[UPDATE: The two parties have reached a settlement in which Fox will pay Dominion $785.5 million.

This settlement is not the end of the legal woes for Fox.

Fox still faces several legal battles related to its decision to broadcast false claims. Smartmatic, another voting equipment company, is suing the company for $2.7bn. Abby Grossberg, a former Fox employee who worked for Bartiromo and Carlson, is also suing the company, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony.

The network also faces a separate lawsuit from a shareholder who is seeking damages and argues that executives breached their fiduciary duty to the company by causing false claims about the election to be broadcast.

Fox has also admitted that it told lies about the election. It is not yet clear what public apologies Fox will give on the air, if any. The details of the settlement once released may clarify that point.]

The defamation trial of Dominion against Fox News was supposed to get underway yesterday but on Sunday the judge in the case postponed it until today. No reasons were given for the delay, leading to speculation that lawyers for both sides were trying to negotiate a deal. It is not unusual for deals to be struck on the eve of a trial as both sides play a game of chicken to see whether the other will make the first move, signaling weakness. Although the judge on Monday said that the trial would start today, it may be that a deal has been reached by the time people read this post.

It seems likely that if the idea of a deal was broached, it was by Fox since the amount of pre-trial information released has been pretty damning to them. But what might have pushed them over the edge is the fact that the judge ruled that Rupert Murdoch could be forced by Dominion to testify. This came in the wake of Fox admitting that it had misled the judge by downplaying Murdoch’s role in the company , by claiming that he was not an officer but had mostly an honorary role, which seemed to tick off the judge.
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One of the nice things about legal opinions is that, although often long, they tend to lay out the facts of a case in an ordered, chronological manner, making it easy to understand what the case is all about. I have been reading the ruling by the Delaware judge Eric Davis on the defamation case brought by Dominion voting systems against Fox News Network (FNN) and its parent company Fox Corporation (FC) and I learned some new things. It appears that Fox News has a research department called the ‘Brainroom’ that is called upon to give definitive answers to questions and as early as November 13, 2020 (just 10 days after the election on November 3) they said that the fraud claims were rubbish. And yet, Fox continued to make the allegations for weeks and weeks after that.

Here is the relevant section on pages 17-18:
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The indictment against Donald Trump that was presented in court yesterday charged his with 34 counts, each of which consisted of “falsifying business records in the first degree” that were taken “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise”.

The indictment itself did not specify the evidence that was used to arrive at these charges but they consist at a minimum of the payment of $130,000 made to Stormy Daniels to prevent her speaking out in public about her affair. Note that it is not the payment itself that is illegal. One question is what was the intent of the payment. If it was meant to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, then that would be a violation of campaign finance law since it could be considered a campaign contribution that exceeds the allowed amounts.
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During this week when it will be all Trump, all the time, this article in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow from back in 2018 shows what a pathetic creep Trump is and how his cronies worked out a system for concealing his affairs with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, and other women.

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own.

The interactions that McDougal outlines in the document share striking similarities with the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump, or who have accused him of propositioning them for sex or sexually harassing them. McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.

On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story, which it never ran. Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call “catch and kill.” This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as “a personal friend.”
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On Tuesday afternoon at about 2:00pm Eastern time, Donald Trump will be processed in a Manhattan courthouse as a result of the indictment against him. He will be booked into the system, photographed, fingerprinted, read his Miranda rights, and then walked over to the courtroom to appear before the judge and be asked to plead guilty or not guilty to each of the the charges against him. This will the be the first time that the charges will be made public. It is rumored that the number of charges are around 30 so that could take some time and he will be placed in the embarrassing position of standing quietly before the judge while the charges are read out. For someone who likes to be in control of his immediate surroundings and dominate the conversation, this will be excruciating. I do not believe that the charged person gets to make a statement so he will not be able to rant about how this is all so unfair and a political witch hunt. Then there is the question of bail. It is unlikely that the prosecution will ask for any bail and will let him leave the court under his own recognizance but that little step will add to the humiliation.
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The pretrial maneuverings in the legal case brought by the Dominion voting company against Fox News are over and Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis has ordered that it go to trial. Both sides had petitioned the judge to grant a summary judgment in its favor without a trial. In defamation cases against media organizations, the person claiming injury has to show that the statements made were both false and malicious, in that the speaker knew they were false and yet made them with a reckless disregard for the truth. (The judge’s ruling can be read here.)

Fox News said that when reporting the lies about Dominion machines changing the results to enable Joe Biden to win, it was merely exercising its First Amendment right to cover the news. Dominion said that all the internal communications that it had obtained during the discovery process showed conclusively that Fox News did not believe any of the allegations that its on-air personalities were saying and that hence it amounted to reckless and malicious behavior and that the judge should grant a summary judgment in its favor.
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Kevin Seefried was sentenced to three years in prison for carrying a Confederate flag into the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 and threatening a police officer with the flagpole. His lawyers tried to find some way to mitigate his actions.

Kevin Seefried, 53, teared up before U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. The judge told him that bringing the flag into “one of our nation’s most sacred halls” was “outrageous.”
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