Commentary, National Commentary

Editor’s Editorial: Courts Set to Slam Trump & Fox News

It’s not in southeast Turkey and Syria, or on the battlefields of Ukraine, but it’s in the courtrooms of the U.S. where the most seismic events are occurring this week. With sincerest apologies for all who’ve suffered and died from the great earthquakes and military/civilian casualties of the resistance to Putin’s brutal military offensive. Nonetheless we have to assert that it is the U.S. justice system that is poised to inflict the greatest blow of all this week – long-awaited and past due blows against the crimes of the deceitful Donald Trump and Fox News. 

The words from the jury foreman of the special grand jury in Georgia made in TV interviews this week suggest that no less than Trump himself, and a dozen or so of his cohorts, are facing imminent and severe criminal indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in that state. Criminal indictments against Trump at long last. 

The other big news of near equal import comes from court documents just released in the Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News. Transcripts released from that trial of internal Fox News documents show that highest level Fox executives and mouthpieces, alike, admit that their coverage of the 2020 election results engaged in patent lying when they claimed the result of that election, of President Biden’s clear victory. was in doubt.

In addition, it is in the context of such revelations that the leadership of the entire Republican Party is also seriously called into question now, since news has come out that Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed over more than 41 hours worth of video tapes of the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol to none other than Fox News’ premiere liar and dissembler, Tucker Carlson.

Stated the highly respected Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe in an interview with The Guardian, the Dominion brief and request for summary judgment made public this week is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark in the history of free speech and freedom of the press.” 

Tribe said, “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant (Fox) admitted in writing that it was making up false information in order to increase its viewership and revenues,”Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.” As The Guardian pointed out, “The case concerns Fox News’ repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.”

Tribe said the filing establishes that Fox producers, owners and personalities from Rupert Murdoch down “were deliberately lying and knew they were lying.”

Consider how much suffering and pain these Fox lies have caused, even to this very day, when sadly it can be expected that millions of Americans will go on believing those lies and plotting against American democracy.