Fox hosts doubted election fraud off camera

WILMINGTON, Del. — To millions of viewers, Fox News hosts gave allies of former President Donald Trump a platform to champion false claims that he lost the 2020 election because of voter fraud. To one another, they expressed doubts about the claims and mocked the people making them.

Private exchanges between Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and other network bigwigs — including the chairman of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch — show a wide chasm between what the network promoted in primetime and the doubts its stars held behind the camera, according to new court filings in a defamation lawsuit being waged by a company whose voting systems were regularly maligned on air.

“Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence for election fraud, Carlson said via text on Nov. 16, 2020, to a Fox News producer, referring to one of Trump’s lawyers.

Ingraham texted Carlson that Powell is “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.

These and other internal communications were included in a redacted brief filed Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, for $1.6 billion.

In a deposition, host Sean Hannity said “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second,” according to Dominion’s filing.

Murdoch, meanwhile, in a Nov. 19 email, described what he saw in a press conference that day featuring Giuliani and Powell as “Really crazy stuff. And damaging.”

Attorneys for Fox argued in a counterclaim unsealed Thursday that the lawsuit has advanced “novel defamation theories” and an assault on the First Amendment, noting that when voting-technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials.