Featured Image Credit: Fox News
Topics: US News, Politics, Donald Trump
Joe Harker
Over a million pages of internal messages between Fox News employees has revealed that a former producer for Tucker Carlson compared election deniers to 'negotiating with terrorists'.
A huge amount of information has been released as part of the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems.
The lawsuit filed by the electronic voting machine manufacturer says that members of the Republican party had accused them of being partly responsible for Donald Trump's loss to Joe Biden.
Dominion have accused Fox News of making false claims about the 2020 US elections in an attempt to explain why Trump lost, claiming that the news outlet 'sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes'.
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This is not the only mega-money lawsuit that Fox News are facing either, as technology company Smartmatic are demanding damages of $2.7 billion from them.
In the aftermath of Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, Trump took a long time to concede defeat and while Trump later admitted that he didn't win the election he continued to claim the vote was rigged.
Investigations after the elections found no evidence of voter fraud, while court filings found that the Trump campaign knew that claims of vote machine rigging were untrue.
Despite this claims that the vote was rigged continued to persist from Trump supporters, and files released in connection to Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News have revealed some of the internal conversations going on around that time.
Sydney Powell, a former lawyer for Trump, had claimed that she had an affidavit about Dominion and there were discussions between Fox employees about whether or not to address her claims on Tucker Carlson's show.
In the messages, Alex Pfeiffer - who used to work as a producer for Tucker Carlson and has since left Fox - said the claims were 'so insane but our viewers believe it' and warned that addressing how baseless the claims were 'might insult them'.
Pfeiffer said dealing with people denying the results of the 2020 US elections was 'like negotiating with terrorists'.
He wrote that it was like dealing with 'especially dumb ones' who were 'cousin f**king types not Saudi royalty'.
Pfeiffer also pointed out that Dominion machines were used in important swing states like Ohio and Florida which Trump won during the 2020 election.
Elsewhere in the messages Raj Shah, the White House deputy press secretary between 2017 and 2019 who later joined Fox, said: "The only clear cut evidence for voter fraud is the failed attempts from Trump."