Citizen Cartwright

The Fox, Dominion settlement

As a packed courtroom was waiting for opening statements to begin on Tuesday, "gasps filled the air" when Judge Eric Davis told the jury shortly before 4 p.m. that the two parties had resolved the matter, says The New York Times. 

 

Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. had agreed to settle the case for $787.5 million.

 

The settlement, one of the biggest ever in a defamation case, came with this admission from Fox News:

 

"We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

 

Dominion Voting Systems had alleged that Fox stars, executives, journalists and guests defamed the election tech company for segments in which conspiracies held it had switched votes for then-President Trump to Democratic challenger Biden.

 

"Dominion started this case because Fox's defamatory statements had severely damaged its reputation,” says Tom Wienner, a retired Michigan corporate litigator who's been following the case closely at the request of NPR. "By largely trying its case in the court of public opinion, Dominion has gone a long way toward restoring its good name. In the process, of course, Fox's own reputation has been seriously undermined.”

 

It's uncommon for defamation suits to get to trial, in part because the bar for proving “actual malice” — the legal standard that requires plaintiffs to show that defendants knew what they were saying was a lie, or had a reckless disregard for the truth — is so high, says the Times. It's rarer yet for one to feature the volume of evidence that Dominion had amassed against Fox.

 

In the run-up to trial, Dominion publicly released internal communications among Fox executives, hosts and producers that revealed how the country’s most-watched cable news network set in motion a strategy to win back viewers who'd tuned out after Trump’s loss. 

 

Those communications showed how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud.

 

Some Fox hosts privately described their colleagues as “reckless” for endorsing Trump’s false claims, acknowledging that there was “no evidence” to back them up. Yet for weeks, Fox continued to give a platform to election deniers despite the doubts about their credibility. Dominion challenged statements that were made on multiple programs on multiple nights. Typically, defamation cases involve just a single disputed statement, the Times says.

 

The settlement deal is a significant amount of money, even for a company the size of Fox, says The Associated Press. It represents about a quarter of the $2.96 billion the company reported earning last year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — a figure often used to approximate a company’s cash flow.

 

The settlement is about half of what Dominion was asking for in the trial. But Elie Honig, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says, “I didn’t think there was any way they would get $1.6 billion — even when they proved their case, even if they proved it overwhelmingly to a jury. Let’s remember, by its own estimation, Dominion valued the entire company at somewhere between $30 and $80 million. This settlement is 10 times the value of Dominion as an entire company. That’s how strong a statement this is with this number.”

 

Fox faces a separate $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic USA, a voting-machine company that’s making claims similar to Dominion's. 

 

I’m not seeing any mention of the settlement on Fox News' main web page this morning. Here is what I found when I searched the site.

Frank Luntz advice to GOP candidates on beating Trump

The longtime pollster and GOP strategist says he’s run two dozen focus groups on why Donald Trump still inspires so much loyalty and how someone else can win the Republican nomination in 2024.

 

Here is his advice for GOP candidates, in a New York Times guest essay:

 

— While Trump’s GOP support is wide and deep, "roughly a third of Trump voters prioritize the character of the country and the people who run it — and that’s enough to change the 2024 outcome.”

 

— There’s a clear way to appeal to Republican voters firmly focused on the future rather than on re-litigating the past. It starts with a simple campaign pitch along the lines “We can do better. We must do better.”

 

— GOP candidates should get endorsements from Trump voters who have a message like “Donald Trump had my back in 2016. Now, it’s all about him. I didn’t leave Donald Trump. He left me.”

 

— Compliment Trump’s presidency while you criticize the person.

 

— Appeal to Trump’s elderly voters by making it about their grandchildren: “We mistake loud for leadership, condemnation for commitment. The values we teach our children should be the values we see in our president.”

 

— The increase in the annual deficit under Trump is the third-biggest, relative to the size of the economy, of any presidential administration, Luntz says. A campaign pitch he suggests: “We can’t afford these deficits. We can’t afford this debt. We can’t afford Donald Trump.”

 

— During his 2016 campaign, Trump condemned President Obama repeatedly for his occasional rounds of golf, promising not to travel at taxpayer expense, Luntz says. Yet Trump played nearly 300 rounds of golf on his personal courses, costing taxpayers about $150 million in additional security. This could be lethal on the debate stage: “While more than half of America was working paycheck to paycheck, he was working on his short game. And you paid for it!”

 

— Trump surely loses if Republicans come to believe that a vote for him in the primaries means the election of Biden in the general.

 

— You need to get at least one conservative commentator on your side by being as tough as Trump but more committed publicly to traditional conservative ideology like ending wasteful Washington spending. “Some people want to make a statement. I want to make a difference.”

Media's take as Trump is first current or former president to be indicted

The indictment is under seal, and the Lawfare blog says "we encourage all commentators to refrain alike from triumphant claims that the rule of law has been vindicated or from clucking about witch hunts. There will be plenty of time for that later.”

Sounds sensible to me.

So here is “background material on the fact pattern that has reportedly given rise to the indictment,” from Lawfare.

And here is a “what to know about Alvin Bragg” — the Harlem-raised, Harvard Law-educated Manhattan district attorney who convened the grand jury that indicted Trump — by The Associated Press.

Here is a “what happens next,” with Trump expected to turn himself in next week, also from AP. “There is no playbook for booking an ex-president with U.S. Secret Service protection,” AP says.

If you’re interested, here is a roundup of reaction to the indictment from Trump — "This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” he says — and others, from Reuters.

And here is reaction from Trump’s 2024 GOP rivals, from Fox News.

Finally, here is what I find interesting possible schadenfreude from our British friends at BBC News:

"In some ways, a former head of state being charged with a crime and possibly even going to prison is not news. It's happened all over the world down the ages: hundreds of presidents, prime ministers and military leaders turfed out of palaces and straight into prisons.

"But America regards itself as exceptional; and Washington, the city on a hill that provides a moral and democratic beacon for the world.

"Historians refer to the 20th Century as The American Century — will they do the same for this one?"

Trump’s CPAC speech and the future of American democracy

The initial reporting I saw on last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference seemed to treat it as more-or-less a political sideshow.

 

AP: "While CPAC was once a must-stop for candidates mulling Republican presidential runs, DeSantis and other major likely contenders skipped this year’s gathering amid scandal [involving CPAC host Matt Schlapp] and as the group has increasingly become aligned with Trump.”

 

But as this week has progressed, I’ve come across more articles on why we need to pay attention to what Trump said.

 

(I ran out of time putting this blog together yesterday because the only transcript of Trump’s speech was by Rev, with which I wasn’t familiar and wasn’t sure I could trust. And the audio of Trump’s speech ran an hour and 45 minutes. By the way, I read the Rev transcript as I watched the speech, and Rev only made a couple of minor mistakes.)

 

On Wednesday morning, The New York Times email of top headlines included an article about Trump’s speech: "Framing the 2024 election as a dire moment in an us-versus-them struggle — “the final battle,” as he put it — Mr. Trump charged forward in an uncharted direction for American politics, talking openly about leveraging the power of the presidency for political reprisals.”

 

So I looked around for more. Former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh writes in The Bulwark this takeaway from CPAC: 

 

"The Republican Party voting base has been radicalized. They no longer believe in truth, they’ve given up on democracy, they want to destroy their political opponents, and they want an authoritarian to give them back the America they long for. This radicalization was on full display these past four days. From ‘Joe Biden is not the legitimate occupant of the White House’ to ‘COVID was a hoax’ to ‘transgender Americans need to be eradicated’ . . . the lies, disinformation, misinformation, attacks on our democracy, cultish calls for an authoritarian, and utter cruelty—it was all there. This radicalism is not a bug; it is a core feature of today’s GOP.

 

"Donald Trump is a big problem. The millions and millions who support him are an even bigger problem. But the millions and millions who still don’t know how or why anyone could support Trump are the biggest problem. The base of my former political party needs to be defeated. And in order to defeat them, we need to understand them and take them seriously."

 

I encourage you to scan the Rev transcript.

 

Here is the video of Trump’s speech, from C-SPAN. 

 

And here is the transcript, from Rev.

What does it really mean when an ex-official has classified documents?

When I was a congressional staffer working on international environmental issues, at one point I spent several weeks in Europe, meeting with EU officials in Brussels; U.N. officials in Geneva, Switzerland; and at a conference with science diplomats in Vienna.

 

In Geneva, I had the pleasure of working with my uncle, a long-time science diplomat at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. there, on climate change, endangered species and other issues. 

 

One day when we were in his office, he handed me a document marked “classified.” I was surprised, since I didn’t have a security clearance allowing me access to classified information. But the document was just the when and where of an ordinary meeting we were attending.

 

And one possible reason classified documents go astray is that too many documents are classified in the first place, experts say. The federal government classifies more than 50 million documents each year, according to The New York Times.

 

Concern about overclassification dates back as far as 1956, when a Defense Department committee set up to tackle the issue during President Eisenhower’s first term said overclassification had reached “serious proportions” and recommended an overhaul.  

 

In many agencies, officials “face no downsides for over-classifying something,” says Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and former special counsel at the Pentagon. “But if you under-classify something, really dire consequences could come for you.”

 

Of those more than 50 million documents classified every year, just 5 to 10 percent warrant the classification, Hathaway estimates, based on her experience at the Pentagon.

 

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Intelligence Committee, says: “One of the reasons why perhaps people become lackadaisical and less than vigilant in protecting classified information is the experience of most members of Congress when you go … get briefed [in a] secure facility on whatever it is the administration wants to brief you on and you come out of there saying, ‘I could have watched cable news and read the newspaper as much as they were willing to tell me.' And so, they think, ‘Well, this is not that big a deal. You say it’s secret, but this is not a secret. It’s open source stuff. …’"

 

U.S. officials have offered to brief as soon as this week the “Gang of Eight” — the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and of both intelligence committees — on their investigation into the classified documents found at former President Trump’s Florida residence and President Biden’s Delaware home and former private office, The Associated Press reported on Sunday.

 

But the briefing isn't expected to include direct access to the documents that were seized, AP says. Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked for that access in a letter last week to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

 

So will we, the public, be able to assess the actual significance of these documents? Seems like it’ll be classified.  

Special counsel appointed in Biden classified documents probe

Attorney General Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to investigate the presence of classified documents at the Washington office President Biden used after leaving the Obama administration and at Biden’s house in Delaware.

 

Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney appointed by former President Trump, will lead the investigation.

 

Here is a profile of Hur, from NBC News.

 

In November, Garland appointed Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor, to oversee concurrent investigations into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. 

 

"Though the situations are factually and legally different, the discovery of classified documents at two separate locations tied to Biden — as well as the appointment of a new special counsel — would almost certainly complicate any prosecution that the department might bring against Trump," says The Associated Press.

 

Here is an explainer of the role of a special counsel, from AP.

McCarthy keeps losing House speaker votes, despite Trump efforts

Kevin McCarthy lost three more ballots Wednesday. None of the 20 lawmakers who'd opposed him Tuesday dropped their opposition, despite former President Trump’s supportive post Wednesday morning on his social media site.

 

“REPUBLICANS, DO NOT TURN A GREAT TRIUMPH INTO A GIANT & EMBARRASSING DEFEAT,” Trump wrote. “IT’S TIME TO CELEBRATE, YOU DESERVE IT. Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, and maybe even a GREAT JOB — JUST WATCH!”

 

The 20 defectors voted on Wednesday for Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., who was just elected to his second term and was the first African American man to be nominated by Republicans for the job.

 

Only one lawmaker changed their vote: previous McCarthy backer Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., switched her vote to “present.” 

 

In another McCarthy concession to his critics, his political action committee cut a deal with the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group that's opposed McCarthy’s bid for speaker, agreeing not to spend money to support candidates in open primaries in safe Republican seats. That had been a major demand of conservatives, who've been angered at the group’s efforts to boost more mainstream candidates over hard-right ones, says The New York Times. 

 

Here is more on the views of McCarthy’s GOP opponents, from The Associated Press.

 

Here is more on Donalds, also from AP.

Trump tax returns to be released, IRS didn’t do audits

The House Ways and Means Committee voted on party lines Tuesday to release six years of the former president's tax returns. The returns will cover the period between 2015 and 2021, the years Trump was running for president and serving in the White House, according to panel members. The returns are to be redacted to remove information like Social Security and bank account numbers and released in several days.

 

Hours later, a report released by the panel’s Democratic majority said the IRS didn't follow its own policy because it didn't audit Trump during his first two years in office. 

 

An accompanying report released by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also found repeated faults with the IRS’s approach to auditing Trump and his companies. 

 

The reports released Tuesday renew one of the biggest questions that's surrounded Trump, says The Associated Press: Why did he abandon the post-Watergate tradition of White House hopefuls releasing their tax returns? 

 

Trump and those around him consistently have said IRS audits prevented him from doing so. There aren’t any laws that would have barred Trump from voluntarily releasing his returns even if they were being audited, AP says.

 

In response to the report findings, the Ways and Means Committee is proposing legislation to beef up the IRS’ approach, requiring an initial report no later than 90 days after the filing of a president’s tax returns. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House will “move swiftly” to advance the legislation. 

 

Democrats say the IRS is ill-equipped to audit high-income, complex tax returns and instead targets filers in lower-income brackets — something the lawmakers have tried to remedy in their work on the panel.

 

“Because of the dismantling of funding to the IRS, they have not been unable to do their job,” says Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev.

 

Republicans have vowed to cut recent increased funding for more IRS agents. It's the first bill they'll consider when they take over the House majority in less than two weeks, says AP.

Will DOJ pursue House panel’s charges against Trump, allies?

It’s unclear how closely the special counsel’s office in charge of the Justice Department’s own investigation will follow the path mapped out by the House Jan. 6 committee — or whether Trump and others will face any criminal charges at all, says The New York Times.

 

The panel on Monday urged the Justice Department to consider prosecuting Trump for four different crimes involving his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election and his behavior during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

 

There's been some overlap between criminal statutes cited by the department and the charges the committee recommended, according to search warrants and subpoenas that have surfaced during the federal inquiry, the Times says.

 

The laws the committee cited:

 

— Obstruction of an official proceeding 

Both the committee and prosecutors have placed this at the center of their work, says the Times. DOJ mentioned that charge in a warrant used in June to seize the cellphone of Jeffrey Clark, a former department official whom the committee referred for criminal charges on Monday.

 

And prosecutors already have used the obstruction charge in nearly 300 criminal cases to describe how the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 disrupted the certification of the election that was taking place there during a joint session of Congress.

 

— Conspiracy to defraud the United States

This charge has been used in several Justice Department cases against both far-right extremists and ordinary rioters who appeared to have planned in advance to storm the Capitol.

This conspiracy charge may better describe the evidence against Trump, says the Times. According to the committee, he defrauded the public by making constant false claims that the election had been rigged against him.

 

— Conspiracy to make a false statement

The committee says this charge is warranted because Trump took part in a scheme to send to Congress and the National Archives fake slates of electors declaring that he was the victor in several key states that were actually won by Joe Biden.

 

— Inciting or aiding an insurrection

This is the most serious charge the panel has recommended against Trump and likely would be the hardest to prove, says the Times. 

 

While the Justice Department has won a conviction on a related charge, seditious conspiracy, against Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and is set to try five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, for sedition, it hasn't charged anyone with insurrection in more than 900 criminal cases, the Times says.

 

On the other hand, a federal judge in Washington laid the ground for a potential insurrection case against Trump in a ruling in February that permitted a series of Jan. 6-related civil cases filed against the former president to move forward, says the Times.

 

Here is the text of the Jan. 6 panel’s summary of its report, from NBC News.

Part 4 of NYTimes editorial series on violent extremism in U.S.

As I mentioned in my Dec. 13 post, I try to run the most balanced information I can find on what’s going on and tend to avoid opinion articles and media editorials. 

 

But the Times’ series on violent extremism is trying to point out all the levers to protect our democracy from political violence and seems to me worth our attention.  

 

“One of the most effective ways to deter political violence is to make it unacceptable in public life. To do that, all political leaders have an important role to play,” says the Times in its Nov. 26 editorial.

 

"Leaders in politics, law enforcement, the media and elsewhere have an obligation to do everything they can to remove from public life those who participate in or endorse political violence.

 

"The onus falls on Republicans. While voters this month rejected some of the most extreme candidates, the party is still very much under the spell of Mr. Trump and his brand of authoritarianism. Two prominent Republicans who have been outspoken about right-wing extremism and baseless lies, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have been driven out of office. Meanwhile, the spread of conspiracy theories that have already inspired violence continues unabated from politicians and conservative media.

"Even if Mr. Trump doesn’t become the party’s nominee for president, the party and many of its supporters seem to have convinced themselves that the spread of extremism in service of their causes is not an urgent concern. Those who can influence the direction of the party — its voters and its biggest donors and supporters — must do everything they can to convince them otherwise. American democracy depends on it.

 

"Democrats, too, have a role to play. They should not spend money on far-right fringe candidates in the primaries with the hopes of beating them in general elections. To do so only further pollutes the public square, even if it can lead to Democratic victories, as it apparently did this year. Rather than giving in to the temptation to tar the entire party with the actions of its worst members, Democrats should continue to find opportunities for bipartisanship whenever possible.

"The alternative is allowing extremism to run rampant until the degradation of American politics is complete.

 

"Political disagreement need not include the menace of violence. Americans, and their political leaders, have the ability to choose a different future.”