The Fox News host was aware of the repeated voter fraud conspiracy after the 2020 presidential election was fake, but still pushed for it to boost the right-wing network’s ratings, according to newly released court filings.
The 192-page document, produced as part of an ongoing $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, features what it says are comments and text messages between senior Fox News executives and the network’s star hosts.
Privately, the documents show that the network’s top decision-makers and on-air talent slammed various allegations of voter fraud and election lies — which they later disseminated through their own programs.
“Sidney Powell lied. I caught him. It’s crazy,” Fox star Tucker Carlson allegedly texted fellow host Laura Ingraham in November 2020, referring to Donald Trump’s campaign attorney.
According to court documents, Ingraham replied: “Sidney is crazy. No one will work with him. The same goes for Rudy [Giuliani].”
“It’s unbelievably offensive to me,” Carlson allegedly wrote back. “Our audience is good and trusting people.”
Days later, in a message to a person whose name was redacted in court documents, Carlson said it was “very reckless” to claim that Dominion rigged the election when there is no evidence or documentation that “shows they did.” “As you know there isn’t,” Carlson added.
It’s a very different tone than he took in a group text including fellow host Sean Hannity, in which Carlson attacked a Fox News reporter who checked Trump’s tweets about Dominion. In that message, according to court documents, he called for the reporter to be fired.
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In a group text thread between Ingraham, Hannity and Carlson on November 12, Carlson allegedly highlighted a tweet from Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich, who quoted a “top election infrastructure official” to confirm that “there is no evidence that the voting system was removed or lost. vote, change vote , or in any way compromised.”
“Please fire him,” Carlson told Ingraham and Hannity, according to the document. “Seriously… What is it? I’m really surprised… I have to stop immediately, like tonight. It is a measure of damage to the company. Stock prices are down. No joke.”
By morning, Heinrich had deleted the fact-checking tweet.
In another personal quote, Carlson allegedly called the claims of the Trump campaign — and the advisers spreading them — as “ridiculous” and “totally off the rails.”
Other executives and on-air personalities allegedly used similar language to describe the claim and those promoting it, including Hannity (“F’ing crazy”), anchor Dana Perino (“nuts”), host Maria Bartiromo (“kooky”) , and Raj Shah, senior vice president of Fox Corporation (“MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”).
According to the document, in December 2020 – as rival network Newsmax leaned into the election fraud scandal and Fox News found itself retreating and losing viewers – Fox News senior vice president Bill Sammon said to a friend, political editor Chris Stirewalt: “It’s great how the ratings it’s not good to make good journalists do bad things.
Fox News did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, but in a statement to The New York Times, the network accused Dominion of “misusing the record, cherry-picking quotes stripped of key context and wasting a lot of ink on facts that are irrelevant under the principles of- principles of defamation law.”
The trial, which will be heard by Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, is scheduled to begin in mid-April.