After suing Fox News for $1.6 billion, Dominion has its eye on other media outlets as well as Donald Trump, a lawyer for the voting-machine company said
- Dominion could sue other media outlets following its lawsuit against Fox News, its attorney said.
- Dominion claims Fox News helped spread a conspiracy theory that its machines “flipped” votes.
- Tom Clare told Axios other outlets helped spread the theory. It was “a fair assumption” Dominion would sue them.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Dominion Voting Systems has already filed four defamation lawsuits over baseless claims that its machines helped rig the election, including one against Fox News — and other media outlets could be next, the company’s attorney said.
It could also sue individual Fox staff, and the company also hasn’t ruled out suing former president Donald Trump, Tom Clare told Axios Monday.
A conspiracy claim that started spreading during the 2020 election said Dominion voting machines “flipped” votes from Trump to President Joe Biden through a method developed with the regime of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez. The theory has been thoroughly debunked.
On Friday, Dominion filed a lawsuit against Fox News, claiming the network gave prominence to the election-fraud claims as a tactic to revive its ratings. Fox News told Insider that it was “proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”
Clare told Axios that other outlets “played a similar role to Fox in spreading these lies,” and that it was “a fair assumption” that Dominion would sue other media outlets. He didn’t name any outlets.
“We’re trying to get to the media outlets that really gave this a much bigger platform,” he said. “I expect that we’re going to be holding them accountable as well.”
Dominion’s lawyers were still looking into the evidence, he said. “This is not one of those cases where we’re going to fire first and aim later.”
Since January, Dominion has also filed lawsuits against pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell, Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, claiming they helped spread the conspiracy theory. It is seeking $1.3 billion damages in each suit.
Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in its Fox News suit.
Smartmatic has also sued Fox News, naming specific hosts
Dominion’s lawsuit was just against Fox News. Fellow voting-technology company Smartmatic, which has also been accused of “flipping” votes, named Fox News hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro as defendants in its lawsuit against the network.
Clare said that Dominion hadn’t ruled out suing individual Fox personalities, and that it could join these cases to the larger Fox News one, or file separate cases.
But he added that “Fox is the entity with the megaphone.”
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Several of Fox’s shows reported that there was no evidence of Dominion’s systems changing votes. But Fox News, in particular its opinion hosts, “questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774 times” in the two weeks after the network called the race, according to Media Matters. Insider has asked Fox News for comment on the Media Matters report.
When asked whether Dominion would file a suit against Trump, Clare said: “We haven’t ruled anyone out.”
He said that Dominion’s lawyers would look into the role that the president and the White House played in spreading the conspiracy theory. “If the evidence leads us to believe that we’ve got strong claims, that’s something we’re gonna look at.”
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