Rupert Murdoch gave Jared Kushner ‘confidential information’ about Biden’s 2020 ads before they were public, Dominion alleges
Rupert Murdoch #RupertMurdoch
A new filing in Dominion’s mammoth defamation lawsuit against Fox News includes claims that network chief Rupert Murdoch gave former Trump advisor Jared Kushner confidential information about Joe Biden’s strategic moves in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
Dominion Voting Systems opposed Fox News’ move to throw out the lawsuit in a new filing on Monday, in a high-stakes case set for an April trial. The voting company alleged through depositions, and internal texts and emails, that Murdoch provided Jared Kushner with advance knowledge of then-candidate Joe Biden’s political ads and debate preparations.
“During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public),” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in the filing.
Murdoch is also quoted from his depositions in the case, agreeing that he “seriously doubted” any claims of widespread election fraud pushed by the Trump camp.
In response to Insider’s request for comment, a Fox News spokesperson said, in part, that Dominion was “mischaracterizing the facts.”
“Dominion cherry-picks any soundbite it can find from any corner of the Fox organization even though it admits in its brief — 117 pages later — that most of that evidence is utterly irrelevant to the legal issues in this case. Dominion’s focus on such irrelevant evidence demonstrates that it is more interested in headlines than law or fact.”
On March 26, 2021, Dominion filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News seeking $1.6 billion in damages, claiming that the network gave prominence to the election-fraud claims as a tactic to revive viewership as ratings dropped after President Donald Trump’s loss.
Dominion manufactures and sells electronic voting hardware, software, and voting machines, and was repeatedly targeted with conspiracies in the wake of the 2020 election.
And in the company’s lawsuit, Dominion claimed that Fox News “sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.”
Two months later, Fox News filed to dismiss the motion, and by December 2021, a judge had rejected Fox’s motion.