Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      The Fox Newsification of Nikki Haley

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      Here’s what I think is one of the most intriguing questions in American politics today: How would Nikki Haley talk about the country and its challenges if Fox News didn’t exist?Here’s why: We’ve learned a lot in recent days about both Fox and Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has just started running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.Let’s start with Fox News. We all sort of knew the truth about Fox, but now there can be no doubt: Fox News is to journalism what the Mafia is to capitalism — same basic genre, but a morally corrupt perversion of the real thing.Before, during and after the 2020 election, it was not crazy to assume that Fox’s main prime-time hosts — Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham — actually believed some of the pro-Trump, election-fraud conspiracy theories and theorists that they were putting on the air. But now we have learned from a batch of recently disclosed text messages and emails that they didn’t believe any of it.The internal messages reveal that the three prime-time hosts, as well as others at Fox, privately made fun of, and were at times appalled by, the election-fraud claims of Donald Trump advisers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani. But they mostly kept their skepticism hidden from viewers. Having gotten the Fox audience totally aroused by — and addicted to — claims of election fraud, Fox News’s leaders were afraid to stop. Why? They feared they would lose viewers and ad revenue to even crazier networks — Newsmax and OAN.The Fox News text messages, emails and testimony that expose all of this to public view are from depositions and discovery contained in a recently released legal filing in Delaware state court by Dominion Voting Systems. It is part of the company’s lawsuit against Fox News for broadcasting what it allegedly knew were false claims that Dominion machines helped to rig the 2020 election. The cynicism they reveal is breathtaking.The depth of it is best summed up in this account by The Times last week of an exchange dated Nov. 12, 2020: “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.”Yup, Fox hosts and the Murdoch family were OK with discrediting the core engine of America’s democracy — our ability to peacefully and legitimately transfer power — if it would hold their audience and boost their stock.Now enter Nikki Haley, who also last week announced her presidential bid.I’ve never met Haley, but from afar it seemed that she had a reasonably good story to tell — a successful South Carolina governor from 2011 to 2017, Trump’s first U.N. ambassador and the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her mother, Raj, studied law at the University of New Delhi, and after immigrating to South Carolina, earned a master’s degree in education and became a local public-school teacher. Her father, Ajit, earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia and then taught as a biology professor at Voorhees College for 29 years. On the side, they even opened a clothing boutique.The whole family is a walking advertisement for how America has been enriched by immigration.And as governor, Haley’s best known — and most courageous — political act came in the aftermath of a white gunman killing nine Black parishioners during a June 2015 prayer session inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. After it was discovered that the gunman had posed for numerous photos with Confederate symbols and was linked to a racist manifesto, Haley called for legislation that led to the removal of the Confederate flag that had flown on the State Capitol grounds since 1962.“We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer,” Haley declared.Good on her. Now fast forward to Haley announcing her run for the presidency. Imagine all the ways she could have differentiated herself from Trump and Ron DeSantis.She could have said: “Friends, in the last two years, Congress passed bills to upgrade our infrastructure, our capacity to make advanced microchips and advanced clean energy systems. The first two were passed with bipartisan majorities. This legislation constitutes a launching pad that could enable America to dominate the 21st century. And I know how to get the most out of those launching pads.“During my time as governor, Greenville, S.C., became one of the nation’s most important hubs of wind energy innovation. As South Carolina’s Upstate Business Journal recently wrote, ‘According to a new study from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, inventors in Greenville were responsible for 172 wind energy patents over the past five years, more than any other metro area in the country.’ You bet! That’s because we made Greenville home to General Electric’s Power & Water energy engineering team.”Haley could have added, “I also know a lot about building infrastructure for high-tech manufacturing, because during my time as governor I helped to make South Carolina one of the nation’s most active hubs of advanced manufacturing — from advanced aircraft to cars to tires.”Haley could have then pivoted to explain that every one of those manufacturers today is telling us that to realize their full potential they need workers schooled in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). But they can’t find them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2025 America could need one million more engineers and other STEM professionals than we can produce at home at our current rate. She could have said the only way to fill that gap is by welcoming the world’s most energetic and high-skilled immigrants.Legal immigrants grow our pie and invent things that enhance our national security. As the daughter of two such immigrants, Haley could have committed to forging a long needed compromise that would truly halt illegal immigration while expanding legal immigration. As a governor who dared yank down the Confederate flag, she could boast that she had the spine to pull the country together to do big, hard things.Sure, that kind of speech would have challenged the Republican base, but I bet it would have energized many others — particularly independents and moderate Republicans looking for alternatives to Trump.But Haley said none of it.Here’s Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal on Haley’s presidential announcement: “I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit. … An introducer said she will ‘lead us into the future’; she added, ‘America is falling behind.’ It was all so tired, clichéd and phony.”And here’s Washington Post political analyst Dan Balz on Haley’s opening campaign video, which twice featured The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” — which details the persistence of racism in American history — as red meat to the anti-woke crowd: Haley’s “video also highlights the 2015 mass shooting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where a white stranger killed nine Black people at a Bible study class. It does not mention Haley’s subsequent action to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House after years of controversy.”And now for the perfect ending to Haley’s presidential announcement events. The evening of her speech she appeared on — wait for it now — Hannity’s show on Fox, where she complained that the G.O.P. needs a message to “bring in” a variety of people and it must do a better job at messaging — but offered no actual message.The woman whose family immigration story could have so linked up with a concrete strategy for American renewal, the woman whose political courage in taking down the Confederate flag could have served as the perfect opening message to bring more minorities into the G.O.P., chose instead to do a bad imitation of Ron DeSantis.Why? Because like Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson and the Murdochs, Haley was more interested in following the Fox base than shaping it, let alone leading it to a better place.As I said, imagine what Nikki Haley might have sounded like if Fox News didn’t exist.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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      Jury in Georgia Trump Inquiry Recommended Multiple Indictments, Forewoman Says

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      She would not discuss specific indictments in the special grand jury’s report but noted that its recommendations were “not going to be some giant plot twist.”A special grand jury that investigated election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia recommended indictments for multiple people on a range of charges in its final report, most of which remains sealed, the forewoman of the jury said on Tuesday.“It is not a short list,” the forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview.Ms. Kohrs, 30, declined to name the people recommended for indictment, since the judge handling the case decided to keep those details secret when he made public a few sections of the report last week. But seven sections that are still under wraps deal with indictment recommendations, Ms. Kohrs said.Special grand juries in Georgia do not have indictment powers. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., has led the investigation and will decide what charges to bring before a regular grand jury.Asked whether the jurors had recommended indicting Mr. Trump, Ms. Kohrs would not answer directly but said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.” In the slim portions of the report that were released last week, the jurors said they saw possible evidence of perjury by “one or more” witnesses who testified before them.“It is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”The investigation in Atlanta has been seen as one of the most significant legal threats to Mr. Trump as he begins another run for the presidency. In November, the Justice Department named a special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee two Trump-related criminal investigations. And last month, the Manhattan district attorney’s office began presenting evidence to a grand jury on whether Mr. Trump paid hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months.A focal point of the Atlanta inquiry is a call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” 11,780 votes, or enough to overturn his loss in the state.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More

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      What Fox News Says When You’re Not Listening

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      People who remember Fox News host Tucker Carlson as a bow-tied creature of establishment Washington often wonder what happened to him. Twenty years ago, he was a preppy Beltway habitué and impishly libertarian magazine writer; a wryly affectionate account of Al Sharpton in Liberia that he wrote for Esquire was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Now he’s the sneering, conspiracy-obsessed host of what The New York Times called possibly “the most racist show in the history of cable news.”As The Times wrote, there’s a long-running debate about “whether Mr. Carlson’s show is merely lucrative theater or an expression of his true values.” By most accounts, Carlson shares Donald Trump’s deep cultural resentments. But as an explosive new court filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News demonstrates, in trying to explain why Carlson and many of his colleagues do what they do, we shouldn’t underestimate simple greed.The brief, a motion for summary judgment in a case stemming from Fox’s egregiously false claims of Dominion-abetted election fraud, offers a portrait of extravagant cynicism. It reveals how obsessed Carlson and other leading Fox News figures were with audience share, and their fear of being outflanked by even further-right outlets like Newsmax.“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” Bill Sammon, a Fox senior vice president until 2021, is quoted as saying. It’s a line that would fall flat on “Succession” because it’s too absurdly on the nose.As the Dominion filing lays out, there was panic at Fox News over viewer backlash to the network correctly calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Despite its accuracy, the call was viewed, internally, as a catastrophe.“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted his producer. He added, “An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.” Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back. While the Arizona call was “damaging,” Fox News C.E.O. Suzanne Scott wrote in a text to Fox executive Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, “We will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”When Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked Trump’s wild claims about Dominion on Twitter, Carlson was enraged and tried to get her fired. “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight,” he texted Hannity. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” (Heinrich kept her job but deleted the tweet.)The network knew, of course, that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell, a chief promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories, was a delusional fantasist. The legal brief reveals that some of her claims about Dominion were based on an email Powell had received from someone who claimed to be capable of “time travel in a semiconscious state.” On Nov. 18, 2020, Carlson told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a “complete nut.”But according to the Dominion brief, an analysis by Ron Mitchell, the senior vice president for prime-time programming and analytics, found that “Fox viewers were switching the channel specifically to watch Sidney Powell as a guest” on Newsmax. A few days after this analysis, Powell was a guest on Hannity’s show.At one point, Carlson did express skepticism of Powell on-air, noting on Nov. 19 that she had never produced evidence for her claims. “Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened, and precisely who did it,” he said, adding, “We are certainly hopeful that she will.”Even this gentle note of doubt produced viewer pushback, though most of a message about it from Fox executive Raj Shah is redacted. Afterward, Carlson seems to have given up trying to steer his audience away from total credulity about Trump’s stolen election claims, even though he privately called Trump a “demonic force.” On Jan. 26, Carlson hosted MyPillow founder Mike Lindell on his show and let him sound off about Dominion without resistance. In fairness, Carlson may have had a motive for indulging Lindell besides grubbing for ratings. As Media Matters for America pointed out, MyPillow at the time was Carlson’s single biggest advertiser.It’s certainly true that all cable news shows program with ratings in mind. MSNBC — where, full disclosure, I’m a contributor — pays much closer attention to various Trump scandals than to climate change or the war in Ukraine because it’s catering to its audience. But there is no analogue for the way Fox treats its viewers.In addition to MSNBC, in the past I’ve appeared a number of times on CNN. Sometimes hosts are a little saltier when the cameras aren’t rolling, but I don’t recall ever hearing any daylight between the views they express on-air and off. Fox News is unique in its bad faith.“Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.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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      Takeaways From the Report on the Trump Georgia Investigation

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      The released excerpts from the special grand jury’s report suggest that the jurors probably recommended indictments on more charges than just perjury.On Thursday, after a lengthy criminal investigation by a Georgia special grand jury into allegations of election interference by Donald J. Trump and his allies, a judge released excerpts from a report drafted by the panel. The grand jury’s recommendations were redacted, and little new information was released, but a close reading, together with earlier reporting, offers some insights into where the case is headed. Here are some key takeaways.Legal experts say Mr. Trump remains in real jeopardy in Georgia.In a post on Truth Social on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump thanked the special grand jury for its “Patriotism & Courage.“Total exoneration,” he added. “The USA is very proud of you!!!”In fact, the portions of the grand jury’s report that included recommendations on possible indictments were not revealed. Many legal experts continue to see two significant areas of exposure for Mr. Trump.The first is his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of alternative presidential electors after the 2020 election, even after Georgia’s results were recertified by the state’s Republican leadership. The second are the telephone calls he made to pressure state officials after the election, including one in which Mr. Trump told Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than President Biden’s margin of victory in the state.“Even before we got these initial statements from the special grand jury, we knew Trump was in deep criminal peril because of the mountain of evidence that has accumulated that he violated Georgia statutes,” said Norman Eisen, a lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment and trial of Mr. Trump, and a co-author of a lengthy Brookings Institution report on the Fulton County investigation.The jurors did make recommendations about indictments.The special grand jury noted in its report that it had voted on indictment recommendations, though the released excerpts do not reveal what the results of those votes were. The jurors wrote that they had “set forth for the Court our recommendations on indictments and relevant statutes.” (A special grand jury cannot bring indictments, but can make recommendations to the district attorney.)In ordering that only portions of the report be released, with all names redacted, the judge handling the case may have provided a clue to the grand jury’s recommendations. The judge, Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, said he was limiting the extent of the release because the grand jury inquiry, by its nature, allowed for only “very limited due process” for potential defendants. The judge’s stance would have been unlikely if the grand jury had not recommended indictments.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More

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      It’s Time to Prepare for a Possible Trump Indictment

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      “We find by unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.” With those words, a Fulton County special grand jury’s report, part of which was released Thursday, repudiated Donald Trump’s assault on our democracy.The excerpts from the report did not explicitly offer new detail on a potential indictment of Mr. Trump or any other individual. But they suggest that, combined with everything else we know, Mr. Trump may very well be headed for charges in Georgia.We need to prepare for a first in our 246-year history as a nation: The possible criminal prosecution of a former president.If Mr. Trump is charged, it will be difficult and at times even perilous for American democracy — but it is necessary to deter him and others from future attempted coups.Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, may present the case as a simple and streamlined one or in a more sweeping fashion. Success is more likely assured in the simpler approach, but the fact that the redacted report has eight sections suggests a broader approach is conceivable. In either event, we must all prepare ourselves for what could be years of drama, with the pretrial, trial and appeal likely dominating the coming election season.Ms. Willis opened her investigation shortly after Mr. Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, demand that the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, “find 11,780 votes.” The second impeachment of Mr. Trump and the Jan. 6 committee hearings developed additional evidence about that request for fake votes and Mr. Trump and allies pushing fake electors in Georgia and nationally. There is now abundant evidence suggesting he violated Georgia statutes, like those criminalizing the solicitation of election fraud.The parts of the special grand jury’s report revealed on Thursday only reinforce Mr. Trump’s risk of prosecution. The statement that the grand jurors found “no widespread fraud” in the presidential election eliminates Mr. Trump’s assertion that voter fraud justified his pushing state election officials. We also know that the grand jurors voted defendant by defendant and juror by juror, and set forth their recommendations on indictments and relevant statutes over seven (currently redacted) sections. The likelihood that they did that and cleared everyone is very low. And the fact that the grand jurors felt so strongly about the issues that they insisted on writing the recommendations themselves, as they emphasize, further suggests a grave purpose.Also notable is the grand jury’s recommendation of indictments, “where the evidence is compelling,” for perjury that may have been committed by one or more witnesses. It seems unlikely that Ms. Willis will let that pass.She will now decide the next steps of the case. Her statement that charging decisions were imminent came more than three weeks ago. If she does indict Mr. Trump, the two likely paths that she might take focus on the fake electoral slates and Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger. One is a narrower case that would likely take weeks to try; the other is a broader case that would likely take months.Narrow charges could include the Georgia felonies of solicitation of election fraud in the first degree and related general crimes like conspiracy to commit election fraud, specifically focusing on events and people who have a strong nexus with Georgia. In addition to Mr. Trump, that might include others who had direct contacts with Georgia, like his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and his attorneys John C. Eastman and Rudolph W. Giuliani (who already received a “target” notification from Ms. Willis warning him that he may be charged). Such a case would focus on activities around the execution of the fake electoral slates on Dec. 14, 2020, followed by the conversation with Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2, rooting it in Georgia and avoiding events nationally except to the extent absolutely necessary.Or Ms. Willis could charge the case more broadly, adding sweeping state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, charges that could still include the impact of the conduct in Georgia but bring in more of a nationwide conspiracy. This would look more like the Jan. 6 investigation, albeit with a strong Georgia flavor. It could additionally include those who appeared to have lesser contact with Georgia but were part of national efforts including the state, like the Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro and the Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark.A more narrow case might make slightly more sense: Given the extraordinary circumstances around it, Ms. Willis will surely have her hands full. And it will feature a likely lead defendant who has demonstrated his propensity for legal circuses — coming in the midst of a heated political season no less.That said, Ms. Willis has a proven propensity for bringing and winning RICO cases. And as we have learned in our criminal trial work, sometimes juries are more responsive to grander narratives that command their attention — and outrage.Whether it’s simple or broad, if a case is opened, one thing is nearly certain: It’s going to take a while, probably the better part of the next two years, and perhaps longer. We would surely see a flurry of legal filings from Mr. Trump, which while often meritless nevertheless take time. Here the battle would likely be waged around pretrial motions and appeals by Mr. Trump arguing, as he has done in other cases, that he was acting in his official presidential capacity and so is immune.That challenge, though not persuasive at all in our view, will almost certainly delay a trial by months. Other likely sallies are that the case should be removed to federal court (it shouldn’t); that he relied on the advice of counsel in good faith (he didn’t); or that his action was protected by the First Amendment (it wasn’t).Even if the courts work at the relatively rapid pace of other high-profile presidential cases, we would still be talking about months of delay. In both U.S. v. Nixon and Thompson v. Trump, about three months were consumed from the first filing of the cases to the final rejection of presidential arguments by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this case, there would be more issues, which would be likely to require additional time. At the earliest, Ms. Willis would be looking at a trial toward the end of 2023. Even on that aggressive schedule, appeals would not be concluded until the end of 2024 or beyond.Needless to say, this would have a profound impact on the election season. It would feature a national conversation about what it means for a former president to be prosecuted, and it would no doubt have unexpected consequences.Still, the debate is worth having, and the risks are worth taking. The core American idea is that no one is above the law. If there is serious evidence of crimes, then a former president should face the same consequences as anyone else. If we do not hold accountable those who engage in this kind of misconduct, it will recur.It would be the trial of the 21st century, no doubt a long and bumpy ride — but a necessary one for American democracy.Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. E. Danya Perry is a former federal prosecutor and New York State corruption investigator. Amy Lee Copeland, a former federal prosecutor, is a criminal defense and appellate attorney in Savannah, Ga.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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      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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      Who Is Fani Willis, the Prosecutor at the Center of the Trump Investigation?

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      ATLANTA — Fani T. Willis strode up to a podium in a red dress last year in downtown Atlanta, flanked by an array of dark suits and stone-faced officers in uniform. Her voice rang out loud and clear, with a hint of swagger.“If you thought Fulton was a good county to bring your crime to, to bring your violence to, you are wrong,” she said, facing a bank of news cameras. “And you are going to suffer consequences.”Ms Willis is the first Black woman to lead Georgia’s largest district attorney’s office. In her 19 years as a prosecutor, she has led more than 100 jury trials and handled hundreds of murder cases. Since she became chief prosecutor, her office’s conviction rate has stood at close to 90 percent, according to a spokesperson.Her experience is the source of her confidence, which appears unshaken by the scrutiny — and criticism — brought by the investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies who tried to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss in Georgia.Ms. Willis tends to speak as if the world were her jury box. Sometimes she is colloquial and warm. In an interview, she noted, as an aside, how much she loved Valentine’s Day: “Put that in there, in case I get a new boo,” she said.But she can also throw sharp elbows: In a heated email exchange in July over the terms of a grand jury appearance by Gov. Brian Kemp, Ms. Willis called the governor’s lawyer, Brian McEvoy, “wrong and confused,” and “rude,” among other things.“You have taken my kindness as weakness,” she wrote, adding: “Despite your disdain this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”As a child, Ms. Willis split time between her divorced parents. Her father was a former Black Panther and criminal defense lawyer who practiced in the Washington, D.C., area. He brought her to the courthouse often and put her to work as his file clerk starting in elementary school. A career in law, she said, was never in doubt. More

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      Georgia Judge Will Release Parts of Report on Trump Election Inquiry

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      Releasing the introduction and conclusion of a special grand jury report could shed light on the extent to which Mr. Trump and others might face legal jeopardy in the case.ATLANTA — A Georgia judge said on Monday that he would disclose parts of a grand jury report later this week that details an investigation into election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, though he would keep the jury’s specific recommendations secret for now.In making his ruling, the judge, Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, said the special grand jury raised concerns in its report “that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony.” But the eight-page ruling included few other revelations about the report, the contents of which have been carefully guarded, with the only physical copy in the possession of the district attorney’s office.The ruling does, however, indicate that the special grand jury’s findings are serious. The report includes “a roster of who should (or should not) be indicted, and for what, in relation to the conduct (and aftermath) of the 2020 general election in Georgia,” Judge McBurney wrote.For the last two years, prosecutors in Atlanta have been conducting a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, which he narrowly lost to President Biden. Much of the inquiry — including interviewing dozens of witnesses — was conducted before the special grand jury, which under Georgia law had to issue a final report on its findings, which in this case includes charging recommendations. Special grand juries do not have the power to issue indictments.It will be up to Fani T. Willis, the local district attorney, to decide what, if any, charges she will bring to a regular grand jury.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More