Tag: campaign 2020
Rupert Murdoch

Doddering Murdoch Was In Denial Over Dominion Lawsuit

This week New York Magazine published a sprawling account of the lead-up to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, detailing Rupert Murdoch’s state of “denial” surrounding the $787.5 million dollar settlement his company was forced to pay to Dominion Voting Systems.

Murdoch on Thursday announced he was stepping down as chairman of Fox and News Corp.

Dominion Voting Systems successfully sued Fox News for defamation after the network accused the company of rigging voting machines to steal votes from former President Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential election. In April 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million and acknowledged, in a statement, “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false."

The suit, Wolff notes “was far and away the largest defamation award ever made, outside of Alex Jones.”


In an excerpt from his new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, Wolff reports that after a Delaware Superior Court judge in June 2022 "ruled that the suit could also extend to Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corp,” a visitor to the billionaire’s Montana Ranch found Murdoch “absolutely unwilling to consider any view in which Fox could be at fault.

Wolff writes:

Murdoch, the visitor discovered, was stuck in a place far from the real world. The Dominion suit had somehow become an attack on him and on his long career. He seemed angrily trapped in the company’s desperate and preposterous logic: that it was just airing the newsworthy opinions of important political figures.

“Why don’t you just settle?” asked the visitor. This provoked a Murdoch rant, lots of it hard to follow but leaving the visitor with the sense that Murdoch had found himself alone, up against all those who wanted him to settle, and that he, if no one else, was going to stand up for free speech. And at any rate, it wasn’t Fox’s fault. It was Donald Trump’s fault. He wasn’t going to pay for what Donald Trump did. Sue Donald Trump. The visitor came away wondering how this famously cold and analytic business mind had become such a hot mess.

According to Wolff, while Rupert Murdoch remained static in his denial leading up to the settlement, CEO Lachlan Murdorch — who was named chairman and CEO of Fox News in 2019 — “began telling people that Fox was going to focus on Dominion and get it resolved.”

“But Rupert Murdoch wasn’t having it — he seemed to double down on a desire to punish Trump rather than resolve Dominion. Dominion wasn’t the problem — Trump was,” Wolff writes.

As Wolff reports, Murdoch’s refusal to settle with Dominion bucked the two main rules “of libel law for a media company” — 1) “never to go before a jury,” and 2) “avoid discovery.”

“On Monday, April 17, the day the jury was supposed to be seated and opening statements begun — before a day’s delay was declared — Murdoch told Carlson Dominion was holding to a demand of a billion dollars in damages,” Wolff reports. “For Murdoch, this was a nonstarter: He would not endure the humiliation and defeat of paying a ten-figure settlement in the case. It would be not only a record-shattering sum but also tremendous fodder for his enemies (like the Times) when it came to writing headlines.”

But the company did settle, announcing the following day that it was “pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems.”

“We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues,” Fox News said in a statement.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

trump election fraud

Trump Campaign Spent $600K On 'Election Fraud' Report -- Then Buried It

Donald Trump repeatedly lied in public and in private about what he claimed – with made up numbers – was extensive election fraud, and went as far as to spend more than $600,000 to commission a study that would prove his allegations true. The expensive and extensive report did the exact opposite, exponentially deflating his lies. He never released the report, and to his day has continued to lie about election fraud.

The Washington Post obtained a copy of the report, publishing some of its findings and comparing them to lies Trump told.

“So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people,” Trump told Brad Raffensperger in his infamous January 2, 2021 telephone call demanding the Georgia Republican secretary of state “find” him an additional 11,780 votes.

“And they went to obituaries,” Trump continued, beefing up his false claims. “They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”

That was not only false, it was a lie.

Five thousand dead voters did not cast a ballot. Not even close. Trump’s own report put the likely potential number at 23.

“Researchers paid by Trump’s team had ‘high confidence’ of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a ‘potential statewide exposure’ of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 fewer than the ‘minimum’ Trump claimed.”

In court documents, Trump’s lawyers, trying to overturn Nevada’s election results stated, the Post reports, “1,506 ballots were cast in the names of dead people and 42,284 voted twice. Trump lost the Silver State by about 33,000 votes.”

In reality, the number of dead voters casting ballots was closer to 20.

Trump’s own researchers “had ‘high confidence’ that 12 ballots were cast in the names of deceased people in Clark County, Nev., and believed the ‘high end potential exposure’ was 20 voters statewide — some 1,486 fewer than Trump’s lawyers said.”

Instead of 42,284 people voting twice, Trump’s report put the low end probability at 45 double votes, and the high end at 9,063.

The Justice Department obtained emails, reports, and interviews showing Trump’s own campaign officials “analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly.”

Read the Post’s full report here.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Tried To Execute Voting Machines Seizure Three Times

Trump Tried To Execute Voting Machines Seizure Three Times

Two weeks ago, the details of an executive order from Donald Trump that would have ordered the military to seize voting machines as a step toward reversing the outcome of the 2020 election came to light. It’s now clear that Trump also tried, and failed, to get either the Justice Department or Department of Homeland Security to take control of the machines.

Trump’s open confession on Sunday that he was trying to get Mike Pence to “overturn the election” on Jan. 6 may seem to be a complete confession of the scheme to install himself as an unelected ruler, but the revelations aren’t over. As The New York Times reports, that draft order was just one attempt to take voting machines away from states and counties, positioning Trump to repeat false claims about how those machines operate and lies about incorrect results.

This included a scheme—pushed by Trump, and carried out by Rudy Giuliani—in which they attempted to get the Department of Homeland Security to swoop down on select states and take the machines. And that effort followed a meeting between Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr, in which Barr refused to use the Justice Department to support Trump’s scheme.

These failures were part of a weeks-long effort to seize the evidence that the election had not been plagued by fraud, take machines away from objective observers, and put them under lock and key where Trump’s team could make any claims they wanted. And it’s now clear these plans went beyond papers being passed around the White House, or angry meetings in the Oval Office. There was an attempt to put these plans in motion.

In the end, Trump didn’t “walk away peacefully,” he went down kicking, screaming, and scheming to the ugly end.

As events have been pieced together at this point, Trump and his associates conducted a multi-part scheme intended to 1) create the false impression that there had been election fraud, 2) send false slates of electors to the National Archives to bolster that claim, 3) use Republicans in Congress to both maximize the pressure on Mike Pence and lend supports to claims of fraud, 4) declare Trump the winner by excluding results in states that Biden won, 5) backup this scheme through a series of maneuvers including polling of the states congressional delegations where Republicans held a one-state advantage, and 6) announce that Trump would remain in office pending another election at some point in the future.

But there is another action: the seizure of voting machines so that Trump could expand on claims that systems were connected to the internet, were subject to being hacked, or under the control of foreign governments. It’s now clear that this was more than a proposal. Trump tried to make it happen at least three times.

To that end, Trump first held a meeting with then-Attorney General William Barr “in mid- to late-November” in which he tried to get the Justice Department to take control of the voting machines. Trump informed Barr that, “his lawyers had told him” that taking and holding the machines was within the power of the DOJ. But Barr—who had actually looked into the allegations of issues with the machines—told Trump there was “no probable cause” that justified seizing the machines.

Barr stepped down from his role as attorney general before the end of 2020. It’s unclear to what extent his late resignation was intended to protect him from being caught up in the investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. What is clear is that Barr did not come to the public and explain the threat represented by Trump’s actions, so he remains deeply complicit.

With the DOJ at least temporarily off the table, Trump turned to the Pentagon. The idea of using the military to impound machines appears to have originated with retired Army colonel Phil Waldron. It was Waldron who prepared the PowerPoint presentation that was given to at least 100 Republican members of Congress in the days before Jan. 6.

During a Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting with Flynn and Powell, Trump apparently was given, or already had, the draft executive order instructing the military to take control of voting machines. That order was predicated on long-debunked claims about issues with results in Antrim County, MI. At the same meeting, Flynn also proposed that Trump could conduct a do-over election under the supervision of the military. However, this scheme was ultimately “rejected.”

That rejection appears to have taken the form of, not pushback from the Pentagon, but a breakdown among Trump’s coup plotters. Trump was apparently taken with the idea as put forward by Flynn and Powell, but Giuliani was not. Despite Powell’s claims of everyone from China to Spain to Venezuela to Germany being involved in some form of election fraud, the Antrim County claims mentioned in the draft order offered no explicit evidence of foreign interference. Giuliani was convinced they needed to make a claim about foreign interference if they were going to use the military.

It’s unclear whether Giuliani made this argument out of some concern for the facts—a concern he never demonstrated in public—or out of a growing antipathy toward Powell. Three weeks earlier, Giuliani had made the claim that Powell was not part of Trump’s legal team after a particularly contentious, and embarrassing, press event.

With the DOJ and military attempts halted, Trump instructed Giuliani to see if Homeland Security could be used to seize the voting machines. Giuliani called the acting deputy secretary at the DHS and passed along Trump’s instructions to go out there and get those machines. However, the official told Giuliani that he lacked the authority to take the action Trump wanted.

All of these accounts show the same thing: Trump didn’t “consider” having to seize voting machines; Trump tried to seize the voting machines. This wasn’t something that ended with papers passed around a desk and a decision not to go forward. On each occasion, Trump agreed with the scheme to take control of machines, ballots, and supporting materials. With the equipment and results in hand, he could have issued whatever lies he wanted about what his team “found.”

Donald Trump schemed openly to overthrow democracy and install himself as an authoritarian ruler. His party—from bottom to top—is complicit in this scheme which is, without qualification, the greatest threat the United States has ever faced. Why isn’t the media treating it that way?

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Igor Fruman, Former Associate Of Giuliani, Will Plead Guilty

Igor Fruman, Former Associate Of Giuliani, Will Plead Guilty

(Reuters) - Igor Fruman, a former associate of Rudolph Giuliani, told a New York court hearing on Friday he will plead guilty to one criminal count in a campaign finance case.

Fruman worked to collect damaging information about Joe Biden before he became president. Giuliani, a one-time lawyer for former President Donald Trump, has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing although he is under federal investigation in the Southern District of New York.

(Reporting by Jon Stempel in New York and writing by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware)