Dominion Reps Struggled to Find Defamatory Statements From Maria Bartiromo: ‘These Examples Don’t Actually Sound Very Damning’

New evidence shows that representatives of Dominion Voting Systems admitted that as of mid-December 2020, they didn’t believe anything Fox News host Maria Bartiromo had said about the company was defamatory.

In a December 17 email, Tony Fratto, a founding partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consulting firm working for Dominion, requested “a sampling of what we might consider defamatory statements” by Bartiromo and a number of other cable news hosts.

After he was provided such a sampling, Fratto remarked that he felt “there were some worse things said by some of these,” while naming Bartiromo in particular. “These examples don’t actually sound very damning. Is it possible we’re missing some?” he asked.

“In a lot of what we read for Maria, she actually worded things pretty carefully,” replied managing partner Stephanie Walstrom, who promised to follow up the next day.

“That’s all possible,” said Fratto, who appeared not to have yet reviewed Bartiromo’s statements. “Sometimes things sound bad when you’re listening but they’re actually more careful than you think.”

The next evening, a junior associate appeared to provide the promised follow-up in an email to Fratto on which Walstrom was cc’d:

We’ve combed through the Flag transcripts of Maria Bartiromo’s interviews, her Twitter, and her Parler, but she hasn’t made any statements that seem to have a strong case for defamation because she is always careful about either quoting other people (“a report issued says…”, “Sidney Powell says…”) or not mentioning Dominion specifically. She leaves it up to her guests to make most of the defamatory claims.

Bartiromo features prominently in Dominion’s billion-dollar lawsuit against Fox. An interview Bartiromo conducted with conspiracy-mongering attorney Sidney Powell on November 8, Dominion argued in a brief, demonstrates that “Fox placed Dominion at the center of a wide-ranging and inherently implausible conspiracy theory designed to perpetuate the ‘myth’ that Donald Trump — and not Joe Biden — legitimately won the 2020 election.”

Dominion argued in their brief that segment was defamatory because Bartiromo knew Powell’s source for her claims was an anonymous emailer who claimed that Justice Antonin Scalia had been murdered and  that Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch and deceased former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes were working “tor portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible.” The source submitted that Dominion was the “one common thread” in voting irregularities across the country and claimed to know all of the above because of supernatural abilities.

“The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it,” wrote the source. Bartiromo later admitted that the email was “kooky” in a deposition, but also noted that it wasn’t used on-air and she hadn’t looked at it beyond “forwarding it to [her] producer to check out.”

Dominion has pointed to hundreds of statements from Fox News hosts and guests they invited on air that they say promoted the stolen election conspiracy theory, for which Dominion was fingered as a key culprit. Fox’s case against Dominion holds that the commentary on the network is protected by the First Amendment, by arguing its hosts merely asked questions about newsworthy allegations being made by the president and his supporters.

The lawsuit also mentions a November 15 broadcast of Fox & Friends that included a promotional teaser for  Bartiromo’s show, during which Bartiromo said she would ask Powell about “potential kickbacks that government officials were asked to use Dominion actually enjoyed benefits to their families.”

In a statement, Fox News declared that “Thanks to today’s filings, Dominion has been caught red handed using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press. We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”

A spokesman for Hamilton Place Strategies told Mediaite that “Fox’s emails, texts, and deposition testimony speak for themselves. We welcome all scrutiny of our evidence because it all leads to the same place—Fox knowingly spread lies causing enormous damage to an American company.”