Pennsylvania voter win

 

GOP: We can't win if we don't cheat

Meanwhile, in Dominion v. Fox

Proof t[he people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit] would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.

  NYT

New court filing: Rupert Murdoch deposition transcript.

Murdoch not only admitted the hosts were pushing lies about the election, he suggested it was helping Fox make money. [...] One of Dominion’s lawyers asked Murdoch if he could have ordered people like Giuliani and Powell off the air. “I could have,” Murdoch responded. “But I didn’t.”

[...]

He was more explicit as to why when discussing Mike Lindell, the election-denying pillow salesman.

[...]

“The man is on every night. Pays us a lot of money,” Murdoch testified of Lindell. “At first you think it’s comic, and then you get bored and irritated.”

Murdoch said he wants to keep Lindell’s advertisements on the air, and when asked why Fox continues to give Lindell a platform, said, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”

  Rolling Stone

The document also described how Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had implored Mr. Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” Mr. Ryan suggested instead that the network pivot and “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”

[...]

On Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the attack at the Capitol, Mr. Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, talked about whether Mr. Hannity and his fellow prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, should make it clear to viewers that Mr. Biden had won the election.

  NYT

January 5, huh? Gee, you don't suppose Murdoch and Scott knew what was going to happen on January 6 do you?

According to the filing, Ms. Scott said of the hosts, “Privately they are all there,” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” No statement of that kind was made on the air.

Dominion details the close relationship that Fox hosts and executives enjoyed with senior Republican Party officials and members of the Trump inner circle, revealing how at times Fox was shaping the very story it was covering.

[...]

At one point, Dominion’s lawyers accuse Ms. Pirro, who hosted a Saturday evening talk show, of “laundering her own conspiracy theories through Powell.” The filing goes on to say Ms. Pirro bragged to her friends “that she was the source for Powell’s claims.” Dominion notes that this was “something she never shared with her audience.”

[...]

Dominion also describes how Mr. Murdoch provided Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about ads that the Biden campaign would be running on Fox.

Do I smell a new lawsuit coming?

The filing on Monday included a deposition by Viet Dinh, Fox Corporation’s chief legal officer, who was one of the many senior executive cautioning about the content of Fox’s coverage.

[...]

When asked in his deposition if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, Mr. Dinh said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”

I wonder if he's still the chief legal officer. Or employed by Fox at all. I also wonder what his legal basis for that opinion is.

“There appears to be a pretty good argument that Fox endorsed the accuracy of what was being said,” said Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment lawyer who has defended major media organizations in defamation cases. He added that Fox’s arguments were stronger against some of Dominion’s claims than others. But based on what he has seen of the case so far, Mr. Levine said, “I’d much rather be in Dominion’s shoes than Fox’s right now.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09:14 am:

No shit.

It's not like Fox honchos don't know what's going on

As the summer has unfolded, Fox's star TV news hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have been grilled under oath. High-powered attorneys are bearing down on the Murdochs, the most powerful family in English-language media. And it's all part of an all-out legal war. Dominion is seeking to strip away the curtain protecting what happens behind the scenes at the nation's most watched cable news channel, which holds a singular role on the American political scene. The suit could also define what's fair game in journalism and politics in a democracy very much on the edge. The trial date is set for April of next year.

[...]

Besides Carlson and Hannity, the list of Fox figures already questioned under oath in the cases includes former stars (Shepard Smith) and fallen stars (Lou Dobbs and Ed Henry), as well as show producers and programming executives, court records show. Dobbs left the network in early 2021, the day after Smartmatic, the electronic voting company, filed a closely related $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox over similarly false claims about that firm made on Fox's airwaves.

[...]

Dominion's attorneys have obtained emails, texts, WhatsApp messages and more, documenting how the network's executives and journalists behaved and acted behind the scenes, as well as determining what they actually knew about the claims.

[...]

[A] November 2020 email from an anguished Fox News news producer to colleagues sent up a flare amid a fusillade of false claims.

The producer warned: Fox cannot let host Jeanine Pirro back on the air. She is pulling conspiracy theories from dark corners of the Web to justify then-President Donald Trump's lies that the election had been stolen from him.

[...]

Asked by NPR whether Fox still considers [Maria] Bartiromo a news anchor, and thus part of Fox's news and reporting division, rather than its opinion side, a network spokeswoman declined to comment. It is the first time Fox has not identified Bartiromo as a news-side journalist when directly asked by NPR.

[...]

In the weeks that followed Election Day 2020, other prominent Fox stars, commentators and their guests heavily promoted them.

[...]

The producer's email is among the voluminous correspondence acquired by Dominion's attorneys as part of its discovery of evidence in a $1.6 billion defamation suit it filed against Fox News and its parent company.

[...]

The wide nets cast by Dominion in seeking depositions suggests, University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters says, that the company's attorneys are "exploring the extent to which Fox personnel published false statements with knowledge of their falsity or with a 'high degree of awareness of their probable falsity,' (the relevant fault standards)."

[...]

Defamation cases are generally hard to win in the U.S. and Peters says this one is no slam dunk. But given what's already known, he says, he'd rather be on Dominion's legal team than Fox's.

  NPR

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Attack from every angle

Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. This is the Trump cabal strategy.

The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to block the certification of the Pennsylvania election results that tipped Joe Biden decisively across the threshold to become President-elect of the United States.

[...]

Teased out by the White House and the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani over the weekend, Donald J. Trump for President filed the lawsuit with two electors as co-plaintiffs: David John Henry and Lawrence Roberts.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, and seven Keystone State county boards of elections are listed as defendants.

[...]

Variations of the word “fraud” appear in the lawsuit 33 times, mostly in the context of rare prosecutions related to other elections. The only suspected instances of voter fraud cited in the complaint occurred in two Keystone State counties that voted for Trump: Fayette, where Trump is winning by a 34-point margin, and Luzerne, where his lead is 14 points.

“Fayette County experienced two different issues with their mail-in ballots leading up to Election Day,” the complaint states. “First, an issue caused by Pennsylvania’s SURE software system as to the marking of online applications submitted prior to the June primary election with the ‘permanent mail-in’ status caused some voters to receive duplicate ballots for the general election.”

Neither appears to be a clear-cut case of fraud.

[...]

Trump trails Biden by more than 45,000 votes in the Keystone State. Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower is reportedly investigating that quartet of allegations.

[...]

Federal prosecutors rarely announce investigations before charges are filed, amplifying allegations that Attorney General Bill Barr has been politicizing the Justice Department.

[...]

Other passages of the complaint falsely contend that Republican poll watchers have been denied access to ballot-counting.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Boockvar debunked the claim, noting that one of the counties they sued has live video that anyone can access of the count.

[...]

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, a Barack Obama appointee.

  Law and Crime

Brian Lehrer talked with Richard Hasen, law and political science professor at UC Irvine, who writes the Election Law blog.  Hasen turns back every Trumpelection lawsuit rationale.  

They have the perfect Trump picture to go with this article:

Disgusting prick.

UPDATE:  Here's another load of bullshit angle: