Bill Barr Subpoenaed in Dominion’s $1.6 Billion Defamation Suit Against Fox News
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Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr received a subpoena Friday to testify in Dominion Voting Systems’ ongoing defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
ABC News noted on Monday that the court docket showed Dominion filed to have Barr testify late last week as the company continues to make its case that Fox News and others knowingly pushed false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election – implicating the voting machines company in various conspiracy theories.
“Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” Dominion’s complaint reads. The voting machine company is suing Fox News for $1.6 billion in damages.
“We are confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs,” responded the network in a statement.
In late June, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis allowed Dominion to sue Fox News’s parent company as well. The judge rejected a motion to dismiss extending the lawsuit to Fox Corps “because Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch may have acted with ‘actual malice’ in directing the network to broadcast conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump,” reported Bloomberg News at the time.
“As part of the Fox News suit, Dominion recently issued an additional string of subpoenas to officials including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who Trump famously called after the 2020 election asking to help him ‘find’ the exact number of votes he needed to win the state of Georgia,” ABC added.
Barr has made headlines recently for his deposition before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his frank assessment that the allegations of fraud in the election were categorically false.
“I told them it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on it, and they were doing a great disservice to the country,” Barr is on record telling the Jan. 6 committee, in regards to his conversations with other Trump officials.
“I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people,” Barr added.
Under Barr’s direction, the Department of Justice investigated Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in real-time and concluded before Jan. 6 that no such fraud had taken place.
Dominion is also suing Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who had their motions to dismiss their cases rejected by judges.
