A Dominion Voting Systems court filing Monday featured excerpts of News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch's January deposition, focusing on Murdoch's acknowledgment that several Fox News hosts "endorsed" on TV claims about 2020 voting fraud that Murdoch and his network knew to be false. But the filing also pointed to an unsealed exhibit in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox News suggesting Murdoch tried to tip the scales in former President Donald Trump's favor during the election.
"During Trump's campaign, Rupert provided Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden's ads, along with debate strategy," the court filing said.
That little bombshell set up testimony from Murdoch that he declined to step in when Kushner called him on election night, after Fox News was the first network to project that President Biden won the key state of Arizona (and thus, likely, the election). "My friend Jared Kushner called me saying, 'This is terrible,' and I could hear Trump's voice in the background shouting," Murdoch said in his deposition. "And I said, 'Well, the numbers are the numbers.'"
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A spokesman for Murdoch declined comment to The Washington Post on those sections of the deposition, but pointed to a statement from Fox News saying Dominion had "cherry pick[ed]" salacious details "utterly irrelevant to the legal issues in this case." Dominion's Monday filing is part of its argument against Fox News' motion to prevent the case from going to trial.
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