Lindell has to pay $5 million over false election claims

There are so many lawsuits going around over the lies told about the 2020 election that this one went under my radar. It was not a lawsuit exactly, but something that was referred to an arbitration panel that ruled that Mike Lindell, the founder of the My Pillow company and ardent advocate of Trump and the Big Lie, has to pay $5 million to someone who took up his challenge to prove that Lindell’s data claiming to support the Big Lie was wrong.

He announced his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota in 2021, saying he would give $5m to anyone who could disprove what he claimed was genuine election data he had obtained.

The arbitration panel said that the challenge had been successfully met.

Mike Lindell must make good on a promise and pay $5m to a software expert who debunked data the conspiracy theorist touted in advancing Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 presidential election defeat was the result of voting fraud, an arbitration panel decided.

In its decision, the panel said: “The data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.”
…

On Wednesday, a panel of the American Arbitration Association ruled in a dispute between Lindell and Robert Zeidman, an expert who took up the challenge.

Based on its analysis, the panel said, “Mr Zeidman performed under the contract … Failure to pay Mr Zeidman the $5m prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”

Lindell has vowed to take this matter to court. Of course he will. That is what he does.

There was a parenthetical comment in this news report that said that Lindell “is recovering from substance use disorder”. I wondered why he always seemed to be hyper-energetic in his public appearances, talking non-stop and at a high volume. This may be the explanation.

How Harry and Meghan’s child became part of the Disney-DeSantis feud.

The governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is a prime example, if you needed one, that having elite educational credentials (he attended Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Law School) does not mean that you are smart. I wrote before that I thought his decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 (while he has not yet made a formal announcement, he has done pretty much everything that a prospective candidate does) was not a good idea, that he would suffer because of it, and that he would have been in a far better position in 2028.

Further evidence that his political skills are sub-par comes from the fight he picked with the Disney corporation, escalating it to such ridiculous levels that it risks backfiring on him. DeSantis seems to think that running on an ‘anti-woke’ platform will be his key to success in outflanking Trump on the culture war grievance issues. He has bragged that ‘Florida is where woke goes to die’. The word ‘woke’ is conveniently undefined, meaning that one can claim to be anti-woke by seizing on any aspect of the culture wars and opposing any moves that seek to make society more egalitarian by promoting acceptance of marginalized groups. In particular, ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric has been used to attack equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community.
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The aftermath of the Fox-Dominion settlement

As far as a I can tell of the settlement of the case, Fox News personalities who told all those lies about Dominion and the elections will not have to make on-air apologies.

It looks like Dominion wanted a large financial settlement more than they wanted on-air apologies from Fox, and Fox wanted to avoid giving on-air apologies and was willing to pay almost $800 million to avoid doing that. Dominion likely used the demand for apologies as leverage to get Fox to pay up. While this is a large amount, Murdoch media is used to seeing fines for wrongdoing as just the cost of doing business. While many of us would have liked to see all the Fox people squirm on the witness stand and show public contrition for their irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric, ultimately Dominion is a business, not a pro-democracy or media watchdog organization, and it made a business decision.

But there are other cases that in the works and it will be interesting to see what impact this result will have on those cases.
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Last minute delay in Fox-Dominion defamation trial

[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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The Tennessee state legislature goes off the rails

The old saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was provided another example in the Tennessee state legislature where Republicans have a supermajority that enables them to do pretty much anything they want. Recently they used that power to vote to expel two young black members of the legislature because of their calls for gun reforms following yet another mass shooting in the US, this one resulting in the deaths of three students and three staff members at a Christian school in Nashville. This expulsion has made national news and the two expelled members have become national figures.

Sue Halpern gave the background to this action.

On March 30th, three Democratic members—Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson—now known as the Tennessee Three, stepped into the well of the chamber without being formally recognized and led the student protesters sitting in the gallery in the chant “No action, no peace,” demanding that lawmakers pass gun-reform legislation. Jones and Pearson used a megaphone. On April 6th, their Republican colleagues voted to expel both members for having violated the decorum of the chamber. When Johnson was asked why they, and not she, had been kicked out, she was blunt, saying, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.”

This article reports on the backlash to the expulsions, including the fact that the constituencies represented by the expelled members acted quickly to send them back into the legislature as interim members until elections are held in their districts.
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Fox’s own fact checking team knew the claims of election fraud were false

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 case against Trump

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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Trump the creep

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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Not the usual people Trump likes to surround himself with

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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Dominion case against Fox News to go to trial in April

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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