Former FBI counsel thinks Dominion's lawsuit looks solid — and Fox has a very difficult road ahead
Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann addressed the legal impact of the recent revelations in the court filings for the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News. The critical piece of the suit is that Dominion's lawyers must prove that there was actual malice in the attacks against the company. Weissmann thinks that the case looks promising for Dominion.
"It is fascinating to me," Weissmann said of the case. "It is really an example of the courts holding Fox News to account. Their standard now, is they have to meet actual malice. It is a really high standard. As people in the media know, for anybody suing for false claims, you have to show actual malice. By gosh, I mean, these documents show that they are a pretty long way to getting there, and it looks like there's going to be a trial in April."
When looking at the big picture of the lawsuit as a whole, he pointed out that Tucker Carlson was caught trying to fire a fact-checker because he realized that telling the truth could decrease viewership and thus drop the stock price of the company. One of the reasons that Murdoch and executives made the decision to buy into the 2020 election lies was to bring back the audience lost because they correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.
"Once I heard that, I was really kind of done," confessed Weissmann. "I think what's interesting here is that the courts have really fared pretty darn well in holding people to account. And we are going to be seeing that, I suspect, more on the criminal side. But the Dominion suit, is holding people responsible for lies that affected that company, to the tune of, as you said, over a billion dollars."
MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle pointed out that such a lawsuit hasn't exactly changed Fox's behavior regarding the distortion of the truth or outright lying about the news. Carlson, in particular, is producing a video arguing that the Jan. 6 attack on Congress was a "false flag operation" conducted under the government run by Donald Trump.
Still, Weissmann sees some change since the lawsuit.
"You can't say that is going to change that, but here is one of the things that you have to give Murdoch some credit for — he did the wrong thing at the time — but he appears to be pretty darn candid in his deposition. Where he is saying, look, I could've done more. I had the power to do more. And I didn't, and I wish I did. And it is remarkable to me that in the filing, you have Rupert Murdoch saying that he realizes that his own anchors endorsed the false story. But in the filing, the lawyer says that Fox News did not endorse. I don't know how they're going to square that circle. It is like you have the head of the company saying that is what happened. The jury is going to be able to, as they used to say, go to the videotape and see that the anchors are actually endorsing these false statements."
He noted that money certainly could have an impact and deter people. If a lot of money is paid out, it could result in the company being forced to make some cuts if anchors continue saying false things.
"And it is going to give a little bit more clout to the executive producers to monitor what is being said," Weissmann explained. "Because they are supposed to protect the company from having to pay this kind of judgment."
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