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      Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods

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      Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul, spoke under oath last month in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems.Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documents released on Monday showed.“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. Fox had been the first network to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden on election night — essentially declaring him the next president. When Mr. Trump refused to concede and started attacking Fox as disloyal and dishonest, viewers began to change the channel.The filings also revealed that top executives and on-air hosts had reacted with incredulity bordering on contempt to various fictitious allegations about Dominion. These included unsubstantiated rumors — repeatedly uttered by guests and hosts of Fox programs — that its voting machines could run a secret algorithm that switched votes from one candidate to another, and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help that country’s longtime leader, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.Read What Murdoch Said in His Deposition in the Fox-Dominion CaseRupert Murdoch made his remarks last month as part of the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems.Read DocumentDespite those misgivings, little changed about the content on shows like Mr. Dobbs’s and Ms. Bartiromo’s. For weeks after the election, viewers of Fox News and Fox Business heard a far different story from the one that Fox executives privately conceded was real.Lawyers for Fox News, which filed a response to Dominion in court on Monday, argued that its commentary and reporting after the election did not amount to defamation because its hosts had not endorsed the falsehoods about Dominion, even if Mr. Murdoch stated otherwise in his deposition. As such, the network’s lawyers argued, Fox’s coverage was protected under the First Amendment.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsA $1.6 Billion Suit: A defamation lawsuit by the voting machine maker Dominion seeks to hold Fox News responsible for false claims after the 2020 election. Here’s what to know about the case so far.Rupert Murdoch’s Deposition: The conservative media mogul acknowledged under oath that several Fox hosts promoted the false narrative that the election was stolen. Read his deposition.Privately Expressing Disbelief: Dozens of text messages released in the lawsuit show how Fox hosts went from privately criticizing election fraud claims to giving them significant airtime.“Far from reporting the allegations as true, hosts informed their audiences at every turn that the allegations were just allegations that would need to be proven in court in short order if they were going to impact the outcome of the election,” Fox lawyers said in their filing. “And to the extent some hosts commented on the allegations, that commentary is independently protected opinion.”A Fox News spokeswoman said on Monday in response to the filing that Dominion’s case “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal scrutiny.” She added that the company had taken “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting.”In certain instances, Fox hosts did present the allegations as unproven and offered their opinions. And Fox lawyers have pointed to exchanges on the air when hosts challenged these claims and pressed Mr. Trump’s lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani to present evidence that never materialized.But the case is also likely to revolve around questions about what people with the power to shape Fox’s on-air content knew about the validity of the fraud allegations as they gave pro-Trump election deniers a platform — often in front of hosts who mustered no pushback.“There appears to be a pretty good argument that Fox endorsed the accuracy of what was being said,” said Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment lawyer who has defended major media organizations in defamation cases. He added that Fox’s arguments were stronger against some of Dominion’s claims than others. But based on what he has seen of the case so far, Mr. Levine said, “I’d much rather be in Dominion’s shoes than Fox’s right now.”Dominion’s filing casts Mr. Murdoch as a chairman who was both deeply engaged with his senior leadership about coverage of the election and operating at somewhat of a remove, unwilling to interfere. Asked by Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, whether he could have ordered Fox News to keep Trump lawyers like Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani off the air, Mr. Murdoch responded: “I could have. But I didn’t.”The document also described how Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had implored Mr. Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” Mr. Ryan suggested instead that the network pivot and “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”There was some discussion at the highest levels of the company about how to make that pivot, Dominion said.On Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the attack at the Capitol, Mr. Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, talked about whether Mr. Hannity and his fellow prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, should make it clear to viewers that Mr. Biden had won the election. Mr. Murdoch said in his deposition that he had hoped such a statement “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen.”According to the filing, Ms. Scott said of the hosts, “Privately they are all there,” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” No statement of that kind was made on the air.Dominion details the close relationship that Fox hosts and executives enjoyed with senior Republican Party officials and members of the Trump inner circle, revealing how at times Fox was shaping the very story it was covering. It describes how Mr. Murdoch placed a call to the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, immediately after the election. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch testified that during that call he likely urged Mr. McConnell to “ask other senior Republicans to refuse to endorse Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless claims of fraud.”Dominion also describes how Mr. Murdoch provided Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about ads that the Biden campaign would be running on Fox.At one point, Dominion’s lawyers accuse Ms. Pirro, who hosted a Saturday evening talk show, of “laundering her own conspiracy theories through Powell.” The filing goes on to say Ms. Pirro bragged to her friends “that she was the source for Powell’s claims.” Dominion notes that this was “something she never shared with her audience.”The filing on Monday included a deposition by Viet Dinh, Fox Corporation’s chief legal officer, who was one of the many senior executive cautioning about the content of Fox’s coverage. After Mr. Hannity told his audience on Nov. 5, 2020, that it would be “impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results,” Mr. Dinh told a group of senior executives including Lachlan Murdoch and Ms. Scott: “Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.”When asked in his deposition if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, Mr. Dinh said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”In their filing on Monday, Fox’s lawyers accused Dominion of cherry-picking evidence that some at Fox News knew the allegations against Dominion were not true and, therefore, acted out of actual malice, the legal standard required to prove defamation. “The vast majority of Dominion’s evidence comes from individuals who had zero responsibility for the statements Dominion challenges,” the lawyers said. More

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      What Fox News Hosts Said Privately vs. Publicly About Voter Fraud

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      Two days after the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson was furious. Fox News viewers were abandoning the network for Newsmax and One America News, two conservative rivals, after Fox declared that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Arizona, a crucial swing state. In a text message with his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, Mr. Carlson appeared livid that viewers […] More

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      Why Fox News Lied to the Viewers It ‘Respects’

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      There are some stories that are important enough to pause the news cycle and linger on them, to explore not just what happened, but why. And so it is with Fox News’s role in the events leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Thanks to a recent filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox, there is now compelling evidence that America’s most-watched cable news network presented information it knew to be false as part of an effort to placate an angry audience. It knowingly sacrificed its integrity to maintain its market share.Why? There are the obvious reasons: Money. Power. Fame. These are universal human temptations. But the answer goes deeper. Fox News became a juggernaut not simply by being “Republican,” or “conservative,” but by offering its audience something it craved even more deeply: representation. And journalism centered on representation ultimately isn’t journalism at all.To understand the Fox News phenomenon, one has to understand the place it occupies in Red America. It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard. If there’s an important good news story in Red America, the first call is to Fox. If conservative Christians face a threat to their civil liberties, the first call is to Fox. If you’re a conservative celebrity and you need to sell a book, the first call is to Fox.And Fox takes those calls. In the time before Donald Trump, I spent my share of moments in Fox green rooms and pitching stories to Fox producers. I knew they were more interested in stories about, say, religious liberty than most mainstream media outlets were. I knew they loved human-interest stories about virtuous veterans and cops. Sometimes this was good — we need more coverage of religion in America, for example — but over time Fox morphed into something well beyond a news network.Fox isn’t just the news hub of right-wing America, it’s a cultural cornerstone, and its business model is so successful that it’s more accurate to think of the rest of the right-wing media universe not as a collection of competitors to Fox, but rather as imitators. From television channels to news sites, right-wing personalities aren’t so much competing with Fox as auditioning for it.Take, for example, the online space. Fox News is so dominant that, according to data from December, you could take the total traffic of the next 19 conservative websites combined, and still not reach half of Fox’s audience.But that kind of loyalty is built around a social compact, the profound and powerful sense in Red America that Fox is for us. It’s our megaphone to the culture. Yet when Fox created this compact, it placed the audience in charge of its content.During the Trump years, Fox faithfully upheld its end of the bargain. If you were Republican and felt embattled for supporting Donald Trump, a quick visit to Fox (especially in prime time) would calm your mind and soothe your soul. There you’d be reminded that the Democrats are the real radicals. That the Democrats are the true threat to America. And if you voted for Trump even though you were uncomfortable with some of his conduct, it was only because “they” forced your hand.As the Trump years wore on, the prime-time messaging became more blatant. Supporting Trump became a marker not just of patriotism, but also of courage. And what of conservatives, like myself, who opposed Trump? We were “cowards” or “grifters” who sold our souls for 30 pieces of silver and airtime on MSNBC.Our disagreement was cast as an act of outright betrayal. People like me had allegedly turned our backs on our own community. We had failed in our obligation to be their voice.So you can start to understand the shock when, on Election Day in 2020, Fox News accurately, if arguably prematurely, called Arizona for Joe Biden. It broke the social compact. By presuming the fairness of the election and by declaring Joe Biden the winner of a previously red state, Fox sent a message to its own audience — an audience that had been primed to mistrust election results by Trump and by reports on Fox News — that it did not hear them. It did not see them.In the emails and texts highlighted in the Dominion filing, you see Fox News figures, including Sean Hannity and Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, referring to the need to “respect” the audience. To be clear, by “respect” they didn’t mean “tell the truth” — an act of genuine respect. Instead they meant “represent.”Representation can have its place. Fox’s deep connection with its conservative audience means that it can be ahead of the rest of the media on stories that affect red states and red culture.But there is a difference between coming from a community and speaking for a community. In journalism, the former can be valuable, but the latter can be corrupt. It can result in audience capture (writing to please your audience, not challenge it) and in fear and timidity in reporting facts that contradict popular narratives. And in extreme instances — such as what we witnessed from Fox News after the 2020 presidential election — it can result in almost cartoonish villainy.There are courageous reporters at Fox. We learned some of their names in the Dominion filing. They were the people who had the courage to tell the truth. But then there are the leaders, and the prime-time stars. Tough? Courageous? Hardly. When push comes to shove, they embody the possibly apocryphal remark of the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” And follow them they did, straight into a morass of lies and conspiracy theories that should undermine Fox’s credibility for years to come.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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      Trump Spent $10 Million From His PAC on His Legal Bills Last Year

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      Now that the former president is a declared candidate again, there are questions about whether he can continue using donor funds to pay his lawyers.Former President Donald J. Trump, who throughout his business career had a reputation for not paying lawyers, spent roughly $10 million from his political action committee on his own legal fees last year, federal election filings show.The money that went to Mr. Trump’s legal bills was part of more than $16 million that Mr. Trump’s PAC, Save America, spent for legal-related payments in 2021 and 2022, the filings show.Some of the $16 million appears to have been for lawyers representing witnesses in investigations related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power. But the majority of it — about $10 million — went to firms directly representing Mr. Trump in a string of investigations and lawsuits, including some related to his company, the filings showed.Mr. Trump was well-known in New York City before winning the presidency in 2016 for refusing to pay his bills to a wide range of service providers and contractors. Lawyers were no exception, with Mr. Trump often saying people got free advertising by being involved with him.The recent spending related to Mr. Trump is notable not just for the sheer volume — it represented about 19 percent of the PAC’s total expenditures outside of transfers to one of his other political committees and those backing other candidates — but also because Mr. Trump is now a declared candidate for president again.Some campaign finance experts are raising questions about whether, as a candidate, Mr. Trump can continue to use the PAC to pay for his personal legal bills. Those questions are arising as he faces legal challenges on various fronts as well as intense scrutiny by the Justice Department and prosecutors in Georgia and New York.According to some campaign finance experts, having the PAC continue to pay his legal bills now that he is a candidate would be seen as a contribution to him, and therefore be subject to legal limits.“Payments by a PAC that exceed the contribution limit are contributions to the candidate and are unlawful,” said Jason Torchinsky, a campaign finance expert and lawyer with the firm Holtzman Vogel, referring to the limit on individual donations to candidates, which is set at $3,300 for the current two-year political cycle.Adav Noti, of the Campaign Legal Center, a group that has called on the Federal Election Commission to more strictly enforce the rules on personal use of campaign donations, called what is permissible a “gray area.” The Federal Election Commission has yet to provide the guidance on the issue that campaign finance experts have sought.The vast majority of Mr. Trump’s PAC money was raised before he officially entered the 2024 presidential race on Nov. 15. At the end of last year, the PAC had just over $18 million in cash on hand, its federal filings show.The Justice Department has been subpoenaing documents from vendors paid by the PAC, including law firms, in an effort to determine what they were being paid for..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to an email asking if Mr. Trump would still use Save America for his personal legal bills. Mr. Trump’s PAC was formed in late 2020 after the November election, as Mr. Trump was raising massive sums of money by vowing to fight what he claimed was widespread election fraud.Mr. Trump spent some of the money on fruitless efforts to show widespread election fraud. He also used it to defend against various matters related to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The PAC that Mr. Trump’s advisers set up allowed for general use of the money so long as it did not directly support a future candidacy.The single biggest payment that Mr. Trump made from the PAC money to a law firm last year — $3 million — went to the Florida-based law firm Critton, Luttier and Coleman, which is affiliated with Christopher M. Kise, a former solicitor general of Florida. Mr. Kise joined Mr. Trump’s team initially to take on the Mar-a-Lago documents case and he is now involved in defending Mr. Trump and his company in a fraud suit filed by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.An additional $930,000 went to Continental, a law firm at which Mr. Kise is of counsel, the filings show.Another $1.3 million went to Silverman Thompson Slutkin and White, the firm of Evan Corcoran, a lawyer who began working with Mr. Trump last spring. Mr. Corcoran was brought into Mr. Trump’s orbit by Boris Epshteyn, a strategist who has played a coordinating role with some of the lawyers in cases involving Mr. Trump, as the investigation related to the Mar-a-Lago documents was heating up. (Mr. Epshteyn’s company was paid $195,000, but for broader strategic consulting, not legal consulting specifically.)The Justice Department recently filed a motion to compel Mr. Corcoran, who has appeared before a federal grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, to give additional testimony, citing the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege. The request means that prosecutors have reason to believe that legal advice or legal services may have been used by Mr. Trump or one of his allies in furthering a crime.Another roughly $1.2 million was paid to Ifrah Law, the firm of Jim Trusty, a former federal prosecutor who Mr. Trump saw on television and decided to hire.Roughly $1.3 million went to the law firm of Michael van der Veen. Mr. van der Veen represented Mr. Trump in his second impeachment trial and last year represented the Trump Organization in a tax fraud prosecution brought by the Manhattan district attorney. Mr. Trump’s company lost on all 17 counts.Another roughly $2 million was paid to the firm of Alina Habba, who represents Mr. Trump in a number of suits, including the New York attorney general suit and two suits brought by E. Jean Carroll, a New York writer who says Mr. Trump raped her in a department store changing room in the 1990s. Ms. Habba is also representing Mr. Trump in a suit against The New York Times for its reporting on Mr. Trump’s tax returns, a defamation case in Pennsylvania, and in a case against Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.There have been various smaller payments for a constellation of other lawyers who have worked with Mr. Trump on issues including the investigation in Fulton County, Ga., into possible violations of election law and the subpoena he received from the House Jan. 6 committee. Those lawyers include Jesse Binnall, Harmeet Dhillon and Tim Parlatore, as well as the firms Earth and Water, Level Law, Weber Crabb and Wein and Wilenchik and Bartness.Some of those firms also represent or advise other witnesses in the investigations related to Mr. Trump, such as the former White House adviser Peter Navarro.One person for whom the money has not been used is Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. Mr. Trump told aides in late 2020 that he did not want Mr. Giuliani paid for his work on Mr. Trump’s behalf unless he succeeded in undoing the election results, and Mr. Giuliani’s own legal fees have not been covered by Save America.The questions of which lawyers and vendors have been paid, and for what, intensified after the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power told the Justice Department that it had evidence that a lawyer representing a witness had tried to coach her testimony in ways that would be favorable to Mr. Trump. The witness in question was later identified by people familiar with the committee’s work as Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide.Her lawyer at the time, Stefan Passantino, was a former White House deputy counsel under Mr. Trump and was paid through Save America. He has denied the allegations and has said he represented her “honorably, ethically and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me.” More

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      Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Trump’s Election Fraud Claims

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      The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems.Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”Mr. Carlson continued, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” he added, making clear that he did not.The messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation, with Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, calling Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff.”On one occasion, as Mr. Murdoch watched Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell on television, he told Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.”Dominion’s brief depicts Ms. Scott, whom colleagues have described as sharply attuned to the sensibilities of the Fox audience, as being well aware that Mr. Trump’s claims were baseless. And when another Murdoch-owned property, The New York Post, published an editorial urging Mr. Trump to stop complaining that he had been cheated, Ms. Scott distributed it widely among her staff. Mr. Murdoch then thanked her for doing so, the brief says.The filing, in state court in Delaware, contains the most vivid and detailed picture yet of what went on behind the scenes at Fox News and its corporate parent in the days and weeks after the 2020 election, when the conservative cable network’s coverage took an abrupt turn.Fox News stunned the Trump campaign on election night by becoming the first news outlet to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. the winner of Arizona — effectively projecting that he would become the next president. Then, as Fox’s ratings fell sharply after the election and the president refused to concede, many of the network’s most popular hosts and shows began promoting outlandish claims of a far-reaching voter fraud conspiracy involving Dominion machines to deny Mr. Trump a second term.What was disclosed on Thursday was not the full glimpse of Dominion’s case against Fox. The 192-page filing had multiple redactions that contain more revelations about deliberations inside the network. Fox has sought to keep much of the evidence against it under seal. The New York Times is challenging the legality of those redactions in court.More on Fox NewsDefamation Case: ​​Some of the biggest names at Fox News are being questioned in the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network. The suit could be one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in a generation.Merger Falls Through: Rupert Murdoch has halted his plans to combine News Corp and Fox Corporation, saying that a merger was “not optimal for shareholders.” The prospect had faced significant investor pushback.‘American Nationalist’: Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, the TV host transformed Fox News and became former President Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.In its defense, which was also filed with the court on Thursday, Fox argued that by covering Mr. Trump’s fraud claims, the network was doing what any media organization would: reporting and commenting on a matter of undeniable newsworthiness. And it noted that many of its programs did not endorse the claim that the election was stolen.“In its coverage, Fox News fulfilled its commitment to inform fully and comment fairly,” its brief said. “Some hosts viewed the president’s claims skeptically; others viewed them hopefully; all recognized them as profoundly newsworthy.”The law shields journalists from liability if they report on false statements, but not if they promote them.Dominion said in its filing that not a single Fox witness had testified that he or she believed any of the allegations about Dominion.In a statement on Thursday, a Fox spokeswoman said, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”The brief shows that Fox News stars and executives were afraid of losing their audience, which started to defect to the conservative cable news alternatives Newsmax and OAN after Fox News called Arizona for Mr. Biden. And they seemed concerned with the impact that would have on the network’s profitability. On Nov. 12, in a text chain with Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.“Please get her fired,” Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Ms. Heinrich had deleted her tweet by the next morning.The details offer more than dramatic vignettes from inside a news organization where internal disputes rarely spill into public view. They are pieces of evidence that a jury could use to weigh whether to find Fox liable for significant financial damages. Dominion is asking for $1.6 billion as compensation for the damage it says it suffered as Fox guests and hosts claimed, for instance, that Dominion’s voting machines had been designed to rig elections for the Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez and were equipped with an algorithm that could erase votes from one candidate and give them to another.Fox Corporation has about $4 billion cash on hand, according to its latest quarterly earnings report.The burden in the case falls on Dominion to prove that Fox acted with actual malice — the longstanding legal standard that requires Dominion to prove that either Fox guests, hosts and executives knew what was being said on the air was false and allowed it anyway, or that people inside Fox were recklessly negligent in failing to check the accuracy of their coverage.That burden is difficult to meet, which is why defamation cases often fail. But legal experts said Dominion’s arguments were stronger than most.“This filing argues a fire hose of direct evidence of knowing falsity,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. “It gives a powerful preview of one of the best-supported claims of actual malice we have seen in any major-media case.”Many defamation suits are quickly dismissed because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections. If they do go forward, they are usually settled out of court to spare both sides the costly spectacle of a trial. The Dominion case has proceeded with a speed and scope that media experts have said is unusual.For eight months, Dominion lawyers have taken depositions from dozens of people at all levels of the network and its parent company. Mr. Murdoch was deposed last month. (Dominion’s brief was written before that deposition and does not reflect its contents, which remain under seal.) Mr. Hannity, one of the most popular prime-time hosts and a close Trump ally, has been deposed twice. And the personal phones and emails of many midlevel employees have been searched as part of the discovery process, which people inside the company have said has created an atmosphere of considerable unease.Both sides appear dug in and confident of victory. The judge has scheduled jury selection to begin in mid-April.Fox has contested how Dominion arrived at the amount it is seeking in damages, arguing that the company has vastly overstated its valuation and the reputational harm it suffered.In papers filed with the court on Thursday, lawyers for Fox called the $1.6 billion sum “a staggering figure that has no factual support and serves no apparent purpose other than to generate headlines, chill First Amendment-protected speech.”Fox’s lawyers added that Staple Street Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns a majority share in Dominion, had paid about $38 million for its 76 percent stake in the company in 2018 and had never estimated Dominion’s financial value to be worth “anywhere near $1.6 billion.” Fox has made a counterclaim against Dominion seeking to recover all its costs associated with the lawsuit.Dominion’s goal, aside from convincing a jury that Fox knowingly spread lies, is to build a case that points straight to the top of the Fox media empire and its founding family, the Murdochs.“Fox knew,” the Dominion filing declares. “From the top down, Fox knew.”The brief cites senior executives and editors responsible for shaping Fox’s coverage behind the scenes who weren’t buying the election denial, either.“No reasonable person would have thought that,” said the network’s politics editor at the time, Chris Stirewalt, referring to the allegation that Dominion rigged the election. Bill Sammon, Fox’s managing editor in Washington, is quoted as saying, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”Fox pushed out both journalists after the 2020 election.Ron Mitchell, a senior Fox executive who oversaw the Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham shows, texted privately with colleagues that the Dominion allegations were “the Bill Gates/microchip angle to voter fraud,” referring to false claims that microchips were injected into people who received Covid-19 vaccines.At times, Fox employees are described as disparaging one another. The president of the network, Jay Wallace, is quoted at one point criticizing the former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs — one of the biggest megaphones for Mr. Trump’s lies. “The North Koreans do a more nuanced show” than Mr. Dobbs, the brief says.On Nov. 6, 2020, three days after Election Day, as Mr. Biden pulled into the lead, Mr. Murdoch told Ms. Scott in an email that it was going to be “very hard to credibly cry foul everywhere,” and noted that “if Trump becomes a sore loser, we should watch Sean especially,” referring to Mr. Hannity. More

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      2016 Trump Campaign to Pay $450,000 to Settle Nondisclosure Agreements Suit

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      The settlement with a former campaign aide who says she was the target of sexual harassment effectively invalidates agreements hundreds of 2016 Trump campaign officials signed.Former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign will pay $450,000 as part of a settlement of a long court fight over its use of nondisclosure agreements, according to documents filed on Friday in a New York federal court.The proposed settlement with Jessica Denson, a former campaign aide whom the campaign tried to silence as she claimed she was the target of abusive treatment and sexual harassment by another campaign member, effectively invalidates the nondisclosure agreements that hundreds of officials from Mr. Trump’s first presidential run signed.Ms. Denson is set to receive $25,000, the filings show, and the rest will cover legal fees and other costs. The judge in the case, who has not yet approved the settlement, pushed back on efforts by the campaign to keep the paperwork sealed. The details were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.“We think that this N.D.A. was entirely unreasonable from the beginning,” said David K. Bowles, one of the lawyers for Ms. Denson, who initially represented herself in the case. “No attorney should have ever drafted it, and no campaign worker should have ever been compelled to sign it. We think the unwinding of the N.D.A. is a triumph for free speech, for democracy and for Jessica Denson, in particular, and we are very proud of our accomplishment tonight.”A representative for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign did not respond to emails seeking comment.Mr. Trump has made broad use of nondisclosure agreements throughout his business career and, later, his political career. The agreements have generally sought to keep people from disclosing information about Mr. Trump, but he has also used them as a cudgel against a wide variety of aides. In Ms. Denson’s case, her lawyers argued the agreement was overly broad, among other flaws.Ms. Denson had been trying to make the suit a certified class action shortly before the matter was settled. She has a separate case pending related to her claim that she was harassed by a superior on the campaign. More

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      The Times Asks Judge to Unseal Documents in Fox News Defamation Case

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      Most of the evidence in the case has remained under seal at the request of Fox’s lawyers.The New York Times asked a judge on Wednesday to unseal some legal filings that contain previously undisclosed evidence in a defamation suit brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, a company targeted with conspiracy theories about rigged machines and stolen votes in the 2020 election.Most of the evidence in the case — including text messages and emails taken from the personal phones of Fox executives, on-air personalities and producers in the weeks after the election — has remained under seal at the request of lawyers for the network.Federal law and the law in Delaware, where the case is being heard, broadly protect the public’s right of access to information about judicial proceedings. The law allows for exceptions if a party in a lawsuit can show good cause to keep something under seal, such as a company seeking to protect a trade secret or financial information.The judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, has cautioned that neither Fox nor Dominion was entitled to keep information secret for reasons not covered by those limited exceptions, including, he said last month, the fact that something “may be embarrassing.”Dominion filed the lawsuit in early 2021, arguing that “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes.” It is asking for $1.6 billion in damages from the network and its parent company, Fox Corporation.Fox has defended itself by claiming that the commentary of its hosts and guests was protected under the First Amendment, and that the allegations of fraud made by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies were inherently newsworthy, even if they were false.The Times argued that the law tilts heavily toward the public’s right to access even if it also allows for limited exceptions. The Times is being joined by National Public Radio in its request to make public hundreds of pages of documents filed under seal this month by Fox and Dominion.Dominion’s suit, The Times said in its filing with Judge Davis, “is unquestionably a consequential defamation case that tests the scope of the First Amendment.”Further, the complaint said, the suit “undeniably involves a matter of profound public interest: namely, how a broadcast network fact-checked and presented to the public the allegations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that plaintiff was to blame.”David McCraw, The Times’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement: “The public has a right to transparent judicial proceedings to ensure that the law is being applied fairly. That is especially important in a case that touches upon political issues that have deeply divided the country.”Judge Davis has scheduled a trial for April. More

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      Lawyers Who Investigated Trump Start Firm to Combat Threats to Democracy

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      Mark F. Pomerantz, Carey R. Dunne and Michele Roberts, the former head of the N.B.A. players union, will launch a pro bono law firm, the Free and Fair Litigation Group.Last year, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne were leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump’s business practices.Now, they have turned their attention to a broader phenomenon that they say the former president represents: threats to democracy in the United States.Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne, who resigned last year when the district attorney decided not to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump, said they have formed a pro bono law firm that aims to stem the tide of anti-democratic policies proliferating around the country. The firm — the Free and Fair Litigation Group, which opens its doors this week — is also led by Michele A. Roberts, the former head of the union that represents professional basketball players.All three founders have extensive experience as litigators, and they plan to defend policies they see as just and bring lawsuits challenging those they believe are undemocratic, the three founding partners said in an interview. Their work will initially focus on voting rights, gun control and free speech.“As I see it, we’re now faced with not just one politician, but really with a national movement that’s aimed at rolling back decades of rights and constitutional principles,” Mr. Dunne said.In the two years since Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen helped spark a violent riot at the Capitol, election denial has only grown within the Republican Party. Mr. Trump is once again a leading contender for president, and the House is in the hands of Republicans — many of whom voted against certifying President Biden’s election victory.Against that backdrop of deep political polarization, it remains to be seen how much of the new firm’s ambitious agenda can be accomplished, particularly if its cases reach a Supreme Court that has taken a sharp rightward turn.Michele Roberts, the former executive director of the N.B.A. players union, is an experienced litigator.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe three founders will take no salary, and the firm will do all its work for free. They expect to hire a small staff of lawyers — no more than eight employees, including one who recently served as a federal prosecutor — and partner with a number of larger law firms. The firm, a nonprofit, will solicit outside donations from foundations and small donors alike.The new firm differs from larger groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Brennan Center for Justice, which conduct lobbying and research in addition to their work in court, because of its singular focus on litigation.The venture was a product of serendipitous timing: three busy lawyers who found themselves with nothing on their dockets in the spring of last year.Ms. Roberts, an experienced litigator, had just retired as executive director of the N.B.A. Players Association. Mr. Pomerantz, a well-known defense lawyer who also served as the criminal division chief at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, came out of retirement in early 2021 to lead the district attorney’s investigation into Mr. Trump. He resigned in February of last year, as did Mr. Dunne, another prominent litigator who oversaw the Trump investigation and successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court twice in the fight over a subpoena for Mr. Trump’s tax returns.Although Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne had begun to present evidence to a grand jury about the former president’s business practices by early last year, the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, developed concerns about proving the case and decided not to seek to indict Mr. Trump at that time, prompting the resignations. The investigation, which began under the prior district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., is now continuing under Mr. Bragg, who also recently secured the conviction of Mr. Trump’s company.Carey Dunne won a Supreme Court decision that gave Manhattan prosecutors access to Donald Trump’s tax returns.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesWhile the new law firm currently has no plans to take on Mr. Trump directly, its mission was in some sense inspired by his influence over the Republican Party and the Supreme Court, to which he appointed three conservative justices.“Trump is obviously the poster boy for increased authoritarianism,” said Mr. Pomerantz, who has written a book about his time investigating Mr. Trump that Simon & Schuster announced on Wednesday would be published in February. “He personifies the problem, but he’s far from the only manifestation of the problem.”For his part, Mr. Trump has slammed Mr. Pomerantz publicly, calling him a “low-life attorney” who “is a ‘Never Trumper’ and a Hillary Clinton sycophant.”The firm’s first case involves gun control policies under attack in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year expanding the right to carry firearms outside the home. The firm is defending four Colorado towns, each with bans on carrying assault weapons in public, that were sued by a gun rights group after the court’s decision. The case is scheduled to go to trial this fall.Measures like Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” law, which limits talk of race, gender and nationality in schools and the workplace, are also of interest at the new firm. It has begun examining the possibility of bringing a First Amendment lawsuit focused on similar laws in other states that prohibit diversity training in the workplace.The firm is also developing plans to challenge Florida’s arrest of a number of people with criminal histories who were able to register to vote in the 2020 election even though their past convictions should have barred them from doing so. Although criminal charges against some of those people have been dismissed, the firm is researching the possibility of suing the state for having violated the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the arrests discourage legal voting by people with criminal convictions.“It’s just disgraceful,” Ms. Roberts said, adding that the case had hit home for her as someone who is concerned with voting rights and with “legislative changes to election laws in various states.”To litigate the cases, the firm will turn for support to a roster of prominent law firms and advocacy groups.In the Colorado gun control case, the firm is working with Everytown for Gun Safety, the group founded by the former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as well as Davis Polk, Mr. Dunne’s former firm. On the Florida voting rights case, they have met with a group called Protect Democracy, a nonprofit founded by lawyers from the Obama White House, as well as Paul Weiss, where Mr. Pomerantz was a partner for many years.Mark Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne led the Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry into Mr. Trump until they resigned last year.David Karp/Associated PressThe outside firms are providing their resources on a pro bono basis. The new firm’s board of directors will also include a number of boldfaced names from the criminal justice world, including Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a former general counsel at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office who was a Democratic candidate for Manhattan district attorney in 2021.Free and Fair’s executive director will be Danny Frost, a lawyer who served as a senior adviser and spokesman in the district attorney’s office under Mr. Vance, when Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz were working on the Trump investigation.Thus far, the firm has mostly accepted donations from friends and professional acquaintances but in the coming months will ramp up their fund-raising now that the I.R.S. has certified the firm as a nonprofit.Originally, the principals had expected that getting authorized for tax-exempt status would take half a year. Then they learned that they could make an emergency application to the I.R.S., “but only if what you’re providing is so desperately needed by the country that you can claim emergency treatment status,” Mr. Dunne said.They filed their application in October. Within 14 days, they had received the emergency approval. More