Dominion Voting Systems executives have taken credit for Fox News firing Tucker Carlson and say they want all of the messages revealed in their $787.5m defamation lawsuit to be made public.
The right-wing host exited the channel just days after Rupert Murdoch agreed to the massive settlement over claims that personalities on his channel had promoted Donald Trump’s election lies even though they knew them to be false.
As part of discovery in the case, Dominion’s lawyers found text messages in which Fox News hosts seemingly acknowledged that Mr Trump’s fraud claims were false, but gave them airtime anyway.
“Dominion did not insist on them firing Tucker Carlson as part of the settlement,” said the company’s lawyer Stephen Shackelford told Axios.
“But the very fact that that’s what resulted out of all of this, and it’s traceable from the work that Dominion set in motion ... of course I know what’s in the redacted stuff and I can’t say anything about it.”
And he added: “I hope that it all gets un-redacted at some point.”
Hootan Yaghoobzadeh, the co-founder of Staple Street Capital which owns Dominion, told the outlet that Carlson’s firing was “much more profound” than “some disingenuous apology or forced statement” in which Fox News admitted wrongdoing.
“For us to have a meaningful impact, we had to make sure that we got that rock moving,” he said.
And he insisted the company had never wanted to settle the case without saying why they had done so in the end,
“We made sure that all the attorneys understood that settlement was like a curse word. We didn’t want to talk about it,” he told Axios.
“Our strategy was to go to trial, get to a verdict and accomplish three goals, which were to make sure the truth got exposed, kept Fox accountable, and that we were compensated for the damages they inflicted.”
