4/13/21
Last November, former Trump attorney Sidney Powell boasted on Fox Business Network that she was getting ready to "release the Kraken," evoking some mythical war on the nonexistent voting fraud Donald Trump was baselessly claiming had disenfranchised him. “We are talking about hundreds of thousands of votes,” Powell told host Lou Dobbs in the interview. Dobbs likely didn't realize the Kraken would bite back. After an election technology company filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox Corporation and Fox News, the network aired awkward rebuttals of the claims from their own hosts. The outlet additionally canceled the Fox Business Network program hosted by Dobbs, who also became a subject of the suit. Fending off her own lawsuit by a different technology firm, Powell’s attorneys recently argued her fraud claims were so ridiculous that "no reasonable person" would ever believe something so preposterous. In other words, please don't make me produce evidence for this claim in discovery—it's indefensible. Like Fox, Newsmax is facing legal trouble. In December, Dominion Voting Systems sued Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN), for personal and professional harms.
Dominion, which has filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox for spreading lies about its voting machines, has also sent letters to Newsmax and OANN threatening legal action. The trend is clear, as The Washington Post's Aaron Blake points out: Almost no person or entity who helped spread Trump's election fraud lies is even attempting to back them up with evidence. In fact, most of those lie-spreaders have either partially or totally backed away from them in the face of litigation: Fox, Newsmax, OANN, Giuliani’s radio host, the RNC, and two former Trump lawyers. It's almost as if the dozens of legal defeats Trump's attorneys suffered in the courts shortly after the election are now being verified by the very people who helped lay the foundation and pushed those cases to begin with. Still, numerous polls have found that anywhere from half to three-quarters of Republican voters falsely believe the election was "stolen" from Trump. Just last week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll put that number at 60% of Republicans. If only the death of the Big Lie went out with a big bang rather than a whimper, it might undo some of the damage done by the fraud Trump and his sycophants perpetrated against GOP voters and the nation.
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