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      Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump's empire of disinformation?

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      When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with customers in 28 states.But the 2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe Biden.Among the more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.The truth matters. Lies have consequencesIt was laughable but also potentially devastating to Dominion’s reputation and ruinous to its business. It also fed a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fuelled Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, as Congress moved to certify the election results. Five people died, including an officer of the Capitol police.The company is fighting back. It filed $1.3bn defamation lawsuits against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, for pushing the allegations without evidence.Separately, Dominion’s security director, Eric Coomer, launched a suit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani, Powell and some conservative media figures and outlets, saying he had been forced into hiding by death threats.Then came the big one. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims.“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “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.”The suit argues that Fox hosts and guests “took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire” by broadcasting wild assertions that Dominion systems changed votes and ignoring repeated efforts by the company to set the record straight.“Radioactive falsehoods” spread by Fox News will cost Dominion $600m over the next eight years, according to the lawsuit, and have resulted in Dominion employees being harassed and the company losing major contracts in Georgia and Louisiana.Fox fiercely disputes the charge. It said in a statement: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Other conservative outlets have also raised objections. Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax, said: “We think all of these suits are an infringement on press freedom as it relates to media organisations. There were the years of Russian collusion investigations when all of the major cable networks reported unsubstantiated claims. I think Fox was reporting the news and certainly Newsmax was.”But some observers believe Dominion has a strong case. Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: “Dominion has an outstanding prospect in its litigation against Fox for the simple reason that Fox knowingly broadcast over and over again the most outrageous and clear lies.You should not have a major television outlet that is a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods about the election“Certainly there are protections under the first amendment and otherwise but this is so far outside the bounds, such a clear case, that I think Fox is looking at a very serious legal exposure here and that’s the way it should be.“You should not have a major television outlet that is able day after day to provide a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods having to do with the election, one that helped trigger a violent insurrection on 6 January. They should not be able to feed a steady stream of those pernicious lies into the body politic without any legal consequences.”‘A real battleground’Eisen, a former White House “ethics czar”, suggests that the Dominion case could provide at least one model for dealing with the war on truth.“The United States and the world need to deal with disinformation,” he said.“There can be no doubt that every method is going to be required but certainly libel law provides one very important vehicle for establishing consequences and while there’s no such thing as a guarantee when you go to court, this is an exceptionally high risk for Fox with a large price tag attached as well.”There are signs that the legal actions, and their grave financial implications, have got reckless individuals and outlets on the run.Powell asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit against her, arguing that her assertions were protected by the right to free speech. But she also offered the unusual defence that she had been exaggerating to make a point and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.Two days after voting machine maker Smartmatic filed a $2.7bn defamation suit that alleged TV host Lou Dobbs falsely accused it of election rigging, Fox Business abruptly canceled Lou Dobbs Tonight, its most viewed show. It has also filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic suit.Meanwhile pro-Trump outlets have begun using prepared disclaimers or prerecorded programmes to counter election conspiracy theories spouted by guests. When Lindell launched into an attack on Dominion on Newsmax in February, co-anchor Bob Sellers tried to cut him off and then walked off set.RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the Washington Post: “We are seeing the way that libel has become a real battleground in the fight against disinformation.“The threat of massive damages for spreading probably false conspiracy theories on matters of public concern could turn out to be the one tool that is successful in disincentivising that behaviour, where so many other tools seem to have failed.”The defamation suits will provide another test of the judiciary as a pillar of American democracy. The courts’ independence proved robust regarding dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the election outcome.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It is such an under-appreciated illumination of the multiple avenues for pursuing politics. Sometimes we get understandably absorbed by what Congress can do, which is obviously significant at times, but mostly fairly kind of deadlocked.“But we’re going to see the legal system prosecuting the 6 January perpetrators, prosecuting Donald Trump and prosecuting these libel charges by Dominion over the monstrous lies that were told after the election.“Thank goodness for the courts because the elected branches have really botched it.” More

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      Trump and Carlson lead backlash as MLB pulls All-Star Game from Georgia

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      Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson led rightwing backlash after Major League Baseball said it would not play its All-Star game in Georgia because of a new law that restricts voting rights in the state.The former president and the Fox News host some say is his Republican political heir thereby ranged themselves against current president Joe Biden and the Democrat he served as vice-president, Barack Obama.“Baseball is already losing tremendous numbers of fans,” Trump said in a statement, “and now they leave Atlanta with their All-Star Game because they are afraid of the radical left Democrats.“… Boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with free and fair elections. Are you listening Coke, Delta and all?”Coke and Delta are among companies which have expressed concern over the Georgia law, which restricts early and mail-in voting, measures seen to target minority voters likely to back Democrats.Laws under consideration in other Republican-run states have attracted criticism from corporate America. The Georgia law was passed by Republicans after Biden won the state against Trump and Democrats won both Senate runoff elections in January.Referring to the segregation of the post-civil war south, Biden called the law: “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”In his own statement on Saturday, Obama congratulated MLB “for taking a stand on behalf of voting rights for all citizens”.He also said: “There’s no better way for America’s pastime to honor the great Hank Aaron, who always led by example.”Aaron, known as the Hammer, was a long-time MLB home-run record holder who played for the Atlanta Braves and endured racist abuse throughout his life in the sport. He died in January, aged 86.MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said he had “decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB draft” from the home of the Atlanta Braves.“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”The move was not without precedent. In 2016 North Carolina lost the right to host high-profile NCAA college events over a bill which restricted rights for transgender people.On Friday night Carlson, who some say could be a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 if Trump does not run again, claimed MLB “believes it has veto power over the democratic process”.Before MLB acted, Biden said he would support moving events from Atlanta. Carlson said that showed the president was “willing to destroy even something as wholesome as the country’s traditional game purely to increase the power of his political party”.The chief of the MLB players union has indicated support for the move. In a statement on Friday, the New York Yankees great and Miami Marlins chief executive Derek Jeter said: “We should promote increasing voter turnout as opposed to any measures that adversely impact the ability to cast a ballot … We support the commissioner’s decision to stand up for the values of our game.”Georgia governor Brian Kemp – a bête noire for Trump over his refusal to overturn Biden’s win – said MLB had “caved to fear, political opportunism and liberal lies”. He also decried “cancel culture”, a key Republican talking point.Stacey Abrams, who Kemp beat in a 2018 election he ran as Georgia secretary of state, said she was “disappointed” the All-Star game would not be played in the state.But Abrams, who campaigns for voting rights and has become an influential figure in the national Democratic party, also said she was “proud of [MLB’s] stance on voting rights” and “urged events and productions to come and speak out or stay and fight”.Also on Friday, nearly 200 companies signed a statement expressing concern at moves to restrict voting rights in Republican-run states.Many observers pointed out that the political ramifications of MLB’s decision to move the All-Star Game will be stronger than the economic fallout, given that coronavirus-related restrictions would have placed limits on capacity at the event this year.A leading professor of sports economics warned that MLB could risk losing the support of conservatives in a fanbase which skews right.“After the country’s top professional basketball and football leagues embraced the Black Lives Matter movement last year,” Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College told the New York Times, “they faced organised boycotts from conservatives, though the effort ultimately had little effect. And baseball’s fanbase is older and whiter than basketball’s or football’s.” More

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      'Welcome to the family': Fox News hires Lara Trump as a contributor

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletter“Welcome to the family, Lara.”That’s how a Fox News host greeted Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of Donald Trump, upon the announcement Monday that she would be joining the network as a paid contributor.Lara Trump, the wife of former presidential son Eric Trump, is already a bosom member of the family that matters most in Republican politics.But now the 38-year-old former TV producer has left her perch as senior adviser to the Trump campaign to sign on for a regular gig sharing her opinions and analysis in front of the cameras on Fox News.“I’m so excited first of all to be joining the Fox family,” she said in an appearance on the Fox & Friends morning program Monday.“I sort of feel like I’ve been an unofficial member of the team for so long, you guys know, it was kind of a joke, over the past five years I would come there so often that the security guards were like, ‘Maybe we should just give you a key’. So to be part of the team I’m so, so excited.”But Lara Trump’s elevation as a Fox News contributor was worthy of celebration in the kingdom of Rupert Murdoch not only for the truce it could signal between the network and Donald Trump, who turned bitterly against Fox News after the election.Lara Trump’s arrival as a news commentator could pave the way to a political career of her own that has for months circulated as a pleasing rumor in conservative circles.The former first daughter-in-law has been mooted as a potential Republican candidate for the US Senate seat in North Carolina to be vacated next year by retiring Republican Richard Burr.Born Lara Yunaska, Trump, 38, grew up in North Carolina and graduated college from North Carolina State University.Her viability as a potential political candidate is an open question, one sure to have strategists and donors scrutinizing her air time on Fox News.But she will also be watched for signs that relations between the network and the former president have warmed since last November, when Donald Trump grew impatient with Fox News for being slow to trumpet his lies about election fraud.“Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there,” Trump tweeted of Fox News on 12 November – after the election but before his account was suspended. “They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”The contract between Lara Trump and Fox means that both partners of Trump’s two eldest sons were once or current Murdoch employees. Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle was a Fox News presenter for more than a decade. More

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      in Elections

      Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for $1.6bn over election fraud lies

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      The North American voting machine company Dominion has hit Fox News with a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit, accusing the network of spreading election fraud lies in a misguided effort to stop an exodus of enraged viewers after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.The complaint accuses some of Fox’s biggest personalities Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro “and their chosen guests” of spreading “defamatory falsehoods” about Dominion.Fox supercharged false conspiracy theories about Dominion, the lawsuit says, by plucking the lies from relatively obscure corners of the far-right internet and broadcasting them to tens of millions of viewers on television and online.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” the complaint says. “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.”Fox vowed to fight the case in a statement Friday morning: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Dominion, a large US and Canadian voting machine company, earlier sued Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for $1.3bn each for spreading election lies during weeks of legal challenges to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in what officials have called the most secure election in US history.On Tuesday, Powell defended herself against the Dominion suit by arguing in court that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats. The company also sued the chief executive of a pillow company, Mike Lindell, a Trump friend who produced a video about election conspiracies.Baseless conspiracy claims about Dominion accusing the company of using technology that flipped votes away from Trump appear to have originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog.But in an effort to steal the presidential election, Trump himself gave the claims the broadest possible platform, including with a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part: “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”Dominion said the lies had threatened its reputation and business.“Dominion brings this lawsuit to set the record straight, to vindicate its rights, and to recover damages for the devastating economic harm done to its business,” the company said in the Fox lawsuit.Fox is fighting a legal battle over spreading election lies on multiple fronts. The voting technology company Smartmatic earlier brought a $2.7bn lawsuit against Fox and network commentators accusing them of a “disinformation campaign”.Fox has filed multiple motions to dismiss the Smartmatic case.Dominion’s lawsuit says that after the 3 November election, “viewers began fleeing Fox in favor of media outlets endorsing the lie that massive fraud caused President Trump to lose the election.“They saw Fox as insufficiently supportive of President Trump, including because Fox was the first network to declare that President Trump lost Arizona,” the complaint continues. “So Fox set out to lure viewers back – including President Trump himself – by intentionally and falsely blaming Dominion for President Trump’s loss by rigging the election.”Dominion brought the suit in Delaware, where Fox is incorporated.“Fox recklessly disregarded the truth,” the lawsuit says. “Indeed, Fox knew these statements about Dominion were lies …“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.” More

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      in US Politics

      Fox News host Tucker Carlson calls QAnon followers 'gentle' patriots

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      Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory are “gentle people waving American flags”, Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed on Friday night – two months since many joined a mob that stormed the US Capitol seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat, a riot in which five people died.“Do you ever notice,” Carlson asked his primetime audience, “how all the scary internet conspiracy theorists – the radical QAnon people – when you actually see them on camera or in jail cells, as a lot of them now are, are maybe kind of confused with the wrong ideas, but they’re all kind of gentle people now waving American flags? They like this country.”Five people died as a direct result of the Capitol attack, one a police officer struck with a fire extinguisher, one a Trump supporter shot by law enforcement. The Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, was reported to have followed internet conspiracy theories including QAnon.Another rioter, Roseanne Boyland, was trampled by the mob while holding a Gadsden flag, a revolutionary era symbol of a snake and the legend “Don’t tread on me”. A friend said she had “watched her decline and go on these rabbit trails … this all really fucked with her head – the QAnon conspiracy theories, the elections, the unrest, the violence”.The QAnon conspiracy theory holds that Trump is America’s true leader against a cabal of satanic liberal child-killers and paedophiles. He is not. No such cabal exists. Nonetheless, the theory has proliferated – even finding a sympathiser in Congress, the Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.On 6 January, before the Capitol riot, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn the election, which he claims was the result of massive electoral fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court. He escaped conviction in an impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the riot. But federal authorities have made more than 300 arrests.Carlson spoke a day after the US Capitol was closed, as law enforcement agencies warned of a threat from rightwing groups around the QAnon theory that Trump would return to power on 4 March. He did not. No attack materialised.Carlson mocked reactions by Democrats and media coverage of the closure, adding familiar racially loaded provocation.“By the time night fell and the city remained quiet,” he said, “except, of course, in the poor neighbourhoods where people are still shooting one another in ever-growing numbers and no one is noticing, MSNBC had decided that, in fact, they had saved the day.”Carlson also said QAnon followers were “not torching Wendy’s. They’re not looting retail stores. They’re not shooting cops. No, that’s not them, it’s the other people doing that.”Last summer, protests against police brutality and institutional racism sometimes produced civil unrest. A Wendy’s fast food restaurant burned in Atlanta; looting occurred in some cities. Police officers have been shot and sometimes killed amid tension and protest over police killings mostly of African American men.The protests of 2020, which spread internationally after officers in Minneapolis killed an African American man, George Floyd, were multi-racial. Carlson’s other racially loaded comments on his prime time show include that immigration makes the US “dirtier”, a remark which prompted some advertisers to withdraw.In some quarters, the Fox News host is seen as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, if Trump does not run again. Carlson’s comments about QAnon believers echoed remarks by Trump, who last August told reporters: “I’ve heard these are people that love our country. So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, Carlson scored 3% in a straw poll regarding the next presidential pick – way behind Trump but ahead of Mike Pence, the former vice-president some in the Capitol mob said they wanted to hang. QAnon followers promise that fate for many of Trump’s opponents. More

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      Stormy Daniels to Michael Cohen: Fox News movie brought back memory of sex with Trump

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      Stormy Daniels has said she could not remember key details of the sexual liaison she claims to have had with Donald Trump, until seeing a film about Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment of women at Fox News prompted her to remember.“I went to see that movie Bombshell,” she said, “and suddenly it just came back.”Daniels, an adult film star and director whose birth name is Stephanie Clifford, was speaking to Michael Cohen on the former Trump lawyer’s podcast, Mea Culpa, made by Audio Up Media and distributed by PodcastOne and LiveXLive. Excerpts were shared with the Guardian.Daniels also described Trump “doing his best yet horrifyingly disturbing impression of Burt Reynolds”, on a bed, clad only in his underwear.Daniels claims to have had sex with Trump in Nevada in 2006. He denies it, but a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels reimbursed by Trump contributed to Cohen’s downfall in 2018.Trump’s longtime fixer was jailed for tax fraud, lying to Congress and violations of campaign finance law. He cooperated with investigators and published a book, Disloyal, while completing a three-year sentence.The payment to Daniels, and Cohen’s role in a payment to another woman, Playboy model Karen McDougal, during the 2016 election, are at the centre of ongoing investigations. Stripped of the protections of office, Trump is vulnerable to prosecution.Daniels’ appearance on Cohen’s podcast marks a rapprochement between the two. After Cohen orchestrated Trump’s attempts to keep Daniels quiet, Daniels had harsh words for Cohen in her own book, Full Disclosure.Daniels called Cohen a “dim bulb” and “a complete fucking moron”. She also detailed what she claims was a threat to her safety and that of her daughter, allegedly from Trump. In 2018, she said: “It never occurred to any of these men that I would someday have a voice.”Cohen is now a vocal critic of his old boss. Daniels remains a thorn in Trump’s side. “Both of our stories will be forever linked with Donald Trump, but also with one another,” Cohen said, apologising for inflicting “needless pain” and adding: “Thanks for giving me a second chance.”The details of Daniels’ alleged liaison with Trump at a charity golf event in Lake Tahoe in 2006 are well known, not least thanks to her book, which the Guardian first reported.“I couldn’t remember,” she told Cohen, “how I got from standing in that bathroom doorway to underneath him on the bed, like I couldn’t remember how my dress came off or how my shoes got off, because I know I took my shoes off because I clearly remember putting them back on and they were buckled, like they’re really gold strappy heels that were not easy to, you know, come off.“And I just, there’s like 60 seconds where I just had no recollection of it and it’s not in the book, and nobody really wanted to ask about it. They just wanted to know the details of what his appendage, or lack of appendage, looked like. And I was like, it really bothered me for, like, years, like, I definitely wasn’t drinking so I’m like why don’t I remember this.“And I’ll never forget this moment. I went to see that movie Bombshell, and suddenly it just came back.”Bombshell was directed by Jay Roach, starred Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie and was released in 2019. It told the story of the downfall of Roger Ailes, chief executive of Fox News and a key Trump ally, over sexual harassment.Trump denies accusations of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women. Shortly before the 2016 election, Fox News killed a story about Trump and Daniels. Ailes resigned in July that year and died the following May.Daniels’ own case against Trump for defamation is heading for the supreme court. She told Cohen: “I’ve already lost everything, so I’m taking it all the way.”Of Lake Tahoe in 2006, Daniels also told Cohen she now remembered thinking, ‘Oh fuck, how do I get myself in this situation. And I remember even thinking I could definitely fight his fat ass, I can definitely outrun him. There’s a bodyguard at the door. But I wasn’t threatened, I was not physically threatened.“And then so I tried to sidestep … I was like, trying to remember really quickly, where did I leave my purse, like I gotta get out of here. And I went to sidestep and he stood up off the bed and was like ‘This is your chance.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ and he was like, ‘You need to show me how bad you want it or do you just want to go back to the trailer park.’”Daniels has said Trump told her he would get her a slot on The Apprentice, the reality TV show for which he was then most famous. At the time of the alleged encounter, Trump’s third wife, Melania Trump, had recently given birth to their son, Barron.Daniels told Cohen she went to the bathroom, then “was genuinely like startled to see him waiting” when she came out.“I just froze,” she said, “and I didn’t know what to say. He had stripped down to his underwear and was perched on the bed doing his best yet horrifyingly disturbing impression of Burt Reynolds.”She “didn’t say anything for years”, she said, “because I didn’t remember.” Now the star of a ghost-hunting reality TV show, Spooky Babes, she added: “I’ve been face to face with evil in the most intimate way. Demons don’t scare me any more.”Daniels has described what she says happened next. Speaking to CBS 60 Minutes in 2018, she said: “And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And I just felt like maybe it was sort of … I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone.”The interviewer, Anderson Cooper, said: “And you had sex with him.”“Yes,” Daniels said. More

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      in Elections

      Fox News cancels Lou Dobbs Tonight

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      Fox Business Network has canceled the show of Lou Dobbs, the ardent Donald Trump supporter with a history of espousing misinformation who promoted baseless conspiracy theories of voting fraud after the election.
      Friday evening marked the final airing of Lou Dobbs Tonight, Dobbs’ regular weeknight program. The Fox host was a major contributor to the false narrative that the election was stolen and continued espousing those views on his program even after admitting that they lacked actual proof.
      “Eight weeks from the election and we still don’t have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone knows were committed,” he said on air in January.
      Dobbs, 75, has hosted the program since 2011. Trump considered it must-see TV and even reportedly patched the host through during key policy meetings.
      Dobbs is still considered the highest-rated host on the Fox Business Network, and he has remained under contract even though he is not expected to reappear on a new show. His show’s slot, which airs twice on weeknights, will now be filled with a show called Fox Business Tonight, which will feature Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman as hosts.
      News of the cancellation came one day after Dobbs, 75, was named as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, an election technology company and voting machine maker, which accuses Dobbs and other Fox News anchors of promoting unfounded claims that Smartmatic was involved in a scheme to hand the presidency to Joe Biden.
      Citing the fabricated reporting, Smartmatic sued to the tune of $2.7bn. The 285-page lawsuit, filed in New York state supreme court, claims the network launched a “disinformation campaign” against the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county. Trump’s former lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell who appeared as guests on the network, were also named in the defamation suit.
      Fox said the move to end Dobbs’ show had been in the works before the lawsuit.
      “As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business,” a Fox News spokesperson said. “This is part of those planned changes.”
      On the Smartmatic lawsuit, Fox said on Thursday the network was “proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court”.
      Dobbs said he had no comment on Friday. More