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Fox News Channel was one of the loudest voices alleging there was voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Sean Hannity was leading the charge.
But it turns out that privately, Mr. Hannity told lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems that he did not believe what he was saying over the airwaves.
The New York Times obtained a copy of Mr. Hannity’s testimony. Turns out many of the highest ranking Fox people have admitted under oath they never believed the Dominion lies.
At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used “to trash large batches of votes.”
Mr. Hannity interrupted her with a gentle question that had been circulating among election deniers, despite a lack of supporting proof: Why were Democrats silencing whistle blowers who could prove this fraud?
Did Mr. Hannity believe any of this?
“I did not believe it for one second.”
That was the answer Mr. Hannity gave, under oath, in a deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, according to information disclosed in a court hearing on Wednesday. The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April.
The New York Times
Fox News hosts were telling you one thing in public but a very different thing in private.
In Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday, Dominion’s lawyers argued that they had obtained ample evidence to make that case.
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. And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Mr. Hannity’s doubts about what Mr. Trump and his allies like Ms. Powell were saying, according to the Dominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford.
This included Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming for Fox News, and the prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Mr. Shackelford said.
“Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies,” he said, naming both Ms. Cooper and Mr. Carlson.
Mr. Shackelford described how Mr. Carlson had “tried to squirm out of it at his deposition” when asked about what he really believed.
Mr. Shackelford started to elaborate about what Mr. 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 spokeswoman for Fox News declined to comment.
The New York Times
I wish I could tell you I was surprised by this news — but I’m not. Unfortunately there are a lot of people working in conservative news who are not conservative. They get paid to read off a teleprompter. And it’s not just television. There are plenty of fake conservatives on talk radio.
For the record – I’m a pro-life conservative. I’m also a constitutionalist. I’m a proponent of small businesses and smaller government. I’m a Christian, too. But I also believe that the U.S. Constitution affords you the right to live your life however you want to live your life.
You may not agree with all of my positions on the issues – but at least you know where I stand. And I believe our listeners and readers appreciate that sort of candor.
Anyone who listens to this commentary or my national talk show should know this: what I say on air is what I believe off air.