An attorney for Dominion Voting Systems revealed the strategy his team planned to use against Fox News if their defamation case had gone to trial.
Stephen Shackelford, the tech company's lead co-counsel, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he felt confident they would have proved their defamation case against Fox Corporation for spreading Donald Trump's election lies, but he said the nearly $800 million settlement was an appropriate penalty.
"If you look at what would happen in a trial, and I could tell you because I saw what their opening statements slides looked like," Shackelford said. "They were going to come into that courtroom, and they were going to gaslight. We weren't going to get Rupert Murdoch on the stand saying he could have stopped this and he knew what was going on, he was going to say he had no idea. The hosts were going to say they had an open mind, and they thought this could be true."
"We were going to have to come in with there with the documents and prove that they were lying over and over again when they claimed they had an open mind and didn't know what the truth was," Shackelford added. "Those documents are out there."
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Dominion was satisfied the settlement didn't require Fox News broadcasters to make an on-air apology, the attorney said, because those statements would have been worthless.
"I think the apology is a little bit the wrong thing to be asking for, I think what we wanted is the truth to get out there," Shackelford said. "A forced apology isn't worth much, and they're adults, they know how to do this, if they would just tell their viewers the truth about what happened in the 2020 election -- that's what we're after. They still have the opportunity to do that. In depositions we asked them why they would not do that, and they said it was old news now, which is ironic, but it is what it is."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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