Despite entertaining a guest who promoted a claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen, Fox News’ Sean Hannity has said he did not believe it at all.
In a taped deposition for Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 million defamation lawsuit against Fox News, the host shed light on whether he actually believed allegations the company helped rig the presidential election, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
His answer was clear and concise as he stated, “I did not believe it for one second.”
“I did not believe it for one second.”
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 22, 2022
That was the answer Sean Hannity gave, under oath, in a deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, according to information disclosed in a court hearing on Wednesday. https://t.co/nIRYFGwBpB
The Times pointed to a Nov. 30, 2020, interview with Sidney Powell, one of then-President Donald Trump’s attorneys who was promoting claims the election was stolen.
In the interview, Powell claimed there was “corruption all across the country, in countless districts.”
“At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used ‘to trash large batches of votes,’” The Times explained.
But rather than push back on the claim, the paper noted Hannity suggested Democrats were trying to shut down whistle-blowers who could prove her claims of fraud.
Additionally, it explained the deposition from Hannity and “others” is the “strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.”
And it could prove to be crucial to Dominion’s lawsuit due to the standard required to win a defamation case.
“Dominion has to persuade a jury that people at Fox were, in effect, saying one thing in private while telling their audience exactly the opposite. And that requires showing a jury convincing evidence that speaks to the state of mind of those who were making the decisions at the network,” The Times noted.
Stephen Shackelford, a lawyer for Dominion, said in court on Wednesday, “Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies.”
Justin Nelson, another Dominion lawyer, revealed the company has evidence an employee of Fox News’ parent company tried to convince Trump’s staff to ditch Powell.
Hindsight is 2020, and for those who were not anti-Trump, it was hard to believe something bad could have come out of humoring his claims about the election — after years of dire predictions about the former president failed to pan out.
Many of them probably believed the Jan. 6 certification of the election would come, election challenges would be shot down, it would be over, and then they could pivot to talking about President Joe Biden’s administration. But, of course, history did not pan out that way.
Even if the Jan. 6 riot did not occur, it was still not a good idea to be promoting claims Fox hosts believed to be false. For one, it could cost the company a lot of money.
And it made Republicans and conservatives look like kooks and conspiracy theorists who are not serious people.
But it also degraded faith in our election system and fueled the notion that despite all the work people put into politics and turning out the vote, it does not matter because the game is rigged. And with that, people will start to lose faith in the grand experiment of our country and system of government.
