Popular Fox News host Sean Hannity testified under oath that he never believed former President Donald Trump‘s false claims of voter fraud caused by a corrupt voting tech company in the 2020 presidential election.
“I did not believe it for one second,” Hannity testified, according to reports from the New York Times and NPR.
Hannity, a longtime ally of Trump on both his primetime television show and nationally syndicated radio program, admitted his beliefs in an August deposition as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News filed by Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox News for its programming following the 2020 presidential election, which supported many of Trump’s baseless claims. Hannity in particular hosted several guests — including former federal prosecutor turned prominent conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell — on his primetime show which regularly boasts over 2 million viewers a night.
Powell served as a campaign attorney and advisor to Trump, making appearances on right-wing media to amplify and legitimize the baseless claims. In a one-on-one interview, with Hannity in 2020, Powell skirted around a request for evidence to support her claims by blaming “the dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, liberal philanthropist George Soros, communist Chinese money and the CIA.”
Fox News executive vice president Meade Cooper, who oversees primetime programming, also “confirmed under oath she never believed the lies about Dominion,” a lawyer representing Dominion told NPR.
Despite doubts over the validity of its guests’ rhetoric, leaders at Fox News continued to air their views and conspiratorial claims. Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and Fox Business stars Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs were among the hosts to repeatedly give airtime to the lies.
Dominion alleges there was a strategic effort throughout all of Fox to win back viewers after the network was the first to project the key swing state of Arizona for Biden. Trump denounced Fox and millions of his supporters abandoned the network that month. Fox stood by the call of Arizona, backed by its owners and leaders Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.
Smartmatic, another voting tech company, is suing Fox News for its coverage and amplification of election fraud lies. During Wednesday’s hearing, which saw the testimony from Hannity released to the public, Judge Eric Davis denied the company’s request for access to uncensored documents crafted about Dominion’s suit, for use in their own case against Fox.
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