Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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    Fox Argues Top Executives Weren’t Involved in Voter Fraud Broadcasts

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    Lawyers for the company, which faces a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, are pushing for a judge to rule in their favor before a trial.WILMINGTON, Del. — Fox Corporation executives, including Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, had no direct involvement in what aired on the company’s cable news channels, and therefore their company should not be found liable in a $1.6 billion defamation case, lawyers for Fox argued Wednesday in a Delaware court.The argument was part of Fox’s request for a pretrial victory. Dominion Voting Systems has accused both Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, of defaming the business. Dominion says Fox’s shows repeatedly linked its voting machines to a vast conspiracy of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.Erin Murphy, a lawyer for both Fox Corporation and Fox News, said there was no evidence that corporate executives were involved in the Fox News shows in question. She said Dominion would need to show that they had directly participated in the broadcasts to meet the high standard needed to prove defamation.Ms. Murphy conceded that some of the executives had the power to bar certain guests from the shows, but said: “It’s not enough for them to show that they have the ability to step in. They have to have been involved.”Fox has asked that Fox Corporation be dropped from the lawsuit.Dominion must prove that Fox knowingly broadcast false information about the company, or was reckless enough to disregard substantial evidence that the claims were not true. Defamation cases have traditionally proved hard to win because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections. But legal experts say Dominion may have enough evidence to clear that high bar.Dominion, too, is asking for summary judgment; its legal team gave its arguments in Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday. The judge, Eric M. Davis, said he would make his decision by April 11. A jury trial is scheduled to start April 17.Judge Davis told both sides on Wednesday that he preferred for trial witnesses to appear in person rather than over a video link, setting up the possibility that Fox News hosts like Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson could show up. He said Rupert Murdoch might also be compelled to testify in person, though he did not issue any decisions on the matter.Fox lawyers had submitted a letter to the judge on Monday asking that Mr. Murdoch and some other executives not be compelled to testify, saying that it would amount to “hardships” on the witnesses and that their testimony would “add nothing other than media interest.”After Fox finished its arguments, a lawyer for several media outlets, including The New York Times, asked the judge to review redactions that Fox had made to some of the communications it handed over, arguing that Fox kept too much confidential. Judge Davis said he would consider the request.Judge Davis also remarked on a lawsuit filed in Delaware on Monday by a Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg. She argues that Fox lawyers coerced her into providing misleading information in her deposition in the Dominion lawsuit.Judge Davis said the lawsuit had been originally assigned to him but then given to another judge in Delaware Superior Court.Fox News said in a statement on Wednesday: “Despite the noise and confusion that Dominion has generated by presenting cherry-picked quotes without context, this case is ultimately about the First Amendment protections of the media’s absolute need to cover the news.” More

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      Fox and Dominion Urge Judge to Rule on Case

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      At the start of a pretrial hearing for the $1.6 billion defamation trial, the judge said he was still weighing whether to issue a summary judgment.A Delaware judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News said in a pretrial hearing on Tuesday that he was still weighing whether to issue a summary judgment for either side in the case.In a hearing in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday, lawyers for Fox News and Dominion both pushed the judge, Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court, to rule on the case without a jury. Dominion, an election technology company, is accusing Fox of spreading false claims of widespread vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election.“I haven’t made a decision,” Judge Davis said.The case centers on Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election, when President Donald J. Trump and his supporters began to spread false claims about widespread voter fraud.On Tuesday, Dominion argued that a trove of internal communications and depositions it had obtained showed that Fox executives and hosts had known that some of the claims about election fraud were false but had given them airtime anyway. Fox asked Judge Davis to dismiss the case outright, saying its actions were protected by the First Amendment.A trial is scheduled to begin on April 17.The lawsuit poses a sizable threat to Fox’s business and reputation. Dominion must prove that Fox knowingly broadcast false information about the company, or was reckless enough to disregard substantial evidence that the claims were not true — a legal standard known as “actual malice.” While defamation cases have traditionally proved hard to win, legal experts say Dominion may have enough evidence to clear that high bar.Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, told the court that it had plenty of evidence that Fox knew what it was doing.Mr. Nelson cited, for example, an excerpt from a deposition by Joe Dorrego, the chief financial officer of Fox News, who was asked whether Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the top executives of Fox News’s parent company, knew that the claims were being aired on the network. Mr. Dorrego answered: “They were certainly aware that the allegations were being reported on Fox News.”“They allowed people to come on the air to make those charges, despite knowing they are false,” Mr. Nelson told the judge.Erin Murphy, a lawyer for Fox, argued in court on Tuesday that a reasonable viewer of Fox News and Fox Business would have understood that the hosts were merely reporting that the president and his lawyers were making the fraud claims, which was newsworthy, and not making factual statements.“We do not think that we are just scot-free simply because a guest said something rather than a host,” Ms. Murphy said. “What we resist is that Dominion’s position seems to be that we are automatically liable because a guest said something.”Ms. Murphy told the judge that there was more context for the shows and statements singled out by Dominion in its complaint that proved the hosts had been merely presenting statements of fact. As an example, she referred to a Dec. 12, 2020, broadcast of “Fox & Friends,” during which the hosts asked Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, about legal challenges relating to voter fraud.“I don’t see how somebody watching that show thinks that by merely asking the president’s lawyer ‘What are you alleging and what evidence do you have to support it?’ the hosts are saying we believe these allegations to be true,” Ms. Murphy said.Ms. Murphy added that there was no evidence that any Fox Corporation executive had been involved in the airing of defamatory statements.Lawyers for Fox are scheduled to finish their arguments before the judge on Wednesday. More

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      Trump’s Georgia Lawyers Seek to Quash Special Grand Jury Report

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      In a motion filed on Monday, the lawyers ask that the Fulton County district attorney’s office be recused from the criminal investigation into election interference in the state in 2020.ATLANTA — Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump filed a motion in a Georgia court on Monday seeking to quash the final report of a special grand jury that investigated whether Mr. Trump and some of his allies interfered in the 2020 election results in Georgia. The motion also seeks to “preclude the use of any evidence derived” from the report, and asks that the office of Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, be recused from the case.The move comes as Mr. Trump has started pushing back more broadly against several criminal investigations into his conduct. Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said in a social media post that he would be arrested on Tuesday as part of an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into a hush money payment he made to to a porn actress, and called on his supporters to protest.In Georgia, Mr. Trump is seen as having two main areas of legal jeopardy: the calls he made in the weeks after the 2020 election to pressure state officials to overturn the results there, and his direct involvement in efforts to assemble an alternate slate of electors, even after three vote counts affirmed President Biden’s victory in the state. Experts have said that Ms. Willis appears to be building a case that could target multiple defendants with charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud or charges related to racketeering.Notice of the filing appeared in the official court docket on Monday morning, but the filing itself was not yet public, so the lawyers’ reasoning was not yet clear. Mr. Findling acknowledged that he had filed it on Mr. Trump’s behalf, along with Ms. Little and another lawyer from Mr. Findling’s firm, Marissa Goldberg.Last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the Georgia case, Drew Findling and Jennifer Little, said that the forewoman of the special grand jury in Fulton County had “poisoned” the inquiry there by granting a number of media interviews in which she discussed details of the jury’s work. Last week, five other jurors discussed aspects of their work in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The Fulton County special grand jury was sworn in last May and met behind closed doors for months, hearing testimony from 75 witnesses. It did not have the power to issue indictments; rather, it produced a report containing recommendations on whether and whom to indict. Portions of the report were released in January, but key sections remain under seal, including those detailing which people the jury believes should be indicted, and for what crimes.Drew Findling, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, in Atlanta in 2021.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressIn interviews late last month with a number of news outlets, the forewoman, Emily Kohrs, did not divulge specific details of the jury’s recommendations, although she told The New York Times that the jury had recommended indictments for more than a dozen people. Asked if Mr. Trump was among them, she said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.”In her round of interviews, Ms. Kohrs, 30, said she was trying to carefully follow rules set out by the judge presiding over the case, Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court. Judge McBurney has not barred the jurors from talking, though he told them not to discuss their deliberations.Lawyers for Mr. Trump argued after Ms. Kohrs spoke publicly that in discussing the case, she had divulged a number of matters that they believed constituted “deliberations.” Judge McBurney, however, noted at the time, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that “deliberations” only covered discussions they had privately in the jury room. Other aspects of their work could be discussed publicly, he said.Even given this leeway, the six jurors who have spoken with news outlets have played it conservatively, declining to discuss whom they had singled out as meriting indictment.In some of Ms. Kohrs’s television news interviews, she sometimes used light and playful language, prompting some critics to charge that the grand jury’s deliberations seemed to have lacked the gravity befitting a criminal inquiry into a former president. Ms. Kohrs was even the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” skit.But some legal experts said they doubted whether Ms. Kohrs’s comments would have much of an impact on the Georgia case. Any criminal indictments would be issued by a regular grand jury.Mr. Trump announced a new presidential campaign in November, and he is leading his Republican opponents in most polls. But his legal troubles present him with challenges that have few, if any, precedents in American history. No president, sitting or former, has ever been charged with a crime.Before his public statements this weekend anticipating an imminent indictment in New York, Mr. Trump had sent out numerous fund-raising emails criticizing prosecutors in the various cases against him and portraying him as a victim of partisan forces. “The Left has turned America into the ‘Investigation Capital of the World,’ as our country’s enemies brilliantly plot their next move to destroy our nation,” he stated in one such email on March 13.The New York investigation is being led by Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. Prosecutors working in Mr. Bragg’s office have indeed signaled that an indictment of Mr. Trump could be imminent. Mr. Trump’s declaration that he would be arrested on Tuesday appears to involve guesswork on his part, however; after his post on his Truth Social website, a spokesperson issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump did not have direct knowledge of the timing of any arrest. More

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      Fox’s P.R. Woes May Not Directly Translate to Legal Ones

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      Some of the unflattering private messages among the network’s hosts and executives may never become evidence when Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News goes to trial.For the past three weeks, a drip, drip, drip of disclosures have exposed widespread alarm and disbelief inside Fox News in the days after the 2020 presidential election, as the network became a platform for some of the most insidious lies about widespread voter fraud. These revelations are the most damning to rattle the Murdoch media empire since the phone hacking scandal in Britain more than a decade ago.The headlines have been attention-grabbing. Tucker Carlson, a professed champion of former President Donald J. Trump’s populist message, was caught insulting Mr. Trump — “I hate him passionately,” he wrote in a text. Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity disparaged colleagues in their network’s news division. And Rupert Murdoch said he longed for the day when Mr. Trump would be irrelevant.These examples and many more — revealed in personal emails, text messages and testimony made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — are embarrassing. But whether they pose serious legal jeopardy for Fox in that case is far less clear.The messages that led to some of the biggest headlines may never be introduced as evidence when the case goes to trial next month, according to lawyers and legal scholars, including several who are directly involved in the case. Fox is expected to ask a judge to exclude certain texts and emails on the grounds they are not relevant.Laura Ingraham disparaged Fox News colleagues in private messages released recently.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesBut the most powerful legal defense Fox has is the First Amendment, which allows news organizations broad leeway to cover topics and statements made by elected officials. In court, Fox’s lawyers have argued that the network was merely reporting on what Mr. Trump and his allies were saying about fraud and Dominion machines — not endorsing those falsehoods.Media law experts said that if a jury found that to be true — not a far-fetched outcome, they said, especially if lawyers for the network can show that its hosts did not present the allegations as fact — then Fox could win.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsDocuments from a lawsuit filed by the voting machine maker Dominion against Fox News have shed light on the debate inside the network over false claims related to the 2020 election.Running Fox: Emails that lawyers for Dominion have used to build their defamation case give a peek into how Rupert Murdoch shapes coverage at his news organizations.Behind the Curtain: Texts and emails released as part of the lawsuit show how Fox employees privately mocked election fraud claims made by former President Donald J. Trump, even as the network amplified them to appease viewers.Tucker Carlson’s Private Contempt: The Fox host’s private comments, revealed in court documents, contrast sharply with his support of Mr. Trump on his show.A Show of Support: In his first public remarks since the recent revelations on Fox News, Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, issued a full-throated show of support for Suzanne Scott, who is at the helm of Fox News Media.“I think the case really will come down to a jury deciding whether the company or the commentators did or didn’t endorse — that really is the key question,” said George Freeman, a former New York Times lawyer who is now executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which assists news organizations with legal issues.“It gives Fox, I think, a fighting chance,” he added.Despite the ways Fox could prevail with a jury, legal scholars say Dominion’s case is exceptionally strong.Lawyers for Dominion argue that the claims made by Fox’s hosts and guests about its machines and their supposed role in a nonexistent conspiracy to steal votes from Mr. Trump was anything but dispassionate, neutral reporting.“Truth and shared facts form the foundation of a free society — even more so here,” its lawyers said in a brief, filed with the court on Thursday. “The false idea that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election undermines the core of democracy.”It is rare for First Amendment lawyers to side against a media company. But many of them have done just that, arguing that a finding against Fox will send an important message: The law does not protect those who peddle disinformation. And it would help dispel the idea, First Amendment experts said, that libel laws should be rewritten to make it easier to win defamation suits, as Mr. Trump and other conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas, have suggested.In its most recent filings, Dominion argued that the law was more than adequate to find Fox liable.“If this case does not qualify as defamation, then defamation has lost all meaning,” Dominion argued in a legal filing made public on Thursday.But legal experts said that the case would rise or fall not based on how a jury considered lofty concerns about the health of American democracy. Rather, they said, Dominion’s challenge will be to persuasively argue something far more specific: that Fox News either knowingly broadcast false information or was so reckless that it overlooked obvious evidence pointing to the falsity of the conspiracy theories about Dominion.Though the coverage of the case has largely focused on the disparaging comments the network’s star hosts and top executives made in private — about Mr. Trump, his lawyers and one another — those remarks could only help Dominion’s case if they pointed to a deeper rot inside Fox, namely that it cynically elevated false stories about Dominion machines because its ratings were suffering.The one episode of Mr. Carlson’s show that Dominion cited as defamatory included an interview with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.Fox News“When I see the headlines that are primarily about Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, those are conversations that the litigation was designed to spur,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at the University of Utah.“At least some of that evidence is going to be important atmospherically,” Ms. Andersen Jones added. But what will be more important to the outcome of the case, she said, is “what drove the narrower decisions at the individual shows.”Fox’s lawyers could ask the judge, for instance, to keep the jury from seeing most of Mr. Murdoch’s deposition on the grounds that he was the chairman of the company and played no direct role in decision-making at the show level. However, during his deposition, Mr. Murdoch did concede a key point of Dominion’s. He acknowledged that some Fox hosts had endorsed false claims of malfeasance during the election. And when Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, presented Mr. Murdoch with examples of how Fox went beyond merely providing a platform for election deniers, the Fox chairman agreed. “I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that,” Mr. Murdoch testified.Fox also plans to argue that the network’s coverage of the aftermath of the 2020 election needs to be considered as a whole, including the hosts and guests who insisted that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.And the more Fox lawyers can show instances in the coverage where its hosts rebutted or framed the allegations as unproven, the stronger their case will be.A lawyer working on Fox’s defense, Erin Murphy, said Dominion did not “want to talk about the shows where there was a lot of commentary coming from different perspectives.”Especially when those shows were ones “that had higher viewership and were the more mainstream,” Ms. Murphy added.Dominion would be on the strongest legal footing, defamation experts said, whenever it could point to specific examples when individual Fox employees responsible for a program had admitted the fraud claims were bogus or overlooked evidence that those claims — and the people making them — were unreliable.Dominion cites only a single episode each from Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hannity as defamatory: Mr. Carlson’s interview of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive, on Jan. 26, 2021, and Mr. Hannity’s interview of Sidney Powell, a lawyer who made some of the most outrageous fraud allegations, on Nov. 30, 2020.Dominion’s defamation claims against three far more obscure shows with much lower ratings are more substantial and extensively documented: “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” and the now-canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” both of which ran on Fox Business in 2020; and “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” which was Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday evening talk show on Fox News before the network canceled it and promoted Ms. Pirro to a regular slot on “The Five,” a weekday round-table talk show.Some of the most damning evidence to emerge involves Maria Bartiromo, legal experts say.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesEspecially damaging, legal experts said, is the evidence against Ms. Bartiromo. Dominion has accused her of recklessly disregarding evidence that a key source for Ms. Powell, who appeared several times on Ms. Bartiromo’s show, was mentally unstable — a “wackadoodle” by the source’s own admission.In an email, the full text of which was released last Tuesday along with thousands of pages of depositions and private messages of Fox employees, is from someone who claims to be a technology analyst named Marlene Bourne. Ms. Powell forwarded Ms. Bourne’s email to Ms. Bartiromo on the evening of Nov. 7, and Ms. Bartiromo forwarded it to her producer.In the email, Ms. Bourne describes numerous conspirators in a plot to discredit Mr. Trump, including some who had been dead for years like Roger Ailes, the former chief executive of Fox News. She writes that she is capable of “time-travel in a semiconscious state” and that when she is awake she can “see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear.” She also says she has been decapitated and that “it appears that I was shot in the back” once after giving the F.B.I. a tip.“If we’re really zeroing in on where the strongest evidence is,” Ms. Andersen Jones said, “it’s the wackadoodle email. Because the real question is whether you had subjective awareness of the likely falsity of the thing you were platforming on your show.” More

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      Little-Known Lawyer, a Trump Ally, Draws Scrutiny in Georgia

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      A special grand jury looking into election meddling interviewed Robert Cheeley, a sign that false claims made by Donald J. Trump’s allies loom large in the case.ATLANTA — At a Georgia State Senate hearing a few weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election, Rudolph W. Giuliani began making outlandish claims. “There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them — dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he told the assembled legislators.After Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, a like-minded Georgia lawyer named Robert Cheeley presented video clips of election workers handling ballots at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. Mr. Cheeley spent 15 minutes laying out specious assertions that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes, saying their actions “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian” and likening what he said had happened to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.His comments mostly flew under the radar at the time, overshadowed by the election fraud claims made by Mr. Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and by other higher-profile figures. But Mr. Cheeley’s testimony did not end up in the dustbin. He was among the witnesses questioned last year by a special grand jury in Atlanta that investigated election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies, the grand jury’s forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview last month.Robert Cheeley reads through Georgia law during a hearing at the Henry County Courthouse in McDonough, Ga., in 2021.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe fact that Mr. Cheeley was called to appear before the special grand jury adds to the evidence that although the Atlanta investigation has focused on Mr. Trump’s biggest areas of legal exposure — the calls he made to pressure local officials and his involvement in a scheme to draft bogus presidential electors — the false claims made by his allies at legislative hearings have also been of significant interest. Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is among the targets who could face charges in the investigation.“He did testify before us,” Ms. Kohrs said of Mr. Cheeley in the interview.His appearance left such an impression that Ms. Kohrs began reciting from memory the beginning of Mr. Cheeley’s remarks at the State Senate hearing. Asked if his testimony to the special grand jury had been credible, she said, “I’m going to tell you that Mr. Cheeley was not one that I’m going to forget.”Mr. Cheeley did not return calls for comment for this article, and he was not present when a reporter visited his office on Wednesday in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. The fact that he testified before the special grand jury was not previously known.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More

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      Nigeria Postpones State Elections Amid Presidential Vote Controversy

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      The government moved elections scheduled for Saturday back by a week, saying it needed more time to reset digital voting machines at the center of fraud accusations.Nigeria has postponed state elections that had been scheduled for Saturday, heightening popular anger and cynicism over whether the country can conduct a fair vote only two weeks after a presidential election tainted with technical malfunctions and allegations of fraud.Since the declaration a little over a week ago that the governing party’s candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, had won the presidential election, Africa’s most populous nation has spiraled further into economic and political paralysis.Now the country’s electoral commission has moved the election for the country’s powerful state governors back by a week, saying it needs more time to reset digital voting machines used for the first time in the presidential election last month. The vote for governors is now scheduled for March 18.The postponement of the election for 28 of the country’s 36 state governors is just the latest challenge faced by Nigeria, a country of 220 million people that has been plagued by fuel scarcity, a cash crunch and multiple security crises.Mr. Tinubu, a divisive figure in Nigerian politics, won the election with 36 percent of the vote, but the two other main candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, have called for a rerun, alleging vote rigging. A new vote appears unlikely, and Mr. Tinubu is scheduled to be sworn in on May 29.Hopes were high ahead of the largest democratic election ever organized in Africa, and Nigerian officials recorded fewer instances of violence than in previous contests. But countless malfunctions — from polling units that opened late or not at all, to the sluggishness of ballot counting — have eroded Nigerians’ trust.“The electoral process remains chaotic, with no improvement from one election to another,” said Idayat Hassan, director of the Center for Democracy and Development, a research and advocacy group based in Abuja, the capital.The confusion over the elections has been compounded by a seemingly never-ending cash crunch: New notes introduced by the government just months before the election have remained largely unavailable, while old ones are not valid anymore.There were reports of some polling locations in Nigeria’s presidential election opening late, or not at all.Akintunde Akinleye/EPA, via ShutterstockLast Friday, the Nigerian Supreme Court ruled that the use of old bank notes should be extended until Dec. 31 because of the impact of the policy on Nigerians’ livelihoods. But neither the government nor the central bank have addressed the issue, leaving most businesses, street traders and even public bus drivers wary of accepting the old notes, even as some banks begin to distribute them again.In Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, one trader, Adelaja Adetoun, was trying to gain access to a commercial bank on Thursday, her face beaded with sweat. “The old notes I received from the banks are being rejected and I need to return them,” she said.Ms. Adetoun, 67, said she was not interested in the state elections, especially since they had been postponed.That decision has left some analysts worried that the turnout on March 18 will be drastically lower than that of the presidential election, in which just over a quarter of 87 million eligible voters cast a ballot. It was the lowest voter turnout ever recorded for a Nigerian presidential election.In many ways, the state elections are as important, said Oge Onubogu, head of the Africa Program at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based research institute.“States are grooming grounds for governors who want to be Nigeria’s next president,” she said. (Both Mr. Tinubu and Mr. Obi are former state governors.) “Some governors oversee budgets that are larger than other West African countries,” Ms. Onubogu said.The digital voting machines that need to be reconfigured ahead of the state vote are at the center of a controversy around the presidential election.Using the machines, election officials were supposed to verify voters’ identities and to photograph result sheets in each polling unit, uploading them to a website publicly accessible shortly after the voting ended on Feb. 25.But the country’s Independent National Electoral Commission, known as INEC, failed to fulfill that mission, according to multiple observers. Instead, the results were uploaded days later, prompting Mr. Abubakar’s and Mr. Obi’s parties to accuse election officials and Mr. Tinubu’s party of having manipulated the results.An election observer at a news conference organized in Abuja after the election last month.Michele Spatari/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo countless Nigerians, the delays and lack of transparency left a bitter taste.“INEC’s performance has made many Nigerians feel that their vote doesn’t count,” said Joachim MacEbong, a senior governance analyst at Stears, a Nigerian data and intelligence company. “It’s difficult to see how they’re going to rebuild their credibility.”International observers voiced similar concern.“The number of administrative and logistical problems flawed the outcome,” Johnnie Carson, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Obama administration, who was in Nigeria to monitor the election, said this week.Officials from Mr. Obi’s party have said that the results uploaded by the electoral commission didn’t match those that party workers collected when the polling units closed. A representative for Mr. Obi, Diran Onifade, refused to provide the results collected, but in a phone interview said the election had been marred by “sabotage.”Mr. Obi’s team now has a few days to inspect the electronic voting machines before the electoral commission reconfigures them for the state elections.Ms. Hassan, the Center for Democracy and Development analyst, and Ms. Onubogu of the Wilson Center both said that a fair and functional Nigerian election experience mattered almost more than the outcome.“Nigerians needed to be able to see that the process worked,” said Ms. Onubogu.Instead, Ms. Hassan said, “More and more citizens are losing trust in democracy itself because of these dysfunctions.” More

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      Lachlan Murdoch Defends Fox News’s Chief Executive Amid Defamation Suit

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      “Suzanne Scott has done a tremendous job,” Mr. Murdoch said in his first public remarks since damaging revelations about the inner workings of the news network.Lachlan Murdoch, whose family controls the Fox media empire, issued a full-throated show of support on Thursday for Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, as the cable channel faces a $1.6 billion defamation suit that has generated a cascade of unflattering revelations about its inner workings.“I just think Suzanne Scott has done a tremendous job,” Mr. Murdoch said at an investor conference in San Francisco, his first public remarks since Fox News has come under intense scrutiny over its handling of spurious claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.“The brand is incredibly strong. The core business is incredibly strong,” Mr. Murdoch said, pointing to Fox News’s significant ratings advantage over its rivals CNN and MSNBC. “It’s a credit to Suzanne Scott and all of her team there. They’ve done a tremendous job of building this business and running this business.”Ms. Scott’s future at Fox News has been the focus of some recent speculation. The defamation suit, filed by Dominion Voting Systems, argues that Fox News leadership allowed stars like Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs to air rank falsehoods about rigged voting machines that ruined Dominion’s business. Rupert Murdoch said in a deposition that any of his executives who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast “should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.”The Murdoch family is loath to make major changes at its media properties in response to public rancor, although there have been occasional exceptions; the family closed its News of the World tabloid following a phone-hacking scandal. Lachlan Murdoch’s remarks on Thursday suggested that Ms. Scott’s position was safe, at least for now. She signed a multiyear contract extension in 2021, shortly after President Biden’s inauguration.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsDocuments from a lawsuit filed by the voting machine maker Dominion against Fox News have shed light on the debate inside the network over false claims related to the 2020 election.Running Fox: Emails that lawyers for Dominion have used to build their defamation case give a peek into how Rupert Murdoch shapes coverage at his news organizations.Behind the Curtain: Texts and emails released as part of the lawsuit show how Fox employees privately mocked election fraud claims made by former President Donald J. Trump, even as the network amplified them to appease viewers.Tucker Carlson’s Private Contempt: The Fox host’s private comments, revealed in court documents, contrast sharply with his support of Mr. Trump on his show.A Show of Support: In his first public remarks since the recent revelations on Fox News, Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, issued a full-throated show of support for Suzanne Scott, who is at the helm of Fox News Media.The documents revealed in the Dominion case showed Ms. Scott, among other executives and some of the network’s hosts, worrying that conservatives would abandon Fox News if its coverage became too critical of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies’ baseless claims of rampant voter fraud.At one point, Ms. Scott privately criticized one of the network’s White House correspondents for describing many of Mr. Trump’s claims as “simply not true” during a live segment. “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories,” Ms. Scott wrote in an internal email.Asked at Thursday’s conference to comment on the Dominion suit, Mr. Murdoch, who is the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, again defended Fox News from its detractors.“A news organization has an obligation — and it is an obligation — to report news fulsomely, wholesomely and without fear or favor, and that’s what Fox News has always done and that’s what Fox News will always do,” Mr. Murdoch said.“I think a lot of the noise that you hear about this case is actually not about the law and is not about journalism and is really about the politics,” Mr. Murdoch continued. “And that’s unfortunately more reflective of our polarized society that we live in today.”Mr. Murdoch’s interlocutor at the investor conference, which was sponsored by Morgan Stanley, did not press him further on the subject.Documents revealed in the Dominion lawsuit showed Suzanne Scott worrying that conservatives would abandon Fox News if its coverage became too critical of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesMr. Murdoch’s own involvement in Fox News was also captured in the recently released documents.He did not hesitate to contact Ms. Scott directly about aspects of the channel’s coverage, even complaining at one point about an on-air caption along the bottom of Fox News’s screen that, Mr. Murdoch believed, took a needlessly negative tone toward Mr. Trump. Mr. Murdoch also complained to Ms. Scott that a correspondent’s coverage of a pro-Trump rally was too critical, calling it “smug and obnoxious.”In his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch mused about Fox News’s broader place in the American news media, arguing that its appeal stretched beyond its journalistic output and into a more cultural realm.“If you talk to focus groups, with any of our viewers, they see Fox News as not just a news channel, but a channel that speaks to Middle America and respects the values of Middle America as a media business that is most relevant to them, as opposed to simply a news channel,” Mr. Murdoch said. More

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      Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump

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      Fox hosts and executives privately mocked the former president’s election fraud claims, even as the network amplified them in a frantic effort to appease viewers.“Do we have enough dead people for tonight?”It was a week after the 2020 elections, and Tucker Carlson — along with Fox News executives and other hosts — had watched with panic as Fox viewers, furious and disbelieving at President Donald J. Trump’s defeat, began to turn against the top-rated network. The viewers believed Mr. Trump’s claims that a widespread conspiracy of voter fraud was behind his loss. And as Mr. Carlson’s nightly 8 p.m. hour approached, the host pushed his producers to give the viewers what they wanted.He demanded examples of dead people voting in Nevada or Georgia, even offering to call the Trump campaign personally to ask for help. That night, he trumpeted the evidence, borrowed from a Trump campaign news release: Four allegedly dead Georgians had cast ballots. Within days, though, the campaign’s spoon-fed examples began to fall apart. Three of the dead Georgians were actually alive. And Mr. Carlson was forced to partly retract his allegations, while insisting to viewers that “a whole bunch of dead people did vote.”Mr. Carlson told his viewers on Nov. 11, 2020, that dead people had cast ballots.Mr. Carlson’s frantic effort to appease angry Fox viewers, revealed in texts and emails released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, underscore the central quandary faced both by Fox and the Republican Party in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat and still today, as the former president mounts another campaign for the White House.Like the Republican Party more broadly, Fox wants and needs the support of Trump fans, who both dominate party primaries and form the core of Fox’s viewership. And like the party, Fox has found it difficult to quit Mr. Trump even as his manic efforts to relitigate his defeat have hobbled the party in subsequent elections.Fox News has been the most trusted and watched source of information for conservative America for decades, and its frequent symbiosis with the Republican Party is well established. But the internal documents released in recent days have provided an unprecedented glimpse into network decision-making as its dual imperatives — to keep its base audience of conservatives satisfied and meet its promise to maintain journalistic standards of fairness and factuality — came into conflict as never before.No figure is more central to that conflict than Mr. Carlson. Ever since taking over Fox’s 8 p.m. hour in 2017, Mr. Carlson had maintained a carefully calibrated distance from Mr. Trump, using inflammatory segments about a border invasion and the “replacement” of native-born Americans by immigrants to appeal to Mr. Trump’s base — while minimizing how often he discussed Mr. Trump, whom he regarded as erratic and undisciplined. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Mr. Carlson texted with staff members in early January 2021, adding, “I hate him passionately.”But in the months after the Jan. 6 attacks, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” doubled down on a pro-Trump narrative that both Mr. Carlson and his bosses knew was rooted in a lie. According to a New York Times analysis, in 2021 nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — featured segments downplaying the Capitol riot, casting the insurrectionists as innocent citizens seeking legitimate redress for election fraud, and suggesting the riot itself was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by federal law enforcement to entrap Trump supporters.His efforts to rewrite the events of Jan. 6 again took center stage this week, just as reams of emails, texts and deposition transcripts from the Dominion suit revealed that the network’s hosts and executives knew they were peddling lies to their own viewers.On his show this week, Mr. Carlson once more recast the violent attack that took place in January 2021 as a largely peaceful protest, this time using previously unreleased surveillance footage provided to his show by the new Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. McCarthy, whose campaign for the speakership was backed by Mr. Trump, provided the footage after Mr. Carlson suggested on his show that releasing the tapes would help Mr. McCarthy overcome conservative resistance to his bid.On Mr. Carlson’s show on Monday, he described the Jan. 6 riot as a largely peaceful protest.On air, Mr. Carlson accused a Democratic-led congressional committee of misleading the public about what really happened. “Committee members lied about what they saw, and then hid the evidence from the public,” Mr. Carlson charged.News outlets and fact checkers found the broadcast rife with inaccuracies and false claims. Republicans in the House, among whom loyalty to Mr. Trump remains strong, defended Mr. Carlson’s segment. But Republicans in the Senate — currently controlled by Democrats, after Trump-backed candidates went down to defeat in the 2022 elections — attacked the powerful Fox host in unusually blunt terms.“It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.In the pretrial public relations maneuvering, Fox News has accused Dominion of using its court filings to share selective and out-of-context portions of internal text messages to “smear Fox News,” part of a broader effort to “silence the press” through a winning verdict. In a statement, a network spokeswoman said, “Fox News will continue to fiercely protect the free press as a ruling in favor of Dominion would have grave consequences for journalism across this country.” In defending Mr. Carlson’s coverage of Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims, Fox executives have also pointed to Mr. Carlson’s on-air criticism of a lawyer behind some of the most outrageous voter fraud charges, Sidney Powell.Documents released in the Dominion lawsuit illustrate in vivid detail Fox’s complex relationship with the Republican Party, with the network serving variously as custodian, enforcer and powerful interest group in its own right.Senator Mitch McConnell pushed back against Mr. Carlson’s characterization of the Capitol attack.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressDuring the election, Dominion has alleged, Fox’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, personally gave Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, a preview of at least one Biden campaign ad. After the election, Mr. Murdoch called Mr. McConnell and asked him to lobby other Republican senators to avoid endorsing Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. At moments, Mr. Murdoch and a top editor at the Murdoch-owned New York Post discussed editorials intended to encourage Mr. Trump to accept his defeat gracefully, seemingly in hopes of avoiding further damage to the party.In mid-November 2020, Mr. Murdoch emailed Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, explaining the need for Fox to reorient away from Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and focus on the Georgia special senate elections, with Fox “helping any way we can.”Top Fox personnel agonized over the difficulty of escaping Mr. Trump’s influence over their own audience. “This day of reckoning was going to come at some point — where the embrace of Trump became an albatross we can’t shake right away if ever,” Dana Perino, a prominent Fox host, wrote to a friend in November 2020.Yet the shoals they were trying to navigate had been in no small part laid by Mr. Carlson, one of Fox’s most-watched hosts. Though the newly released messages show Mr. Carlson expressing skepticism in his private emails about the extent of “voter fraud,” he had been an early and energetic promoter of the doubt Mr. Trump was trying to sow.Within 24 hours of the polls closing, he declared that the election had been “seized from the hands of voters,” and that the final results would finally be determined by “lawyers and courts and clearly corrupt, big-city bureaucrats.” Americans “will never again accept the results of a presidential election,” he predicted.After the major networks declared Mr. Biden president-elect, Mr. Carlson reminded his viewers that troubling questions remained: “We don’t know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night; we don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged,” he said. His audience members, he said, were being played for suckers: “They knew you were coming. They laughed at you when you left.”But behind the scenes, Mr. Carlson and his producers were among those scoffing.In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, they discussed their intense hopes that Mr. Trump would soon leave the political scene. They mocked his plans to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s win and raged at how Mr. Trump’s lawyers had undermined their own arguments about fraud with sweeping conspiracy theories and debunked allegations.Two weeks after the election, Mr. Carlson, his executive producer and a top Fox executive named Ron Mitchell traded texts about a news conference at which one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, unspooled a litany of debunked allegations while hair dye dripped down his face. “I don’t see how to cover this,” Mr. Mitchell wrote. (That night, Mr. Carlson devoted his opening monologue to the news conference, carefully asserting that Mr. Giuliani “did raise legitimate questions and in some cases, he pointed to what appeared to be real wrongdoing.”)Mr. Carlson has claimed to “never look at the ratings” for his show. But Dominion texts show Mr. Carlson, his bosses and his fellow hosts obsessing over them. Within weeks of the election, it became clear to them that Fox viewers badly wanted them to focus on supposed evidence of voter fraud.“Tucker wrote me and Laura and said last nights numbers were a disaster,” Sean Hannity wrote to Fox producers in late November 2020, referring to Mr. Carlson and Laura Ingraham. (His executive producer, Robert Samuel, noted that the previous week’s most highly rated programming minutes “were on the voting irregularities.”) Mr. Carlson had also texted the two other hosts about ratings earlier that month, joking that an angry Fox viewer who had ranted against the network on Twitter would get “way better numbers than what we have” and warning Mr. Hannity that “the 7:00 was third last night,” referring to the time slot immediately preceding his own.As Mr. Carlson’s broadcast was coming to an end on Nov. 10, a Fox staff member warned the host that he was being attacked on Twitter for not covering allegations of voter fraud. “It’s all our viewers care about right now,” the staff member wrote. Mr. Carlson replied that it had been a “mistake” but that “I just hate” the topic.That night and the next morning, Mr. Carlson and the unnamed colleague brainstormed how to get into the story, trading links and tweets, eventually seizing on a local news report in Nevada suggesting a woman who had died in 2017 had voted there in November. (An investigation later determined that the woman’s husband, a Republican, had used her ballot to vote twice, then claimed her ballot had been stolen.) They debated whether they could “get up to five examples of specific names of dead people that voted,” and reached out to Jason Miller, a Trump campaign official, asking for evidence that they could then present on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”“Obviously they need to do whatever they can to help us,” Mr. Carlson told his Fox colleague.On the afternoon of Nov. 11, as the next evening’s broadcast approached, the staff member texted Mr. Carlson again.“Have you seen last night’s numbers?” the staff member wrote, adding, “It’s a stupid story but this is all the viewers are into right now.”Mr. Carlson replied: “I noticed.”Julie Tate More

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      Arizona Sues After County Puts an Election Skeptic in Charge of Voting

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      Cochise County, a hotbed of conspiracy theories, transferred election duties from a nonpartisan office to the county’s elected recorder, a Republican.An Arizona county is being sued by the state’s Democratic attorney general after it transferred voting oversight to the county’s Republican recorder, who has cast doubts about past election results in a place where former President Donald J. Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2020.It is the latest clash between Democrats in statewide office and Cochise County, a deeply Republican area in southeastern Arizona, where conspiracy theories about voter fraud and irregularities still swirl.The county’s nonpartisan elections director, Lisa Marra, announced in January that she would resign, citing threats against her after she refused to comply with rogue election directives from the Republicans who control county government, including plans to count ballots by hand after last year’s midterm elections. She recently accepted a position with the secretary of state’s office.The county’s board of supervisors then made David W. Stevens, the Republican recorder, the interim elections director, with the board’s two G.O.P. members supporting the new power structure in a Feb. 28 vote, and its lone Democrat opposing it.On Tuesday, Kris Mayes, who was narrowly elected as Arizona’s attorney general in November and took office in January, filed a lawsuit against the county and called the power shift an “unqualified handover.”Understand the 4 Criminal Inquiries Into Donald TrumpCard 1 of 5Intensifying investigations. More