employer aired a disclaimer during his show that distanced itself and its advertisers from Mr. Giuliani’s views.“They got to warn you about me?” Mr. Giuliani asked his listeners, sounding incredulous. “Putting that on without telling me — not the right thing to do. Not the right thing to do at all.”Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies disinformation and radicalization in American politics, said that the president’s lies about the election had pushed pro-Trump outlets beyond the relatively lax standards applied to on-air commentators.“The competitive dynamic in the right-wing outrage industry has forced them all over the rails,” Mr. Benkler said. “This is the first set of lawsuits that’s actually going to force them to internalize the cost of the damages they’re inflicting on democracy.”Mr. Benkler called the Smartmatic suit “a useful corrective” — “it’s a tap on the brakes” — but he also urged restraint. “We have to be very cautious in our celebration of these lawsuits, because the history of defamation is certainly one in which people in power try to slap down critics,” he said.Rudolph W. Giuliani was the public face of Mr. Trump’s effort to challenge the election results in the courts.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMartin Garbus, a veteran First Amendment lawyer, said he was personally repelled by the lies about the election propagated by Mr. Trump and his allies, but he also called the Smartmatic suit “very complicated.”“Will lawsuits like this also be used in the future to attack groups whose politics I might be more sympathetic with?” he asked.Mr. Garbus, who made his reputation in part by defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis and other hate groups, said that the growth of online sources for news and disinformation had made him question whether he might take on such cases today. He offered an example of a local neo-Nazi march.Before social media, “it wouldn’t have made much of an echo,” Mr. Garbus said. “Now, if they say it, it’s all over the media, and somebody in Australia could blow up a mosque based on what somebody in New York says.“It seems to me you have to reconsider the consequence of things,” he added.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      MyPillow C.E.O.’s Trump Conspiracy Theories Put Company on the Spot

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMyPillow C.E.O.’s Trump Conspiracy Theories Put Company on the SpotRetailers have stopped carrying its products, though Mike Lindell, the founder and face of MyPillow, blamed “cancel culture” and said he didn’t think it would last.Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, has become closely identified with former President Donald J. Trump.Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesSapna Maheshwari and Jan. 27, 2021Updated 8:43 a.m. ETFor the past four years, most American corporations have tried to avoid the appearance of partisanship while also distancing themselves from the inflammatory rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters, walking a tightrope to keep customers and employees happy.It has been a different story for MyPillow. Mike Lindell, the company’s founder and chief executive, has remained one of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters. His sustained peddling of debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud got him barred from Twitter on Monday night. With retailers like Kohl’s and other major companies cutting ties with the privately held manufacturer, Mr. Lindell has managed to make his pillows partisan.“It goes to my money, you know where my money’s going,” Mr. Lindell said in an interview this month with a pro-Trump online channel called Right Side Broadcasting Network, offering a discount code for viewers to use on MyPillow’s website.Mr. Lindell’s baseless claims of election fraud have prompted a backlash against MyPillow in recent weeks, with several retailers deciding to stop carrying its products, an example of just how strongly his personality dominates the public perception of his company.Mr. Lindell, a former crack cocaine and gambling addict, founded the company after the idea for MyPillow came to him in a dream in 2004, according to his memoir. He is now a devout Christian and credits God with aiding his recovery.MyPillow is based in Chaska, Minn., and Mr. Lindell said in an interview this week that it employed nearly 2,500 people. Its products — it carries more than 100 — have been widely distributed in national chains, and Mr. Lindell’s face is prominently featured in infomercials and boxes carrying its patented pillows. Two former MyPillow employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said they were asked to display multiple cardboard cutouts of the executive in stores and to play his infomercials.Mr. Lindell with Mr. Trump at a White House event in 2017.Credit…Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesPolitics became a bigger part of Mr. Lindell and MyPillow’s identity in the past decade, following the success of its infomercials, which first aired in 2011 and were later a hit on Fox News, according to the memoir and interviews with former employees.The company has said in court filings that it spends an average of $5 million a month on advertising. While Mr. Lindell said he had advertised in The New York Times and on CNN, much of his spending has been with Fox News — 59 percent of the company’s total television spending last year, according to data from MediaRadar — which raised his profile with the former president, an avid viewer of the network.“Politics does not hurt your business,” he said in the interview this week. “I have not alienated anybody except for the bots and the trolls and the hit jobs of the media.”Mr. Lindell said MyPillow’s 2019 revenue exceeded $300 million. MyPillow sells through its website and is carried by retail behemoths like Walmart, Amazon and Costco.The company is tightknit, and its leadership leans conservative, with Mr. Lindell employing many members of his own family and even a sister of former Vice President Mike Pence, according to Aaron Morgan, a procurement planner at MyPillow between September 2019 and last March.“Most companies say don’t talk about politics,” Mr. Morgan said, noting that Mr. Lindell was pleasant. “But a lot of people there talked about politics. People there leaned obviously toward Mike’s beliefs because they were all family. It was not uncommon to see MAGA hats on desks.”Mr. Lindell had a deck of playing cards in the MyPillow office depicting Mr. Trump.Credit…Aaron MorganMr. Morgan shared photos of playing cards that Mr. Lindell offered to employees last year, which used a king card to display Mr. Trump as a proxy for Julius Caesar, Hillary Clinton in an orange prison jumpsuit on a queen card, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer as jokers. Mr. Lindell, whose likeness was also in the deck, said that the cards were given to him as a gift and kept in his office and that employees were able to take them if they wished.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 27, 2021, 10:13 a.m. ETAT&T now has 17.2 million HBO Max customers.John Kerry will talk about climate change at the World Economic Forum.The Fed downplays the chance that it will limit banks from oil and gas lending.Mr. Lindell’s politics entered his company in other ways. On Jan. 6, the day of the riot at the Capitol, MyPillow’s website was accepting a “FightForTrump” discount code that a conservative radio host had promoted on his show. Mr. Lindell, who retweeted the discount code that day, claimed without evidence that Twitter employees gained access to his account and retweeted the post in his name.“We have reviewed the rule violations and consequential enforcement activity and have found no evidence supporting Mr. Lindell’s allegations,” a Twitter representative said.The violence in Washington set in motion a social media campaign against MyPillow and Mr. Lindell, spearheaded by the group Sleeping Giants, which was created in 2016 to stop companies from advertising on Breitbart News. The pressure prompted retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl’s, H-E-B, Today’s Shopping Choice in Canada and Wayfair to drop MyPillow products, according to Mr. Lindell, who said without providing evidence that the protest was led by “bots and trolls.”Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s cited the brand’s poor performance for their exits, while Today’s Shopping Choice did not comment beyond confirming the removal. Wayfair declined to comment, and H-E-B did not respond to requests for comment. Zulily said it stopped carrying MyPillow in July. Affirm, the financing start-up, separately confirmed that it severed ties with MyPillow last week.Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi were shown as jokers in the deck.Credit…Aaron MorganMatt Rivitz, a co-founder of Sleeping Giants, said the claim about bots was “ridiculous.” Throughout the Trump presidency, he said, consumers grew more aware of their collective power, beginning with ads on Breitbart and boycotts of Ivanka Trump products at Nordstrom. This has been the culmination of those efforts.“There were a number of videos that came out with Lindell doing these rants about how the election was stolen and clearly that led to violence,” Mr. Rivitz said. “It was just a natural inclination to ask companies if they supported that because ultimately these companies have greatly benefited from democracy and they likely don’t want to see the country fall into chaos because of these lies.”Mr. Lindell said only one of the companies that had dropped his products cited false information about voting machines, but added, “It’s pretty coincidental when over nine companies do that the same day.” Still, he said he was not concerned about the impact on his business. He added that he did not view his comments to Right Side Broadcasting as “politically skewed” and blamed “cancel culture” for the retailers’ actions, though he anticipated they would return to selling his products.This month, Mr. Lindell was photographed at the White House carrying notes that mentioned the Insurrection Act, by which a president can deploy active military troops into the streets.Until around 2011, MyPillow was run out of a former bus garage in Minnesota, with roughly 40 employees, according to Tonja Waring, who worked there from 2009 to 2012 and appeared in its infomercials. Ms. Waring said Mr. Lindell was fiercely loyal and regularly pushed back against conventional wisdom on issues like maintaining manufacturing in the United States.Mr. Lindell was also included among the Trump presidential playing cards.Credit…Aaron Morgan“He doesn’t care what people think or what they say — he cares about doing the right thing,” she said. She added that Mr. Lindell had grown more comfortable in the spotlight than when she first met him, when he was “barely able to go on TV.”While the infomercials fueled MyPillow’s rise, they have also drawn complaints. In one settlement in 2016, MyPillow paid $995,000 in penalties after a group of district attorneys in California took issue with the company’s claims that its products could soothe insomnia, fibromyalgia and other medical conditions. Last year, Mr. Lindell also faced criticism after pitching an unproven Covid-19 “cure” to Mr. Trump.When customers asked about health claims made in MyPillow commercials, the two former store employees said, they would try to evade the subject without confirming or denying promises made in the ads. One former employee said Mr. Lindell also pushed stores to sell other products that workers were wary to endorse, such as a powder that claimed to stop wounds from bleeding within seconds.In his memoir, Mr. Lindell wrote of “a shady bankruptcy” he declared in 2003 to avoid a lawsuit involving a bar he owned, working with a lender he had met through his bookie’s stepson, who encouraged Mr. Lindell to concoct fake creditors.“It wouldn’t be the first time I’d colored outside the lines of the law,” he wrote of the episode.Even now, as retailers cut ties and he has been kicked off Twitter, Mr. Lindell is defiant, convinced that “real people” do not care about the claims he has been perpetuating.“The people on the left, the Democrats, they’re buying the same amount of product they always buy from me,” he said, “and the people supporting me standing up to cancel culture are buying more.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Four falsehoods Giuliani spread about Dominion.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationFour falsehoods Giuliani spread about Dominion.Jan. 25, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ETJan. 25, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ETRudolph W. Giuliani worked for weeks after the November election in an attempt to subvert its outcome.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesDominion Voting Systems, one of the largest voting machine vendors in the United States, filed a defamation lawsuit against Rudolph W. Giuliani on Monday, accusing him of spreading a litany of falsehoods about the company in his efforts on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the election.The lawsuit chronicles more than 50 inaccurate statements made by Mr. Giuliani in the weeks after the election, and issues a point-by-point rebuttal of each falsehood. Here are four of the most common false statements Mr. Giuliani made about Dominion Voting Systems.1. The Company’s OriginMr. Giuliani regularly stated, falsely, that Dominion “really is a Venezuelan company” and that it “depends completely on the software of Smartmatic,” a company “developed in about 2004, 2005 to help Chavez steal elections.”As Dominion writes in its lawsuit: “Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chávez. It was founded in 2002 in John Poulos’s basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.” The suit later adds that the headquarters for the company’s United States subsidiary are in Denver.2. Programming VotesAnother often-repeated claim was that Dominion had programmed its machines to flip votes: “In other words when you pressed down Biden, you got Trump, and when you pressed down Trump you got Biden.”This has been proved false by numerous government and law enforcement officials, including former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said in December: “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the D.H.S. and D.O.J. have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 25, 2021, 6:32 p.m. ETJanet Yellen is confirmed as Treasury secretary.Grindr is fined $11.7 million under European privacy law.Biden’s Treasury will seek to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, an effort the Trump administration halted.Similarly, a joint statement by numerous government and elections officials and agencies, including the National Association of State Election Directors, the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”The hand recount in Georgia also affirmed that the machine recounts were accurate in that state.3. Antrim County, Mich.Mr. Giuliani zeroed in on Antrim County, Mich., falsely claiming that a “Dominion machine flipped 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden” there, and that machines in the county were “62 percent inaccurate,” had a “68 percent error rate” and had an “81.9 percent rejection rate.”Mr. Giuliani’s focus on Antrim County stems from human errors made by the county clerk on election night. According to the lawsuit, the clerk “mistakenly failed to update all of the voting machines’ tabulator memory cards.” But the suit says that “her mistakes were promptly caught as part of the normal canvass process before the election result was made official.” The Michigan secretary of state’s office also conducted a hand audit of all presidential votes in Antrim County that found the machines were accurate.4. A Problematic ExpertMr. Giuliani claimed that his accusations, particularly in Antrim County, were backed up by experts. But he largely relied on one man, Russell Ramsland Jr., a former Republican congressional candidate from Texas, who, according to the lawsuit filed by Dominion, had also publicly favored false conspiracy theories.Dominion spent more than five pages on Mr. Ramsland’s lack of credentials to properly examine equipment, noting that he had a “fundamental misunderstanding of election software.” The suit also quotes the former acting director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Voting System Testing and Certification program, saying the report produced by Mr. Ramsland “showed a ‘grave misunderstanding’ of Antrim County’s voting system and ‘a lack of knowledge of election technology and process.’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More