Fox could give Dominion 'a dump truck of money' to avoid discovery in defamation suit: political scientist

Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, and political scientist Brendan Nyhan believes it's in the network's interest to settle as quickly as possible.

Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, writes on Twitter that Fox will likely be very wary of giving Dominion's lawyers a crack at discovery over fears of what they might turn up.

"Discovery is going to be lit if this gets that far," he writes. "Plausible Fox drives a dump truck of money up to Dominion like it did in the Seth Rich case to make this go away."

In its lawsuit against Fox, Dominion argues that the network "sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process."

Dominion's lawsuit came even after Fox earlier this year fired host Lou Dobbs, who was one of the network's chief purveyors of bogus conspiracy theories about the company's voting machines.

Additionally, Fox aired several on-air corrections debunking false claims made by Dobbs and other hosts about Dominion voting machines, which suggests that the network's legal team has known for months that it has real exposure in any defamation case brought by the company.