The defamation lawsuit between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems was reportedly delayed until today because the two sides were working out a settlement agreement that ultimately did not materialize. Podcast host Keith Olbermann is questioning why the cable network waited as long as it did to offer a settlement.
“Why on earth would Fox News try to settle the Dominion lawsuit? Now? Why on earth would Fox quote News unquote wait until the scheduled eve of jury selection, so late even against that deadline, that the trial itself had to be postponed to a day until today? Why on earth after everything that has already come out?” Olbermann questioned during his Coutndown With Keith Olbermann podcast.
He then went down the laundry list of evidence that Dominion has uncovered that purports that Fox knowingly peddled falsehoods around Trump’s election claims, mentioning the texts from Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Rupert Murdoch specifically.
“Why, after all that and not before all that, did Fox make the offer that delayed the trial until today? Because, obviously, there is something else that will come out at trial that is even worse. There has to be something else that Dominion found in discovery some other quote from somebody’s inbox, so self-damning that it is worse than Carlson’s hatred and Murdoch’s confession and Ingram’s insults put together and added to the cash value of the hundreds of millions of dollars pots offered to make the thing go away at this late date.”
Olbermann then shared that in his own deposition with his former cable home — Current TV — he inaccurately shared that he had sent less than 100 emails with a subject including the term “Litigation Strategy. In actuality, he authored 665 emails with the phrase in the subject line. He argued that that was true of just one person, considering the magnitude and scale of the Fox News operation, it was likely that someone in the organization said worse things than what Carlson, Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo, or another on-air host uttered in private.
“I firmly believe that as Dominion began to release these trenches of damning texts and emails, one or two or 30 Fox lawyers were assigned to go over every single document given to Dominion, and they found something else. Something worse. Something like the email equivalent of the atomic bomb, only landing on Fox and they all held their breath. And when the day before yesterday came around in the window in which Dominion could find a way to make that something public. and Dominion did not make it public, that’s when Fox offered to settle,” Olbermann concluded.
