Fox still in legal peril over election lies after settling with Dominion – live | US politics

As bad as Ron DeSantis’s day in Washington was yesterday, he does have some supporters in Congress.

Here’s conservative Texas representative Chip Roy’s view. He has endorsed DeSantis over Donald Trump, arguing in a Fox News interview that the Republican party needs new blood:

It wouldn’t be a day in Washington without some news about the debt ceiling.

Jack Lew, who was Treasury secretary under Barack Obama in 2011 when the nation came so close to defaulting that one of the major ratings agencies downgraded the United States’s debt for the first time ever, spoke to House Democrats today about the ongoing standoff with Republicans, Politico reports:

Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy is looking to make the most of the impasse between the two parties ahead of a projected early June deadline for Congress to raise the US government’s borrowing limit or face a default. The GOP is demanding spending cuts and the enactment of some of its legislative priorities in exchange for its votes to raise the limit, while Democrats want an increase without preconditions.

Here’s what McCarthy had to say today:

Following Dominion’s settlement with Fox yesterday, voting systems firm Smartmatic vowed to push on with its own defamation lawsuit, Semafor reported:

Today, Fox responded defiantly, saying they were ready to fight Smartmatic’s claim:

Fox isn’t alone in facing legal consequences for its embrace of Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies.

Dominion Voting Systems also filed a lawsuit against the conservative Newsmax network, which gave wide coverage to Trump’s conspiracy theories after the presidential vote. Following Fox’s settlement yesterday, CNN reports Newsmax released a statement in which it attempts to draw a line between its coverage and Fox News’s:

Donald Trump has, of course, already announced his bid for the White House, but is doing so among a swirl of legal troubles. The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports on a new and curious development in the complex investigation of his and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia:

A new legal filing has exposed a potentially major fracture among a group of so-called “fake electors” in Georgia, who sought to aid Donald Trump in overturning the 2020 election results in a scheme now under criminal investigation.

According to a court document filed on Tuesday, a group of people involved in the scheme recently told state prosecutors that another one of the fake electors committed crimes that they were not involved in.

The finger pointing, included in a document submitted by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, exposes a rift within the group as prosecutors near the end of the investigation and consider bringing charges against the former president and dozens of allies.

Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis popped by Washington DC yesterday to meet with Republican congressmen… who turned around and endorsed Donald Trump. Not a good sign for the Florida governor’s potential bid for president. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly has more:

In a blow to Ron DeSantis, a prominent ally of the rightwing governor was on Tuesday one of two Florida Republicans in Congress to back Donald Trump for president, the latest in a string of defections.

The news came amid reports that DeSantis’s team has pressured US representatives from his state not to endorse Trump.

Brian Mast told CNN he planned to endorse the former president and would chair a veterans committee in support of his re-election bid.

Peter Schorsch, publisher of FloridaPolitics.com, said: “Brian Mast has been DeSantis’s ally on environment and water issues in South Florida. Mast is at DeSantis’s hip during press conferences. They’re both veterans, too. Wow.”

Fox may have to pay up big time to settle Dominion’s lawsuit, but it won’t have to publicly apologize or otherwise own up to its long record of falsehoods. The Guardian’s Sam Levine took a closer look at the settlement’s finer points, from Wilmington, Delaware – the city where the case almost went to trial:

The staggering $787.5m settlement between Fox and the voting equipment company Dominion marked the end of one of the most aggressive efforts to hold someone accountable for spreading misinformation after the 2020 election.

Dominion sued Fox for $1.6bn in damages for knowingly broadcasting false information about the company after the election. The money from the settlement, one of the largest libel payouts in media history, was just the icing on a cake Dominion had, in many ways, already won.

And yet, while Fox doled out an unprecedented sum, they were able to avoid something priceless: the public humiliation of a trial and an apology.

If there’s one takeaway from the US$787.5m settlement Fox agreed to cough up in exchange for Dominion Voting Systems’ dropping its defamation lawsuit, it’s this: it pays to be a lawyer in Rupert Murdoch’s employ. It also pays to be a lawyer suing Fox.

And there are plenty of both groups, since the media empire and in particular its conservative Fox News network remain in deep legal hot water for their enthusiastic promotion of Donald Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy theories. Below is a rundown of the outstanding cases that could wrack up the legal fees and potentially imperil outlet’s finances:

In a last-minute settlement on Tuesday, Fox agreed to pay voting equipment company Dominion US$787.5m, ending a dispute over whether the network and its parent company knowingly broadcast false and outlandish allegations that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election.

According to analysts, while the settlement amount is incredibly costly, Fox has avoided the more damaging spectacle of a trial and a public apology.

But it still faces a number of legal challenges over the coming months.

Smartmatic

A global election technology company headquartered in London, Smartmatic, lodged a defamation suit against Fox in February 2021. The complaint’s striking opening sentence read: “The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election … ”

Like Dominion, Smartmatic is suing Fox for defamation related to its coverage of Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie, but the company’s lawsuit has so far attracted only a fraction of the attention.

On paper, Smartmatic’s suit could be the more dangerous: it is demanding damages of $2.7bn compared with Dominion’s claim for $1.6bn.

In March, the New York state supreme court in Manhattan gave the green light for the case to proceed against Fox News, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former business anchor Lou Dobbs and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

The company argues that that Fox News broadcast a series of blatant lies in support of Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory and that hosts and guests broadcast 100 false statements: among them, that Smartmatic was involved in 2020 election counts in six battleground states when in fact it was present only at the count in Los Angeles county.

Claims broadcast on Fox described Smartmatic as having been founded in Venezuela at the behest of corrupt dictators. In fact, it was founded by Antonio Mugica and Roger Piñate in 2000 in Boca Raton, Florida, in the wake of the “hanging chad” fiasco, with the aim of using technology to restore people’s faith in election results.

Good morning, US politics readers. Fox may have yesterday forestalled a lengthy trial by agreeing to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5m to settle its defamation lawsuit, but its lawyers will remain plenty busy for the time being. The media empire remains in legal peril over Fox News’s enthusiastic promotion of various lies regarding the 2020 election, with another defamation lawsuit from global election firm Smartmatic still pending and even the company’s shareholders reportedly pondering a trip to the courts. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any developments in these cases today.

Here’s more of what to expect:

• Joe Biden is heading to a union training facility in Maryland where he’ll contrast “his vision for the economy with Maga House Republicans’ vision”, according to the White House. This comes as negotiations over raising the US debt limit heat up.
• House Republicans are going after Washington DC again, this time with a disapproval resolution targeting a police reform bill the city recently enacted.
• Mike Pence, who sure seems like he wants to run for president, is expected to again criticize (obliquely) Donald Trump in a speech today, Politico reports.