Sean Hannity Has Doomed Fox News In Defamation Lawsuit

According to reports, Fox News host Sean Hannity admitted in depositions that neither he nor any of the other anchors at Fox actually believed Donald Trump's election lies as they were pushing them on the network. This simple little admission from Hannity could absolutely doom the entire Fox Network, as it likely meets the criteria to show "actual malice" in the lawsuit. Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Well, folks, it might be all over for, uh, Fox News and their defense against the defamation lawsuit filed against them by Dominion Voting Systems. Which of, by the way, in case you forgot, is a 1.6 billion defamation lawsuit that Fox News has not been able to get dismissed in spite of many efforts to do so. And this past week, we learned that during his recent deposition, Sean Hannity may have blown the case for Fox altogether. Here's what happened. In late November of 2020, Sean Hannity brought on Sidney Powell on his Fox News program. Sidney Powell goes out there and makes the bogus claim that Dominion voting systems had rigged an algorithm to flip votes from Trump to Biden. That was on November 30th, 2020. Sean Hannity let it fly. Uh, Sean Hannity even asked her at one point, like, why were Democrats silencing the whistleblowers who wanted to prove the truth? So Sean Hannity went right along with it. He not only allowed the lies to go out on the network, he fostered them. So then fast forward to his deposition a couple weeks ago, Dominion's lawyers ask him like, did you believe any of this? And Sean Hannity said, quote, I did not believe it for one second. According to Dominion's Lawyers, that's pretty much the same story they heard from all of the Fox News hosts that they've talked to. We didn't believe it.

Congratulations. Then you just cost your company $1.6 billion because if you didn't believe it, and you're telling these people during depositions, which is basically the same thing as saying it under oath, you're telling them you didn't believe it, but you allowed it to go on there anyway. Now, one of the hurdles you have to, uh, overcome in a defamation lawsuit is proving actual malice. And actual malice, of course, means that they knew what they were doing was wrong or false, but they did it anyway. That's, that's what Sean Hannity's statement means. Like, I didn't believe it. I knew it was fake, but yeah, we did it anyway. Again, you just lost your lawsuit at this point. If Fox News's attorneys are not already scrambling to come up with a good settlement for dominion and a good settlement, I think at this point would be a full billion dollars because again, they're seeking 1.6, knock it down to a billion. They might be willing to settle. But you're not gonna win this. It is exceptionally difficult to prevail in a defam, uh, defamation lawsuit against a major media outlet here in the United States. The system is basically rigged, kind of in a good way, I'll put it that way. It's rigged in a good way to protect the media

Outlets so that not every Yahoo out there can sue them for everything they say. Sometimes they get it wrong, but in this particular instance, when your own hosts are admitting under oath that, no, we didn't believe any of this, that's the actual malice portion of this. I don't know what else Dominion's lawyers will need to prove in order to win this case. You already have the c e O of Fox News. You have her memos and emails telling people We cannot let the crazies prevail. Now you've got the hosts saying, we didn't believe any of it, but we let it happen. Anyway, Fox, with your lawyers, what the hell are you doing? Get out a sheet of paper, start writing some ones and zeros on it and hand it to Dominion and say, is this good enough for you so we can get this over with?

Because you won't win. And the problem, not just that you won't win because I know you have the money, it's gonna be a big ding to you, but you have the money even if you lose. But what you don't have is the ability to overcome all of the negative press and publicity that's going to continue coming out about your hosts lying to the American public. All of those emails from the ceo, emails, phone calls and all that stuff that we're gonna be getting from the lock, uh, uh, Murdoch family, Lachlan Murdoch, and Rupert Murdoch, all of that is going to be exceptionally damaging to your network. And the longer this drags out, the more the public's gonna find out. So again, get that checkbook out. Start writing some ones and zeros until Dominion tells you, stop. That's good enough because you're not gonna win this one. And you can thank Sean Hannity for that.