A defamation law firm representing Dominion Voting Systems has sent letters to conservative cable news channels Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News warning them of their intention to pursue legal action over the false and outlandish election fraud claims made about the company on their airwaves.
High-powered libel attorney Tom Clare, of the aggressive law firm Clare Locke, told The Daily Beast he has fired off legal letters to Newsmax, Fox, and OAN on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems, predicting the matter will end up in court.
“I think it’s fair to say in January we will be pulling the trigger on multiple litigation matters. The damage that they’ve done has already been enormous,” he said about the networks airing blatant falsehoods about voter fraud.
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“The time for a retraction is not now it was weeks ago. I’m certain a retraction does not undo the damage but it’s the right thing regardless of litigation,” he added.
Representatives for Newsmax and OAN did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Fox News pointed The Daily Beast to an interview the network did with a Dominion rep who told anchor Eric Shawn it was “physically impossible” to switch votes.
The communication to the Trump-boosting networks comes on the heels of similar letters sent to White House counsel Pat Cipollone and President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Clare Locke told the White House and Giuliani to preserve all records related to Dominion, which has been at the center of Trump’s baseless conspiracies about widespread election fraud.
“What this company is going through in terms of the threats to its business as a result of the reputational harm no company should have to go through,” Clare added.
“You’ve got provable false allegations that have been rejected time and time again by the courts with no evidence ever been shown to support them and massive damage.”
On Tuesday, an executive with Dominion filed his own separate lawsuit against Giuliani, former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, One America News, Newsmax, and other right-wing outlets, accusing the conspiracy-peddling attorneys and networks of causing “untold damage” due to their “rigged” election claims. Dominion is not part of that suit.
Seeking damages as well as a public retraction from all parties, Dominion’s director of product strategy and security Eric Coomer says his lawsuit is “an effort to unwind as much of the damage as possible done to me, my family, my life, and my livelihood as a result of the numerous false public statements that I was somehow responsible for ‘rigging’ the 2020 presidential election.”
Dominion isn’t the only voting-machine firm that is threatening legal action against conservative media for giving oxygen to Powell’s and Giuliani’s unfounded claims that millions of votes were “stolen” from Trump because of a nefarious international plot involving corrupt voting software.
Smartmatic, which has been accused of being in league with long-dead dictator Hugo Chavez and liberal philanthropist George Soros, issued letters to Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN demanding a full retraction of claims made on their airwaves. Fox and Newsmax would eventually run multiple segments on their programs debunking the false election claims made about the company.
One America News, meanwhile, has refused to issue any corrections or clarifications and has continued to air segments and reports alleging both voting system firms potentially flipped votes to President-elect Joe Biden.
