To tell
us tonight in Dominion
Voting Systems defamation lawsuit
against Fox News.
They come from a court filing
that was published late today
that revealing that
Fox Chairman
Rupert Murdoch
admitted to in a sworn deposition
about 2020 election
lies and Fox News host
continually pushed on their viewers.
Not only that,
the filing describes
how Murdoch himself characterized
some of those lines.
CNN senior media reporter Oliver
Dorsey joins us
along with CNN political analyst
and New York Times
senior political correspondent
Maggie Haberman
and First Amendment
attorney Leigh Levine,
who is so well-respected
he's worked for basically
every media company
in the United States, in particular
for Fox and for CNN in past cases.
And we appreciate him being on.
Oliver, what is what's in these filings?
That's new.
I mean, this is really shocking stuff.
There's a lot. Even you were surprised.
I mean, you've been following this stuff
for years.
You but
you were surprised that
the things in this
I was reporting a lot
about what Fox is doing in 20, 20.
And I never really imagined
that behind the scenes
there would be
this sort of damning information,
these sort of admissions
that were being made by top executives
and top hosts
like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson
and so on and so forth.
In this recent legal filing,
what we have here is Rupert Murdoch
calling the Trump lies
that were being pushed about the election
damaging, calling them B.S.
and then also conceding that he knew that
some of his top hosts at the network
were peddling
this lie to viewers in a deposition
that Dominion took.
And I want to read to you part of it.
They ask him,
you are now aware
that Fox endorsed
at times
this false notion of a stolen election.
Murdoch says not Fox, no,
but maybe Lou Dobbs, a former Fox host.
Maria Bartiromo,
as commentators, it's a weird split
splitting hairs.
He does.
And then they go through Fox host
Jeanine Pirro.
I think so.
Lou Dobbs owe a lot.
Sean Hannity a bit.
And then it goes on.
And they say he
he says some of the commentators
were endorsing it
and the Dominion lawyer
says about their endorsement
of a stolen election.
Yes, they endorsed
is what Rupert Murdoch says
all all
while he's behind the scenes saying
he does not believe
any of Trump's election lies.
And a lot of these Fox hosts
behind the scenes
didn't seem to believe it either.
No, they it
and I think this really actually exposes
the fact that Fox is not at its
core a news network.
News networks,
they deliver the truth
as they know it to viewers.
They do the best job to attain the truth.
And sometimes it's not perfect,
but that's what they do.
In this case,
we know that behind the scenes,
top personnel
knew that the narrative
they were pushing to
viewers was not true.
And we have evidence now
that shows that they did this
in search of profit
so they didn't lose viewership.
To the small town.
They were afraid of losing viewers.
Exactly.
They did this
so they didn't lose
viewers to the smaller right
wing channels
that Trump was promoting after
the election was called on Fox
four by Mr. Levine.
When I spoke to you for a 60 minutes
story last year about this,
interviewing the Dominion CEO,
you said that
this was the strongest defamation case
you have seen in your 40 years
of seeing defamation cases,
and you have seen dozens,
if not hundreds do these filings.
How do these filings
change your opinion at all?
Is this still the work?
How would you characterize it now?
They haven't made Dominion's case weaker.
I can say that.
What about Dominion's case?
Why is it so strong?
Why?
What is so damning about these
these these this new filing
Well,
I think you have to separate out the
the news
value of today's
filing from the legal significance
of today's filing as a news matter.
For all the reasons
Oliver was just saying,
this is important stuff
from a legal perspective.
It is certainly
helpful to Dominion's case,
but it's not a smoking gun.
I have not seen
in the deposition excerpts
at least evidence
that Murdoch believed
that the specific statements
in the specific broadcasts
that are being sued about
were endorsed by the hosts.
He's speaking more generally
about whether the hosts were endorsing
the idea of a stolen or a fraudulent
an election,
and that's certainly helpful to Dominion,
but it doesn't get them
all the way to the finish line.
Do you think that.
Do you see
any reason that the case would not
continue to go forward
Oh, no, I.
Based on
the hundreds
and hundreds of pages
that have been released over the last
few weeks
on the summary judgment briefing
I would be extremely surprised
if a substantial number of the statements
that Dominion has sued about
don't make it through to a trial.
Maggie, former
President Trump
still spewing
all of these election lies in his current
presidential campaign.
Fox News agenda is so closely
tied to him,
are they going to have to correct
or challenge
his lies about election
fraud going forward?
What do you make of what came out today?
I think that's
the big question, Anderson,
or a big question
in terms of how Fox handles
Trump going forward.
We have seen
that Fox has been moving away from Trump.
Trump has barely been on Fox.
It used to be that whenever
he wanted to go
on, Oliver knows this better than I do.
Whenever he wanted to go on.
He could just dial in to Hannity
or Hannity would go interview him.
Other hosts would do the same.
That's not the way it is now.
And without Lou Dobbs, it's even less so.
They have pivoted toward Ron DeSantis
who they are encouraging.
And basically the entirety of News Corp.
is behind DeSantis
and the prospective
candidacy at this point.
But that is different than saying
Trump is wrong.
Trump was saying the wrong things.
I actually don't think and a lawyer
could speak to this better than I could,
but I don't think that
they are likely to start doing that
because they are
still in this litigation.
I think they are concerned about anything
they say publicly,
but they're definitely in a bind,
which is of their own making in terms
of how they handle Donald Trump.
Do you agree with that?
That they
they would have to think twice
about how what they say
about the president's
election lies that he's spinning now?
Absolutely.
I mean, you've seen
just in the last few
days, it's been reported
that they've told
Howard Kurtz
he can't talk about the case on air
precisely
because they don't want people saying
things that might come back
to bite them in the litigation.
All of this
filing also describes
Rupert Murdoch's relationship
and interactions he had with the former
well adviser,
I guess the son in law to the president,
Jared Kushner.
He was giving information about Biden
ads to Kushner before they ran.
Is that right?
Again, this is not how a news
network is supposed to operate.
Theoretically,
this would be a Firable offense
if someone at,
you know, any other news network
were to do this.
According to the filing
And I read to you from it,
it says that during Trump's campaign,
Rupert Murdoch
provided Trump's son in law
and senior
adviser Jared Kushner
with Fox confidential information
about Biden's ads,
along with debate strategy
before it was public.
Effectively,
I would assume, giving that campaign
an edge over Biden's.
This is
one of the many things
that we're
learning in these documents
that show that Rupert was helping
to work with the GOP. In another
part of the filing or
the previous filing,
there's a talk about
do anything
you can to help down in Georgia,
where there is, of course, that
special Senate race.
So, again, this
this goes back to paint a
broader picture of Fox,
not necessarily
as a news network at its core,
but one that really works
to push Republican talking points,
something we've known for a while.
But these
these documents are pretty damning
of our Darcy. Appreciate.
Maggie Haberman Levine,
thank you so much. Appreciate it.