Fox News Pays Almost $800M To Settle Dominion Defamation Law (2)
People thought, was he nuts?
Was he insane?
I was actually like, no.
No, I was impressed.
He was actually cool.
But he firmly, firmly, firmly thinks that the election was stolen, but he hasn't done anything
to prove it whatsoever.
I remember vividly, PBD asking me, this would have been in November of 2020 when I'd never
heard of Sidney Powell.
He's like, what do you think about this lady?
And I'm like, I don't know.
This is when she was like, Hugo Chavez came back from the dead, China.
She's saying all these wild, over-the-top claims.
It's like, holy shit.
She seems credible.
She seems like she has it going on.
He says, what do you think?
I'm like, I don't know.
This is very odd.
It turns out she ended up being a QAnon conspiracy theorist, liar.
But again, a difference between what you think and what you can prove.
A lot of people genuinely think that the election was stolen.
I get it, but you haven't proven anything.
But wait a minute.
Those are two different things.
A person, what this can't do, a person should have the right to think and speculate.
The problem with this is, no, this is, you know, well, you have to go prove it is what
you need to do.
A lot of people that are speculating, saying the videos of people doing this, the voting,
the lady pulling this and doing it, that stuff, no one said, a lot of that stuff hasn't been
proven wrong.
Yeah, I saw it happen.
It just hasn't been like, you know, talked about.
Those are two different issues that you got to isolate.
The isolating here is they kept driving this over and over.
Yeah, okay, cool.
I mean, it is what it is.
You chose to settle.
By the way, I've been part of lawsuits and sometimes you're like, no, I'm not going to
settle.
It could take four or five years and then you may pay more or you may just say, you
know what, I'll just settle right now, pay half a million dollars or $200,000 or a million
dollars and move on.
What they're doing here is they're not saying, they're just saying, let's settle, let's move
on, let's put this behind us.
You know, we probably don't have a chance of winning this.
There's a conversation that happens with the lawyer.
They sit there and you tell him, listen, what are the chances we can win something like
this?
Ah, 20%, but it could cost us this, this, this, this, that.
Okay, if we settle, how much could we pay for right now?
If we win, it's going to be this, but if we lose, they could get us for the whole thing.
If we settle right now, can you start talking about settling?
Yes.
And then they go start having the discussion.
No, this does not mean there was no possibility of any voter fraud.
This just means the Dominion came in, they fought to protect their name and their reputation.
The part where I would like to see take place, which is deeply concerning, is not needing
45 days to count or 30 days to count, however many days it was to count.
I want to get the results the same night.
So when you all of a sudden say, oh, people stop working, listen, everybody gets skeptical
with that.
What do you mean you stop working?
There's one event that happens every four years.
You don't stop working on those days.
You know when people don't sleep and you have a lot of tired people at work?
When there's World Cup.
You know why?
Especially when it's another country and the game is at 2 a.m. and you're waking up to
watch the freaking game.
That happens once every four years.
It's called the World Cup.
You don't say, you know what, we're going to delay this thing because, and then we're
tired.
No, no.
It's an election.
Sit your ass down.
Count the votes.
If you don't want to do the job, don't be part of the counting the votes and let somebody
else do it that they take this thing valuable.
But that's the area where we sit there and say, I'm sorry, that's a little weird.
For the people that are skeptical about those types of things, I'm fully supportive of that.
Because we should sit there on election night and go to sleep knowing who our president
is for the next four years.
We shouldn't go to sleep and saying, we're going to need 35 more days to count.
My six-year-old knows how to count up to a pretty high number.
If they're looking for people to count, I can send four people to my kids.
Even Brooklyn is learning how to count.
She's 23 months old.
So if they need help, we got some support here for them.
I'll say one thing.
I fully agree with you 1,000%.
There is a difference between being skeptical and questioning and being certain.
And to anybody, whether it's Donald Trump definitely colluded with Russia, 100%.
It's like, oh, you know that Bob who watches CNN for two hours a day?
You know that?
Yeah.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
They definitely stole the election.
You know that Bill?
Because you watched Newsmax after dinner?
You can't be that certain.
You can be skeptical as hell.
No doubt.
I'll say one more thing about Fox News.
And I think one of the biggest reasons why they decided to settle, because the future
of their brand hinges on their personalities, whether it's Tucker, whether it's Hannity,
whether it's Laura Ingram, the Murdochs, the whole family.
The last thing that Fox needs for their brand is Tucker, hand on the oath, hand on the Bible
swearing under oath, it's the last thing that they need for their brand.
Let's pay this fine.
It sucks.
Get it over with.
Live to fight another day.
The last thing they needed to do was drag on and on and on and have all their stars,
all their executives on the trial.
I think there's something else here.
And what it is, is most folks probably don't understand the calculus of settlement.
The calculus of settlement is about time, is about reputation, and more than anything,
discovery.
When you're on the stand, if you go all the way to court, goes on the stand, the other
side can say, I want to ask about your HR policies.
And your lawyer says, wait, wait, wait, we object.
This is not related.
No, Your Honor.
It goes to their willingness to allow people to do this or this.
And if you get Lachlan, and you get Rupert on the stand, and you get other people, what
happens is you can do a tremendous amount of exploratory questioning that is actually
not directly related to the suit if you can simply get the judge to agree with you that
he'll allow the line of questioning.
And so there is not a media company anywhere in the known universe that wants any of their
executives on the stand.
MSNBC doesn't want the producers for Rachel Maddow on there.
Have you ever been in contact?
Were you in contact with Hillary Clinton's campaign on a daily basis and talking about
this?
They don't want that.
Well, these 10 emails say you were.
Great perspective there, Tom.
Great perspective.
This says, Jim DePodesta says that he reached out to Rachel, and Rachel covered.
In actual fact, we have the tape here, Rachel said this, which comes right out of DePodesta's
email to you of that morning at 10.16 a.m.
That is not what anybody wants.
I do not believe that the media industry, although their news divisions are cheering
what just happened to Fox, I don't think anybody in news actually thinks this is a good settlement.
And Pat, I showed this to Rob.
I sent this to you in Slack about what pisses me off about the double standard.
And the left is like, what?
Because it's all the left talking crap.
This is a video of all the Democrats during Trump's election win about how all these machines
and all this voting thing is all suspect.
Can you play it, Rob?
Computer voting because it's so vulnerable.
Weird.
We need to look at all the voting machines.
Every secretary of state needs to be assisted in making sure that they are not being hacked
and attacked.
I continue to think that our voting machines are too vulnerable.
Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that ballot recording machines and other voting
systems are susceptible to tampering.
Even hackers with limited prior knowledge, tools and resources are able to breach voting
machines.
Isn't that weird?
This is weird.
In 2018, electronic voting machines in Georgia and Texas deleted votes for certain candidates
or switch votes from one candidate to another.
The biggest seller of voting machines is doing something that violates cybersecurity 101,
I'm expecting that you install remote access software, which would make a machine like
that, you know, a magnet for fraudsters and hackers.
These voting machines can be hacked quite easily, really easily hack into them.
It makes it seem like all these states are doing different things, but in fact, three
companies are controlling that.
It is the individual voting machines that some pose that pose some of the greatest risk.
There are a lot of states that are dealing with antiquated machines to being hacked.
Workers were able to easily hack into the electronic voting machine.
It was possible to switch votes.
Forty three percent of American voters use voting machines.
Thank you.
That researchers have.
Sounds like a guy from Syria.
Yeah.
Security flaws.
But you can stop it before these guys get sued.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Before they get sued.
And in 2020, everything is going after Trump.
You're hearing them while all of a sudden, is it all good and you should believe in it?
And they look at how they're still going, mother, they're still talking about it.
But it's one side.
It's OK.
But the other side, it's not.
Does that is that the law you let's let's let's put a pin in this and come back in one
year.
I believe this is the law of unintended consequences on parade.
I want to come back in a year.
I'm not trying to stop the conversation right now, but I'd love to come back in a year,
replay the last 20 minutes, this podcast and look at all the stuff that's come out since
then, because, folks, this is the law of unintended consequences.
The water is coming down and it's going to go over the waterfall.
Can you like tell it to the average sixth grader on what what you're trying to say?
Yeah.
A year from now, we are going to look back and we are going to see multiple lawsuits
because I think Trump is going to come out and do things.
We're going to see other lawsuits against other media companies and other settlements.
And we are going to see just what has just happened here, like Portland, Oregon and all
the store closings and everything down there.
They allowed all this stuff during the woke time, Pat.
They defunded their police department.
And now, look, a year later, you look back and you say that didn't work.
And so that's that's an unintended consequence.
By the way, it's like you you ratted on your sister.
You got her in trouble with your dad.
And then four weeks later, you and your brother got home at 1 a.m. and then your dad says,
well, I grounded her for two weeks.
I'm grounding you for two weeks.
By the way, I would actually love to see that.
I would love to see CNN have to pay a half a billion dollars or whatever the amount is
