(TJV) Fox News host Sean Hannity reportedly testified under oath that he did not believe “for one second” that the 2020 election was stolen.
According to reports, Hannity testified in a Wednesday deposition about Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
“I did not believe it for one second,” Hannity said of claims that the election was fraudulent.
“One lawyer for Dominion said that ‘not a single Fox witness’ so far had produced anything supporting the various false claims about the company that were uttered repeatedly on the network,” according to The New York Times.
“And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Hannity’s doubts about what Trump and his allies like Powell were saying, according to the Dominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford.”
New York Times: Sean Hannity testified under oath he never believed Trump’s claims of election fraud. In his deposition in the Dominion suit against Fox News, Hannity stated, “I did not believe it for one second”. pic.twitter.com/I8s8AKKtem
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) December 21, 2022
“Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies,” Shackelford said, naming Tucker Carlson and Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming for Fox News.
From The New York Times:
Shackelford described how Carlson had “tried to squirm out of it at his deposition” when asked about what he really believed.
Shackelford started to elaborate about what Carlson had said privately, telling the judge about the existence of text messages the host had sent in November and December of 2020. But the judge, Eric M. Davis, cut him off, leaving the specific contents of those texts unknown.
A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment.
Another previously unknown detail emerged on Wednesday about what was going on inside the Fox universe in those frantic weeks after the election. A second lawyer representing Dominion, Justin Nelson, told Davis about evidence obtained by Dominion showing that an employee of Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, had tried to intervene with the White House to stop Powell. According to Nelson, that employee called the fraud claims “outlandish” and pressed Trump’s staff to get rid of Powell, who was advising the president on filing legal challenges to the results.
Nelson said that evidence cut straight to the heart of whether Fox Corp., which is controlled by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, was also liable for defamation. Davis ruled in June that Dominion could sue the larger, highly profitable corporation, which includes the Fox network on basic television and a lucrative sports broadcasting division.
A spokesperson for Fox Corp. declined to comment.
Over the last several months, Dominion has been combing through mountains of private email and text messages from people at every level of Fox News and Fox Corp. — hosts like Hannity, senior executives and midlevel producers. A lawyer for Fox, Dan K. Webb, said Wednesday that the company had produced more than 52,000 documents for Dominion, with more to come.
The case will be going to trial in April.
To win the case, Dominion must prove that Fox News hosts were saying one thing privately and reporting another thing publicly.
