The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230303_murdaugh-convicted-and-the-dominion-fox-news-lawsu

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March 3, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show

01:37:26

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A Nation Captured by the Trial 00:07:43
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Friday.
	The Murdoch double murder trial came to an end yesterday with a guilty verdict by the jury of 12, guilty on all counts, two counts of murder, two counts of related weapons charges.
	And the verdict came less than three hours after the deliberations began.
	Alec Murdoch appeared in front of Collington County Judge Clifton Newman earlier today for his sentencing.
	At that sentencing hearing, he once again maintained his innocence.
	Murdoch was sentenced by the judge to life in prison for each of those murder charges for his wife Maggie and his son, Paul.
	Those sentences will run consecutively.
	The basic gist of it is he's not getting out of jail.
	This is it.
	The defense is expected to hold oppressor any moment now, and we will keep our eyes and ears open for that and bring you the updates as they come in.
	You know, I've been thinking about it.
	Last night you get the word that the verdict's coming.
	And of course, you're like, oh my God, the verdict.
	Verdicts in American legal history are just, they tend to be gripping.
	Our legal system is by far the best that exists on earth by far.
	We've done so much to try to make it fair for the defendants because the process is so weighted in favor of the state.
	And therefore, it sets up conflict.
	It sets up drama.
	It sets up, you know, putting one's fate in the hand of 12 strangers, which in and of itself is somewhat dramatic and gripping.
	But I think this case has really captured the attention of the nation in a special way.
	So why is that?
	I've been asking myself that.
	Why has this case so gripped the nation?
	This one in particular, because we've seen murder cases before, even of a husband killing a family member.
	But I believe this one is different.
	It's really captured people's attention because it has forced us to ask the dark questions we try to avoid about human nature and even about ourselves.
	I mean, we all know there's murder.
	There's bad guys.
	There's horrific acts that go on out there.
	We try to tell ourselves that's somebody else.
	That's why we can listen to Dateline, right?
	You say to yourself, that's not my life.
	That wouldn't happen to me.
	I would know.
	I would see it.
	I don't associate with people like that.
	But this case involves a respected trial attorney, right?
	This is not some boogeyman from like the dark dregs of society.
	This is a respected trial attorney from a revered family, a family man, we were told.
	An affable guy most people really liked.
	What turns a person like that?
	From man into monster.
	And how do we grapple with it when the monster was hiding in plain sight and no one knew?
	You heard witness after witness in this case testify about how I had no idea that he was a thief, that he was a serial liar.
	Never mind the murder charges.
	The testimony was this is a nice family.
	They celebrated birthdays together.
	They seemed to love one another.
	Until the day Alec Murdoch blew his son's head off and gunned his wife down five times just after she presumably watched her own son die.
	Listen to the videotape that Paul took minutes.
	I mean, we believe it was four to six minutes before he was murdered.
	I'll play it for you in a second, all right?
	But that videotape is so telling.
	And it was the crux of the guilty verdict we now know because a juror spoke out.
	No one sounds out of sorts.
	And the voice of the murderer, Alec Murdoch, who was about to kill his family, sounds totally nonplussed.
	How can any of this be?
	Murderers are supposed to look like boogeymen and sound like boogeymen.
	You're supposed to be able to hear the anger in their voice and anticipate that something terrible is about to happen.
	None of that happened here.
	The truth is that murderers are not always Charles Manson lookalikes.
	They're not always even strangers.
	Murder can and often is committed by one family member against another.
	And while the vast majority of us cannot fathom it, it happens.
	And understanding why can be nearly impossible, but is understandably compelling.
	It is, I believe, why we tune in night after night and why we get the feeling as the verdict gets announced and why we find ourselves drawn into these cases, even though we think they have nothing to do with us.
	Joining me now to discuss everything about this case, where it goes from here, what's likely to happen next, and how the prosecution got their man is Estella Kelly's court panel.
	Andrew Branca, attorney and self-defense expert is here.
	Ronnie Richter, founder and partner at Bland Richter, and Peter Tragos, lawyer and host of The Lawyer You Know on YouTube.
	Great to have you all.
	Thanks so much for being here.
	So, I mean, what do you guys make of that?
	Let me start with you, Ronnie, as the guy who's got kind of a role in this case and having sued Alec Murdoch on behalf of two of his financial victims.
	What do you make of my assessment of why this has so captured the nation?
	Yeah, I think you're right on.
	And I think also that the, when you think about the power and the privilege that a guy like Alex Murdoch had when he was gifted so much in life, all that was ever really asked of him was just keep the plane on the runway.
	And to think about how far he's fallen, you know, isn't that what is most appealing about a priest pedophile case?
	It's not that priests corner the market on pedophilia, but when you're on such a high pedestal to follow so far, you've got a guy like Alex Murdoch who was gifted everything in life to see him go to ruins, I think is a compelling human story.
	Yeah.
	And the thing about a monster like this man who was living a great big life, right?
	Like well respected, well liked.
	Even the sister of Maggie Murlock testified their marriage wasn't perfect, but she was happy.
	You know, the pictures of them at the birthday parties, having a nice time.
	We like to look at somebody like that and say, no, no, no, couldn't be, could not be.
	That looks too familiar.
	And yet one of the reasons why the verdict is so compelling is it's the jury telling us.
	We impute them with some sort of superior discernment abilities, right?
	It's like not real until the jury says it's real.
	And when the jury says he did it, we walk away saying, he did it.
	He was the monster.
	And what does that mean for me, Ronnie?
	Yeah, I think all those elements were there.
	And then overlaid on top of that, you've got the Grisham novel that it's in the low country of South Carolina.
	It's the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil feel to the whole thing.
	So there were so many elements about the case beyond the simple legal issues that I think were just compelling human stories.
	And you could see it and people traveling to Walterboro, South Carolina from all over the country.
	They were there every day just to be a part of it.
	It was a bizarre circus-like atmosphere throughout that trial.
	Nothing like we've ever seen here before.
	I can tell you that.
	So, this poor judge Newman, who I think is pretty well respected by most of the pundits who have been watching this trial and certainly those who practice in front of him, he lost his own son, who was age 40 to a heart incident earlier this month.
	It was last, January, January.
	It's no longer February.
	In any event.
	And you got to wonder what it was like for this poor guy to be presiding over a trial in which a man was accused of killing his own adult son when this had just happened to him.
The Judge's Heartbreaking Exchange 00:04:00
	And I don't know about you guys, but I thought it was extraordinary the exchange the judge had with Alec Murdoch at the today, moments ago, where he was asking him questions and Alec was responding.
	And the judge was really offering his own opinion about how the evidence went and how he was kind of, it was sad for him personally.
	He had practiced, Alec Murdoch had practiced law in front of him.
	We cut a little bit of it just so the audience can get a feel.
	Take a listen.
	This has been perhaps one of the most troubling cases, not just for me as a judge, for the state.
	You have a wife who's been killed, murdered, a son, savagely murdered, a lawyer, a person from a respected family who has controlled justice in this community for over a century.
	It's also particularly troubling, Mr. Murdoch, because as a member of the legal community and a well-known member of the legal community,
	you've practiced law before me, which was especially heartbreaking for me to see you go in the media from being a grieving father who lost a wife and a son to being the person indicted and convicted of killing them.
	Tangle web we weave.
	What did you mean by that?
	Meant when I lied, I continue to lie.
	And the question is: when will it end?
	When will it end?
	And it's ended already for the jury because they've concluded that you continue to lie and lie throughout your testimony.
	You have to see Paul and Maggie during the night times when you're attempting to go to sleep.
	I'm sure they come and visit you.
	I'm sure.
	All day and every night.
	I'm sure.
	And they will continue to do so and reflect on the last time they looked you in the eyes.
	I say it again.
	I respect this court, but I'm innocent.
	I would never, under any circumstances, hurt my wife, Maggie.
	And I would never, under any circumstances, hurt my son, Paul Paul.
	And it might not have been you.
	It might have been the monster you become when you take 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 opioid pills.
	Maybe you become another person.
	Man, what do you make of the events of the past 16 hours?
	I think it's really interesting that the judge was as gracious as he was in that exchange.
	I expected him to throw a little more shade at Alec Murdoch with how he was even speaking to the jury after their verdict and with all of the evidence he allowed in and kind of how he was throughout the trial.
	He was not happy with Alec Murdoch.
	And I think as a member of the legal community, Alec Murdoch is a dark stain on what lawyers are supposed to be like and how lawyers are supposed to act.
	And I really think that what was so intriguing about this case was not only that it was a murder case, but the financial crimes, the creation of fake LLCs, stealing money from clients who have catastrophic injuries, and then faking a suicide incident for insurance money.
Why Alec Must Maintain Innocence 00:02:45
	This was literally something that is even made for TV doesn't give it justice because it would be so unbelievable, even in some kind of show or movie made in Hollywood.
	And I think that Alec Murdoch has no choice but to continue maintaining his innocence, which is going to bring us into the appellate phase of this case.
	Right.
	The judge said, in all my history, I've never had a defendant just own it.
	Even the ones who have pleaded guilty to committing murder, they won't talk about the moment they pulled the trigger.
	It's like a disassociation or just a refusal to go there.
	And Alec Murdoch was no different.
	No different.
	He did not plead guilty.
	He was found guilty and he maintained his innocence as he's still doing.
	What got him convicted from the sound of it, Andrew, is that tape that Paul Murdoch took moments before he died that they didn't even know about for months and months and months after the murders.
	The cops didn't know.
	They had their eye on Alec, but they did not know that he was there.
	He had said, I was at the house.
	I was sleeping.
	Maggie and Paul were at the kennels.
	And I didn't hear any of this.
	And I went to see my mom.
	Then it turns out Paul had taken out a videotape to videotape a dog on site who had mange on his tail.
	And his friend was worried about the dog.
	And unbeknownst to Alec and most of the people in this case, it was all on tape four minutes, four minutes, at the most six, we think, before Alec murdered them.
	Here's a little bit of that tape just to remind folks of how people sound it.
	Get back.
	Get back.
	Quit, Cash.
	Quit.
	Hey, Obama.
	There's a guinea.
	There's no kick.
	Quit.
	That was it, Andrew.
	That's the reason Alec felt he had to take the stand and explain his lie that he wasn't there when everyone could hear his voice on the tape.
	Everyone testified that was him.
	And that testimony he gave was not helpful.
	The juror who spoke out today, and we'll play some of him in a second, didn't believe one word.
Circumstantial Evidence and Lies 00:15:27
	What are your thoughts?
	Well, probably unpopular opinion, but we mentioned the appellate process beginning now.
	I certainly expect that'll be the case.
	But we have appellate courts for a reason, and that's because sometimes juries get it wrong.
	We have the innocence project because sometimes juries get it wrong.
	And I have no idea whether or not Alec Murdoch murdered his wife and son.
	I wasn't there, of course.
	I can only look at what proceeded in court.
	And what I saw in court was nothing close to proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
	I saw an entirely circumstantial case, absent any motive other than a completely circumstantial motive.
	And I don't think any American should be convicted on that kind of case.
	I mean, why isn't circumstantial evidence enough?
	That can be, that can create, sure.
	If you have a strong motive, circumstantial evidence can certainly be enough.
	But the motive here is entirely itself circumstantial.
	There's no direct evidence that Alec believed he was going to get any benefit from the financial crimes or discovery of his financial wrongs by murdering his son and his wife, the son and wife that every state witness in the position knows he adored and loved.
	Okay, let me get Ronnie to respond to that as somebody who sued Alec on behalf of those two kids who were with me.
	By the way, I'm not saying Alec's a nice guy.
	If he goes to do it for the rest of his life with the financial stuff, I don't have any problem with that.
	I have no personal investment in Alec Burdock.
	I'm speaking only to the criminal charges here, which were murder.
	Go ahead, Ronnie.
	Do you want to respond?
	Yeah, I think any outcome here would have been a perfectly acceptable outcome.
	I think if the jury had said not guilty, I think that would have been acceptable based on the evidence presented.
	I think if the jury would have hung, that would have been understandable.
	I think the pivotal moment in the case was Alex's decision to testify.
	And he made it a single issue case.
	He turned a very complicated case into a single issue.
	And the single issue is, why did you lie to the police about having not been there?
	And I don't think the jury believed his answer.
	I think that's why the deliberation was so short.
	At the end of the day, it wasn't just this time to go home.
	I think the first question was, does anybody accept his answer as to why he was not there?
	And if he lied about not having been there, then he lied about that for a reason.
	You know, the other thing that I think is compelling in the case, in a place where I think the defense strategy may have boomeranged a little bit, that site visit, I think, was ill-advised.
	I've been out there.
	It's remote.
	And they wanted the jury to see the spatial relationships with the kennels in the house.
	Well, the spatial relationship that strikes you when you go out there is it's in the middle of nowhere.
	And so I could see the jury on that site visit asking themselves, well, how is it possible that it was anyone else other than Alex?
	So he's there at the time.
	We're very close in proximity to the time the murders are committed.
	They appear to have been committed with weapons of the household, and he lies about his whereabouts.
	And his behavior from that moment forward appears to be the behavior of a guilty person.
	So I'm comfortable that the circumstantial evidence was there.
	I would have been comfortable with any outcome from this evidence, frankly.
	The juror who spoke out on ABC News today, his name was Craig Moyer, definitely cited that video.
	I mean, the big lie in this case, which was Alex saying, I was not down at the kennels anywhere near the time of the murder, maybe an hour before that, but nowhere near after that until I found the dead bodies.
	And he was forced to take the stand and admit that that was a lie because his son had taken this videotape unbeknownst to him.
	I had said a couple of days ago to your partner, Ronnie, Eric Bland, who was on here, that if this jury finds Alec Murdoch guilty, it will be because his son, in essence, fingered him.
	His son is the one who found his own murderer and told the police about it posthumously.
	I mean, it's very eerie.
	And the prosecutor, Mehta, said something very similar in his rebuttal, which resonated with the jury as described by Craig Moyer.
	Here's Soundbite 8 with the prosecutor in that rebuttal on that moment.
	The three witnesses that were beautiful, that were uncontroversial.
	And one was Paul.
	He didn't testify to you up on the stand, but he testified to Dr. Raymond.
	And he testified to his son.
	He didn't know he took that video.
	That's why he said he went down.
	Paul knew.
	Dad, I got some insurance.
	I got some insurance.
	Not the kind of insurance you made money off of an insurance some clients you gave back and some you didn't.
	I've got some insurance on you.
	But if you go lie and say you weren't down here, I got you.
	I don't know when it'll come out.
	Maybe you'll go ahead and lie.
	But this is going to come out.
	Paul had that insurance on him.
	And maybe that's why he was worried about that phone.
	And you can't make that up.
	Because you may want to ask David Owens, does anybody else in the world, in the world, know that that video was out there except Paul?
	No, sir.
	And that's incredible evidence.
	Absolutely chilling.
	What did you make of the juror this morning?
	Oh, that's for you.
	If you're asking me, I never know that's for Ronnie.
	And then I'll get you, Andrew.
	Yes, definitely.
	Go ahead, Ronnie.
	Yeah, the juror.
	The juror this morning.
	Yeah, again, it just became a credibility contest.
	And I disagree with you a little bit, Megan.
	I don't think that Alex had to take the stand to explain this lie.
	I think he, I don't think they could have kept him off the stand.
	I think he's that guy who's so comfortable on his home court that he just thought if he took the stand and he talked to his people, he could convince them one more time.
	And having taken that risk, it's not just the big lie.
	It's every other lie in between.
	And there was a small lie at the end that might have been the one that cooked his goose.
	And that was the lie about the fact that the sheriff had permitted him to put the blue lights in the car.
	And so in the closing, Meadows was able to turn to the jury and say, look how easily and casually he turned and lied to you about something even as simple as whether you had permission to put the lights in the car.
	So I think it's hard to get into jail.
	I think you have to talk your way in.
	And I think Alex talked his way into jail.
	Creighton Waters, the lead prosecutor, he said this morning on ABC, I knew as soon as the defense put in one exhibit that Alec Murdoch would take the stand.
	He knew Alec too well.
	He knew he was not the type to sit there and let this trial go by without having himself weigh in.
	He really believed in his own powers of persuasion.
	And it did not turn out to be helpful.
	I mean, you know, you and I, Peter, have talked about how the defense wasn't going so badly, you know, as they were poking holes in the way the state handled the crime scene.
	Yes, they had to deal with this problem of the videotape, but it was the biggest problem.
	And if they had found a clever way of dealing with that, they could have avoided Alec on that stand.
	Yeah, I think the two biggest things in this case, and I've heard the juror interview.
	I know they put a lot on that video, which I think was the best and biggest piece of evidence that the state had.
	But when I look at this case, I think it came down to the other bad acts.
	And we talk about, again, who he stole from, how he stole, how he literally didn't care about anybody else but himself or his family.
	And then when you couple that with the fake suicide attempt and then Alec Murdoch taking the stand, I think that's where he lost the case because I think this was a very winnable case by the defense because of how horrible this investigation was, all the things they didn't do, all the things they didn't find, all the things they didn't test.
	And that should have been the focus as the defense.
	But then when it started to pile on that Alec Murdoch is a generally bad guy, it's very difficult for jurors to acquit somebody when they start feeling that way about a defendant sitting over there in that chair.
	That's not the problem.
	I think that if they based it off propensity, absolutely.
	That's the point of the instruction to not base it off propensity.
	And that's why I think it's a good idea.
	Explain that, Peter.
	Explain to the audience what you mean by propensity.
	So 404B is you can hear these other bad acts for other reasons, such as motive, which is what the state got it in under, that he was trying to cover up these financial crimes that we're literally going to convict him for here for three weeks during this murder trial.
	And then credibility.
	You know, he lies.
	If he lied about that, maybe he lied about this, but not.
	Alec Murdoch is a guy who commits crimes.
	And because he's committed all these financial crimes, he's more likely to have committed this crime of murder.
	Now, the issue with that is every case I've been involved in where they've allowed other bad acts, it has ended in a guilty verdict.
	When you start to pile on other bad acts, it becomes very difficult for a jury who feels like they know that this person has done at least something wrong.
	Are we really going to acquit him?
	Are they able to separate these crimes?
	But when they're told it's just for motive or just for credibility, then sometimes it's hard to differentiate.
	And that's why the appellate process is not a guaranteed win, regardless of how many lawyers sit here and think about maybe they shouldn't have been allowed in to at least the extent that they were allowed in in a murder trial.
	Andrew, his lawyers right now are at the microphones saying they will file an appeal within 10 days.
	You got to think that the lead basis will be this 404B argument prior bad acts, which normally are not allowed in, except under very limited exceptions.
	And the prosecution exploited the one on motive mightily to put in all that financial fraud information, which the defense will now argue poisoned the jury against him and deprived him of his right to a fair trial.
	Yeah, I think there's lots of grounds for appeal in this trial, but I would caution, I always say appeals are for losers.
	And I mean that in two senses.
	Of course, you're only appealing if you lost a trial.
	But also the prospects of getting any meaningful relief on appeal is close to zero.
	Fewer than 1% of appeals result in a reversal of a conviction.
	And if you get a reverse of the conviction, I mean, that's a win, I guess, but it just means they're going to try him again.
	It'll just be another murder trial.
	So I wouldn't put too much value on appeal.
	I think the appeal is unavoidable, even if he were completely broke, because he's going to be spending the rest of his life in prison, if only on the financial crimes.
	And if I were, you know, had legal skills and I had nothing to do with my time in prison except file appeals for myself, I guess that's what I would do.
	I look forward to it, if only from a technical perspective, I'd like to see what the arguments are going to be.
	But I never, it's not a redo of the trial, right?
	It's not a second bite of the apple.
	All the legal presumptions are against him now that he's been found guilty.
	That's just like you need to look no further than his outfit in court this morning to see what happened, what a difference those 16 hours make, right?
	He was in his suit for the entire court proceeding because he was only the accused.
	And as of last night at around six o'clock, he became the convicted murderer, Alec Murdoch.
	And today he was in his prison garb, handcuffs, sheriff's deputies, and so on surrounding him.
	Ronnie, quickly, do you think there's an appealable issue?
	Do you think there's a credible appealable issue that actually could result in a reversal?
	A credible appealable issue?
	Absolutely.
	That will result in a reversal?
	Absolutely not.
	I mean, first, the Supreme Court of the state of South Carolina would want to help Alex Murdoch.
	I can assure you they do not.
	For what he has put our bar through, our state through, there is no sympathy for Alex Murdoch in the state of South Carolina.
	And the way this issue came to be, I think there's perfect cover for the court to do nothing for Alex here.
	Because if you remember, the financial crime evidence was kept out.
	Judge Newman said it's a bridge too far.
	And then he pinned the introduction evidence on the defense having opened the door.
	So and when he gave that ruling, he even said, look, I said it was a bridge too far.
	You built a road back over that bridge and you danced in the flames as if you thought you couldn't be burned by it.
	I remember that ruling.
	And that's a judge protecting himself on the record saying, I gave you what you wanted.
	I told you to be careful, but you went there anyway.
	And having gone there, I'm letting it all in.
	So that's every basis in the world for the Supreme to look at it and say, we're not going to give you a lifeline here.
	Can we talk, Peter, about this, about the jury?
	I'm so interested.
	I love when the jurors speak out, right?
	It's like, so usually the trial lawyers hate it.
	Maybe they want to have a private conversation, but they don't want the jurors all over television because God only knows what they're going to say.
	that might get you in trouble, might get the upend your verdict that you're happy with if you're on the prosecution team.
	So Craig Moyer speaks out to Good Morning America and said, yes, it was that videotape.
	That's what was critical.
	Said it was nine to three when we first got back there, nine in favor of guilty, two in favor of not guilty, one who wasn't sure, said it took us 45 minutes to convince those three to come on board to guilty.
	And what those three were focused on was the shell casings at the scene and whether they should be buying into the defense argument that there had to be two shooters.
	And they were the majority convinced them to abandon that.
	So here's Craig Moyer speaking out about his impressions of Alec on the stand.
	It's sci-fi.
	What did you think when Alec Murdoch took the stand?
	I didn't think much of him.
	Really?
	Really?
	I didn't see any true remorse or any compassion or anything.
	Even though he was, he cried a lot on the stand.
	He never cried.
	He never cried.
	What do you mean by that?
	All he did was blow snot.
	Did you not see tears?
	No tears.
	How did you know he wasn't crying?
	Because I saw his eyes.
	I was just close to him.
	So I kind of love this guy.
	I got to say, Peter, is like South Carolina guy, working guy.
	You can't, you can't bullshit him.
	You know, this guy's like, I see you.
	I got real problems in my life.
	I know what a good man looks like and I know what a bad man looks like.
	And I know when somebody's lying to me.
	That's what's so deadly for the defense.
	Like you get jurors like this guy, plain spoken, like doesn't buy into the razzle dazzle.
	I'm a much more dangerous juror for either side, really, than this guy.
	Cause I'm like, I'm open-minded.
	I see both sides.
	That kind of a guy is gold for the prosecution in a case that seems to many of us to be plain as the nose on your face.
	So I think what this confirms about me is, you know, what we think about jurors in all different cases, whether it's a criminal case like this or whether it's some kind of personal injury case and you have an MRI or some study or some report about a truck, the jurors trust their own eyes, ears, and minds over anything else.
	He looked Alec Murdoch in the face.
	He looked at his eyes.
	He made the determination as to whether or not he was crying or remorseful or sincere in anything he said.
	And that was going to trump any other piece of evidence or expert that they were going to get up there.
	And apparently these nine jurors only took 45 minutes to convince a couple holdouts when both sides took six weeks to try to do that job.
	And it's very interesting when you hear about these deliberations.
	Listen, as a lawyer not involved in the trial, I love it.
	I love to listen and to hear what happened.
	If you win a trial, you never want a juror to go out and speak because you don't want them to say the wrong thing or that they relied on the Netflix documentary or something like that.
	God forbid.
	That makes you nervous when you win a case like this.
The Juror Who Got Bounced 00:03:39
	When you lose, you usually want to know why and what happened.
	Ronnie, very interesting report today.
	Okay.
	You know the juror who got bounced at the last minute.
	She was there.
	She went on the visit to Mizell.
	So she was there yesterday or two days ago, whatever that was.
	And she did not join in the deliberations because there was a report and your partner, Eric Bland, had told us he had been hearing that there was a juror who'd been speaking out of turn about the case, speaking to people, not necessarily other jurors, but people in her life about her opinions on the case, which is just absolutely verbodin.
	You will get kicked off of any jury if they find you doing that.
	She got kicked off.
	And here's what's interesting.
	Okay.
	So there is Fitz News.
	It's an independent news website in South Carolina.
	My producer, Kelly, she knows about this website.
	She's South Carolinian.
	And they are reporting that this juror who was removed might very well have hung the jury.
	According to a source familiar with the deliberations, that juror was dug in and she said Alec was not guilty and there was nothing anyone could do to change her mind.
	Quote, she would have hung the jury.
	The judge removed her and said, I'm not suggesting you intentionally did anything wrong, but you've got to go.
	And there was a question about, well, there was a report that when they discussed with counsel the fact that these communications had happened by this particular juror, the prosecution was like, yeah, she's got to go.
	And the defense was like, well, you know, so it was very clear they had been told that the substance of her communications were pro-defense.
	Fascinating issue, right?
	Like she might very well have hung the jury.
	And if she hadn't spoken out, Alec Murdoch might have had a different result yesterday.
	Yeah, I think he was that close.
	And if you remember, two days ago, there was an email that counsel at the bench were discussing with the judge.
	And that was an email that alerted the court to this issue that there was a juror out there who had violated oath, who had A, formulated opinions before the evidence was complete, and B, had shared those opinions with people outside of the confines of the jury.
	So that was the matter that was being addressed in that email.
	And what we came to learn is, you know, this judge, smart judge, there were in-chambers hearings on this.
	Sled investigated.
	There were interviews with third parties with whom this person apparently talked.
	So apparently there's a very rich record that was developed behind the scenes that we don't get to see that makes this not an appellate issue.
	But it does sound by all accounts that this was the juror that Alex needed.
	And if she had just kept it tight, then yes, the outcome might have been quite different.
	It's all speculation.
	My producers are telling me the defense right now, as they're speaking, are saying, we're not sure.
	It might not have been pro-defense.
	I'm sure they know.
	I'm sure they've been told what her communications were, but we'll find out.
	And I mean, it's just, of course, it's all a coulda, shoulda, woulda if you're on the defense side.
	Like, what if we had stopped him from testifying?
	What if somehow we had, you know, managed to find that Paul Murdoch tape before we did?
	You know, what if that juror hadn't been bounced?
	They'll torture themselves for years on that as they file their appeal.
	Okay, much, much more when we come back after this quick break with Andrew, Ronnie, and Peter.
	Don't go away.
Sentencing Murdoch to Prison 00:08:03
	Mr. Murdoch, I sentence you to the State Department of Corrections on each of the murder indictments and the murder of your wife, Maggie Murdoch.
	I sentence you for a term of the rest of your natural life for the murder of Paul Murdoch, whom you probably love so much.
	I sentence you to prison for murdering him for the rest of your natural life.
	Those sentences will run consecutive.
	It's just, it's, yeah.
	Did you love him?
	Did you love your son?
	Did you love your wife?
	The prosecution's closing argument was he did, but he loved himself more.
	It's absolutely chilling.
	Ronnie, where does he go now?
	What kind of prison is he likely to go to back with now with our panel?
	Where's he likely to wind up?
	Well, this is South Carolina, and we don't have country clubs.
	And he's going to be processed as a violent offender.
	So he'll, and especially given his background as a former lawyer and a former prosecutor, he's going to require protection inside the system.
	So he's probably going to be in the most secure facility we have here.
	We have Kirkland Correctional in Columbia, South Carolina is probably where he ends up.
	He's probably going to be on lockdown most hours of most days.
	So a 23 in one where you're in isolation for 23 hours and you have an hour in the yard, something like that.
	That's foreseeable for a guy like Alex Murdoch.
	You have to wonder.
	You never want to see it, but you have to wonder if there are suicidal thoughts in the wake of a verdict like this for a guy like Alec Murdoch, especially given the whole roadside thing.
	But of course, we don't really believe that was a suicide attempt.
	That was him trying to make it look like there was a mad killer out killing off Murdoch's.
	But, you know, when those deputies were around him, like three flanking him, all I could think was there actually is a chance that this guy is going to grab somebody's weapon and try to take himself out.
	You know, this is not a man who's used to what's about to happen to him.
	And I also had to wonder, you know, Ronnie, I'll ask you this too.
	You're the local.
	Is there any chance, you know, his buddies in law enforcement do him one last favor?
	And, you know, we should be on the lookout for a Jeffrey Epstein type suicide, you know, attempt or something where they look the other way.
	I'm just, I'm just wondering how easy that would be for him.
	Yeah, I think it would be difficult for him.
	I really do.
	And, you know, I hate to, I hate to think about suicide.
	I would think under this circumstance, it's certainly a natural thought to have.
	This is a guy who went from an 1800 acre estate to an eight by eight cell for the rest of his life, 23 hours a day.
	I think it's enough to break any person.
	So, yeah, it is foreseeable.
	I think it would be difficult for him because he's not going to be with the general population.
	I will say to the audience, just an update on what the defense said, they weren't saying that that witness, that juror dismissed was not pro-defense.
	They were saying, well, she said she could keep an open mind.
	She said she hadn't made up her mind yet.
	Hold on a second.
	My team's sending me.
	Here it is.
	This is the verbatim of what was said.
	Harputlian says, she admitted she talked to other people about the case, but not specifically.
	She clearly, when we interviewed her back in January, said she hadn't made up her mind before the trial started.
	Do you think she would have helped your case?
	Answer from Dick Harputlian.
	I don't know.
	She didn't express an opinion to us.
	She said she's open.
	She hadn't made up her mind.
	Okay, that's normal defense speak or she was great.
	Why did she have to be booted?
	But I don't think it's a grounds for appeal, the booting of that juror since she's admitting that she spoke about it.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So she's gone and that's not going to be grounds.
	The juror who spoke out, just one other interesting thing of him.
	The question was, was he a good liar?
	And the juror said, yeah, not good enough.
	It's like so good.
	The guy's a, he is a carpenter.
	It looks like he's in his like 30s or 40s and he saw right through it all.
	Anyway, fascinating case.
	We're going to see now quickly where things go.
	Here's my question for you, Peter.
	What happens to the lawsuit over the boat?
	Like the accident that got this whole series of events started where Mallory Beach was killed by Paul Murdoch driving that boat?
	What happens with the Buster Murdoch allegations?
	Some people are speculating with no proof that he may have been involved in the murder of, well, in the death of Stephen Smith, this young gay man who was allegedly killed by a hit and run, but there's a lot of speculation that in fact it was a beating and there was a lot of buzz about whether Buster Murdoch was involved.
	What happens to the financial cards?
	Like there's a lot more that has to be resolved.
	Does this put an end to all of that, Peter?
	No, it really doesn't.
	I mean, I think it greases the wheels definitely on the financial crimes.
	And I think it would be interesting if Alec Murdoch continued to plead not guilty after admitting it on the stand under oath that he did commit those crimes.
	The civil cases, I would assume, are going to continue to try to collect from estates and from the sale of land and from any dollar they can find that's connected to Alec Murdoch.
	I assume they will continue to go and continue to try to collect there.
	But I've done my best to try and not watch HBO, Netflix, whatever it is while I'm watching this trial because I wanted to see what the state was going to bring out that was credible, relevant, admissible evidence before the jury and see how they made their decision on that.
	So now is kind of the time to dig in on the other stuff, watch some of the documentaries.
	I'm sure there's going to be a lot in there that would never make it into any court of law, but I would expect that the financial crimes are going to resolve one way or the other criminally.
	And I think the civil cases, I mean, Ronnie could answer this one probably better than anybody.
	I think they're going to still continue to try to collect one way or the other from Alec Murdoch, from the law firm, from insurance policies, from the sale of land, any way they can find money to make their clients whole as they deserve to be.
	Is that true?
	Oh, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	The court has appointed a receiver for all the civil matters.
	And the receiver's job has been to go out into the countryside and find anything of value, anything of value, Alex Murdoch, convert it to cash, create a super fund, and then allow any victims to come forward and make application against that fund.
	As far as the boat wreck, there are other third-party defendants, Parker's convenience store, some of the bars downtown in Buford that served alcohol to the boys before the boat accident.
	So those claims definitely rock on.
	That's not going away.
	His legal troubles are not even over, though the big one has been resolved.
	Okay, let's shift gears because there's a couple of big cases in the news today.
	And while I have such an esteemed legal panel, I've got to ask you about them.
	My number one is Jussie Smollett, Juicy Smollett.
	Back in the news now, this guy who created a race hoax in Chicago, claiming that MAGA hat wearers approached him at two in the morning in the middle of the polar vortex in Chicago in 2019.
	And just happening to bump into Jussie Smollett, who is a black man who used to star in the show Empire, they randomly had a noose on them, as well as bleach, put the noose on Jussie after recognizing him in the middle of the night, poured bleach on him and yelled, this is MAGA country.
	It's so farcical.
	It's so farcical.
	So he originally had all the media running with this story.
	Oh, it's so terrible.
	America sucks.
	And poor Jussie.
	And then, of course, it was outed as this is a bunch of baloney.
	And the black chief of police out there was basically saying, shame on you.
	He had a barn burner of oppressor saying, how dare this guy do this to the cops and waste our resources and all this stuff in this hoax?
	Well, he wound up being found guilty of five out of six counts of felony, disorderly conduct for doing all this stuff, this fake case.
	And now, Andrew, he is appealing.
Baldwin, Statutes, and Civil Charges 00:07:02
	Well, he's complaining and he wants a new trial.
	He feels that he was not given a fair trial, that they failed to properly investigate his claims that he really was the victim of an actual homophobic attack and that the person who appointed a special prosecutor to try this case had already, that judge who appointed this, had already made up his mind that Jussie was guilty.
	What do you make of it?
	Well, it's all a little chaotic.
	I mean, no offense, Megan, but not everybody has your level of expertise out in the media.
	So it's kind of hard to figure out what the media is actually reporting.
	On one hand, he seems to be saying my conviction should be reversed because of double jeopardy.
	I don't see how any double jeopardy, it doesn't make any sense to me.
	But then he also wants a new trial, which would be triple jeopardy.
	So I'm not exactly sure what he's going for or frankly, why he would expect a different legal outcome.
	I mean, the facts in this case do not appear to be ambiguous.
	Yeah, he came out and Peter and said that, you know, because, you know, the first deal he struck with Kim Fox, this ideological prosecutor who is more of a BLM activist than she is a crime fighter.
	And she decided not to go after him, even though it was so outrageous what he did.
	She's like, oh, he's fine.
	Move on.
	And that's why they had this judge step in and appoint a special prosecutor.
	That doesn't mean you go right to jail.
	You get a trial.
	He got a trial.
	He was found guilty by a jury of his peers.
	And you remember he had that infamous moment when he was walking out of the courtroom.
	I think we have it, where he wanted everybody to know that I didn't do this.
	Remember this here, watch.
	I am not suicidal.
	I am innocent.
	And I am not suicidal.
	If I did this, then it means that I stuck my fist in the fears of Black Americans in this country for over 400 years and the fears of the LGBTQ community.
	Your honor, I respect you and I respect the jury, but I did not do this.
	And I am not suicidal.
	And if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself.
	And you must all know that.
	I respect you, Your Honor.
	I respect your decision.
	Jail time.
	I am not suicidal.
	I am not suicidal.
	Stop it.
	I am not suicidal.
	And I am innocent.
	I could have said that I was guilty a long time ago.
	The drama.
	My God.
	He didn't even have to go to jail.
	Basically, he's been out on appeal.
	And now this is his latest Hail Mary, Peter.
	Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting process.
	We just saw what a lawyer looks like as a client and then what a professional actor looks like as a client.
	You know, a lot of people that get in these situations think they can talk their way out of it or perform their way out of it, regardless of who they are.
	I think that he had both Murdoch and Jesse Smollett potentially early on in this case did have the upper hand.
	But eventually evidence started to mount and it turned for both of them and they both ended up convicted.
	I don't see how he turns this around on appeal.
	We've already talked extensively about how difficult it is to win an appeal and the evidence was overwhelming in that case.
	And everybody kind of seemed to see it the same way.
	And the judge really tore into him during sentencing, even more than Murdoch's judge did.
	So I just don't see this going well for Jesse Smollett in the appellate process.
	I agree.
	He's got as much of a chance as he does of winning an Oscar for that performance.
	Andrew, back to you on Alec Baldwin.
	He's pleaded not guilty.
	It's official.
	He's still maintaining he did not pull the trigger.
	They have dropped the gun enhancement charge.
	You are an expert in the law of self-defense when it comes to firearms too.
	They dropped the gun enhancement charge, which was a very problematic charge for him because if convicted, it would have been a mandatory five years in prison.
	He's not facing that on the negligent or the involuntary manslaughter charge that he's still looking at.
	What do you make of those latest developments?
	Well, I think the dropping of the gun enhancement was perfectly appropriate.
	The version of that statute that was in place at the time he shot Helena Hutchins required at least brandishing, intentionally putting someone in fear with a gun.
	And I don't believe there's any evidence that he intended to put her in fear with the gun.
	But I mean, I started covering this the day after the shooting and pointed out then.
	If you point a gun at another human being without first making sure it's not loaded and it discharges and you kill them, that's the dictionary definition of legal recklessness, creating an unjustified risk of death to another person and then they die.
	That's reckless manslaughter every day of the week.
	So I like this case again.
	I felt the reckless manslaughter charge was pretty much an open and shut charge from the very beginning.
	Wow.
	So what, how do you, how does that come out?
	If he goes to trial and he's found guilty on that, what happens to him?
	18 months is the maximum sentence in New Mexico.
	So would he face jail time again?
	In the broader context, not a lot of time for having killed somebody.
	Oh my gosh.
	But like, would they send somebody without a criminal record?
	I mean, he's maybe he has a mild fight.
	I mean, you know, the gun sentencing would have been a problem, as you say, because it was a five-year mandatory minimum.
	But that's off the table.
	So now he's looking at up to 18 months, but it's at the discretion of the sentencing judge.
	So it could be no time.
	It could be community service, could be whatever the judge wants.
	And he could cut a deal.
	It's getting, it's very ugly between his team and the prosecutors out there in Santa Fe.
	Ronnie, there are civil cases or civil charges against him, lawsuits against him, too.
	The newest lawsuit was just filed against Alex Baldwin, Alec Baldwin, by three Rust crew members, the Dolly operator, the set costumer, the key grip, all of three of whom allege they were in close proximity to Baldwin when the gun was fired and have suffered blast injuries from the deafening sound of the shot, as well as they're alleging intentional infliction and so on, saying the producers cut corners.
	They hired people who had been the subject of previous safety complaints.
	And they're saying in his capacity as both a producer and an actor, he failed to keep this set safe.
	How do you like that civil suit?
	I like it.
	I mean, when this first happened, I thought it was all nonsense, to be perfectly candid.
	But I read the New Mexico statutes, especially the lesser statute that he's being charged with criminally.
	And it's based upon a negligent standard.
	So negligence is just a failure to use reasonable care.
	I then looked around a little bit to see: well, is there an industry standard on how you handle these weapons on set?
	And it seems to be that the prevailing school of thought is assume every gun is real, assume it's loaded, and don't point it at anybody.
	And so if that is the standard, and if those standards were breached, then yes, I see a negligence claim there.
	And yes, that falls into the negligent use of a deadly weapon, which is the criminal statute.
	Here's the craziness.
	They still are on schedule to resume the filming of this movie, Rust, starring Alec Baldwin this spring.
	He will stay in the lead role and as a producer.
	And I assume they're going to rehire all these people who are suing him.
	So it's going to be, as the kids say, awkward AF.
	I don't envy any of the people involved in this thing.
Fox Accused of Platforming Liars 00:12:32
	I am so grateful to all three of you for your great legal minds and expertise.
	Thanks so much for being on here and having such a great discussion.
	Kurt, thank you.
	Thank you.
	All the best, guys.
	Andrew, Ronnie, and Peter, we'll talk again soon.
	My goodness.
	All right.
	Speaking of legal matters, we have an all-star legal panel up next for something we've been really wanting to take a deep dive into: an honest, unbiased, deep dive.
	And that is the massive lawsuit by Dominion against Fox News.
	We're going to set it up for you.
	We're going to have a fair and balanced debate, and you're going to know more about this case than you've heard anyplace else that's real, not all the spam.
	Next.
	Now we're taking a deep dive into the lawsuit that many critics of Fox News are hoping will be a nail in the coffin for the network.
	Next month, the $1.6 billion defamation trial against Fox News brought by Dominion Voting Systems is expected to begin.
	We are on the precipice of trial.
	So rare that any media company would let it get to this point.
	So rare that a company like Fox would allow all of its top hosts, top executives, all the way up to Rupert Murdoch to be deposed.
	So clearly they are ready and willing to litigate this case.
	But if you listen to the media, most pundits say that's insanity.
	Most pundits say this is an open and shut case for Dominion, as open and shut as you can get in the field of defamation, at least.
	But is that true?
	Fox is accused of knowingly allowing false statements about Dominion to be made on air by some of its hosts and guests.
	The false statements included that Dominion was part of a scheme to steal the election from Donald Trump by using its voting machines to transfer millions of votes to Joe Biden.
	Again, not true, but it was repeated many times.
	Over the past two weeks, several filings by Dominion and Fox have been unsealed.
	So far, we haven't been able to see most of the evidence in this case, but now we're getting a look at it, causing an explosion of headlines.
	Text messages and deposition testimony from stars like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, and the very top executives, including News Court CEO Rupert Murdoch, right down to Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News Channel, Viet Din, the general counsel.
	I could go on.
	They've all been deposed.
	And now we're getting a look at some of that testimony in the form of excerpts.
	in the party's briefs.
	Both sides have moved for what's called summary judgment, where you say, judge, my case is so strong or on Fox's side, my defense is so strong that you shouldn't make me go to trial.
	You should just enter judgment in my favor on the papers.
	Look at these deposition transcripts.
	That's where we are right now.
	We'll see what the judge does with that.
	There is no question that these revelations are embarrassing to Fox, nor that they are potentially damaging to its case, its defense.
	But Fox contends that once the full context is known, they believe the other side has cherry-picked certain excerpts, that it, Fox, will prevail in court.
	But before the trial even gets underway, there are, of course, calls to de-platform the number one network in news.
	Former MSNBC anchor Keith Olberman has wanted this for years.
	Even back when Shepard Smith, the late Alan Combs, and Greta Van Soestren populated the primetime hours of Fox, the network, and I'm not exaggerating, was like al-Qaeda to Olberman.
	Listen.
	We should all make every noise we can to get DirecTV to stop carrying Fox News and to get Verizon to stop carrying Fox News and Comcast and Dish and Cox and every satellite provider and every cable provider and every internet provider.
	I believe the word is deplatform.
	In 2007, I said in an interview that Al-Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us.
	Osama bin Laden killed thousands of us.
	Rupert Murdoch has, in essence, killed the minds of millions of us.
	Fox News is now a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States of America.
	Okay.
	He's never been one for drama.
	Can't you tell?
	It's unbelievable.
	All right, so we're going to put that to the side for now, just give you a flavor of the reaction from some of Fox critics and those on the left who they smell blood and they're loving it, which means you can't trust their coverage.
	You can't trust their coverage if they're rooting openly for one result, right?
	It's like we know MSNBC and Keith Oberman want Fox to fail.
	Why would I listen to them as neutral arbiters of the case?
	Well, we, I, am in a unique position, I think, to walk you through this because I made my name at Fox News.
	I made a lot of money at Fox News.
	I have a lot of friends at Fox News.
	I have nothing against Fox News.
	And yet I am a lawyer and I understand defamation law and I see the evidence and that it's not ideal for Fox.
	These admissions are not great.
	So we're going to have both sides represented.
	In a bit, we've got two lawyers steeped in First Amendment issues, which is ultimately what the case is about.
	But we begin with Jeremy Peters, who's a reporter for the New York Times.
	He covers media and its intersection with politics and the law.
	He's been on this show several times.
	He's been covering the case for the paper.
	And in my opinion, he's been very fair in his reporting on this issue.
	Jeremy, welcome back.
	Great to have you.
	I'm glad to be here, Megan.
	So in a nutshell, Fox is accused of platforming people like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani who are making these claims about Dominion and also accused of endorsing said claims in certain instances with certain hosts.
	Is that a fair summary?
	That's completely accurate.
	And you zeroed in on what's so crucial and what's potentially so damaging for Fox once this goes to trial, which we assume it will because Fox has not made any efforts, serious efforts so far to settle this.
	And that's not that people like, it's not that, you know, Maria Bartaroma or Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on their show and let her say these outrageous things.
	It's that they endorsed it.
	And that was what was so searing about the testimony from Rupert Murdoch that we saw come out this week is Rupert acknowledges, yes, my hosts endorsed these lies.
	And it's one thing, like, you know, I write for the New York Times.
	I can write a story that says, you know, Donald Trump and his supporters are claiming that Dominion voting systems are hackable, that they were made by Hugo Chavez in an attempt to rig elections in Venezuela, and they brought them here.
	And now they're trying to rig the election against Donald Trump.
	But I also would point out in my story, there's no proof for these allegations.
	In a lot of cases, and the reason why Dominion is suing, that but was never uttered by Fox, by some Fox hosts.
	They gave credibility to Sidney Powell.
	And to make the case even more damning against Fox, we now know that hosts like Maria Bartaroma and Lou Dobbs had evidence that Sidney Powell was not a credible source.
	Now, anybody who's seen Sidney Powell or Rudy Giuliani speak can probably figure that out for themselves, that these two people were not credible.
	But we know things like Sidney Powell was relying on a woman who was so delusional that she claimed to talk to ghosts and that the wind spoke to her and that she had been decapitated and was capable of time travel.
	And Maria Bartaroma knew that that was Sidney Powell's source, but had her on the air anyway.
	If you, Megan, knew that I coming on your show was relying on someone like that, would you have me on your show?
	No, I mean, I might because it could be fun to bring that up and see why you squirm.
	But there's no way you don't mention it.
	That's for sure.
	You absolutely have to be like, you forwarded me your source and your source is a joke.
	They call that the whackadoodle email.
	It was something that Dominion alleges was sent by Sidney Powell herself to Maria Bartaromo before she was going on her show.
	And this is Sidney Powell's source for the thing that got us all spun up over did Dominion have, you know, did they hack the election?
	Did they transfer votes from Trump to Biden?
	And the author says in this email, quote, who am I?
	And how do I know a lot of this?
	I've had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl that I was intentionally decapitated and yet I live.
	The wind tells me I'm a ghost, but I don't believe it.
	It goes on to say that Justice Scalia was purposely killed at the annual Bohemian Grove Camp during a week-long human hunting expedition, and that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who by the way died in 2017 and Rupert Murdoch, this was after that, secretly huddle most days to determine how best to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible.
	This person's a loon is a loon.
	Right.
	And Maria was, she saw that this was Sidney's, quote, source before she, quote, platformed Sidney.
	And you touched on something that's legally relevant here, which is that Maria and Lou Dobbs, knowing this, did not tell their audience that.
	And that is part of Dominion's case here, is that they had not only possessed this evidence that this woman was a lunatic and she was Sidney Powell's source, but that they hid that from their audience.
	Another thing that Dominion has claimed, they discovered in the process of getting all these tens of thousands of emails and texts from Rupert Murdoch on down is that Janine Pirro was bragging to her friends that she was feeding Sidney Powell some of these conspiracy theories.
	And Janine Pirrow failed to disclose that to her audience.
	That very well could be something that a jury looks at as evidence of defamation.
	But that's just one other example of why this case is so strong and so extraordinary.
	I mean, think about it this way.
	You were listing all the people at Fox from the corporate parent Fox Corporation on down to Fox News who've been deposed in this case and how unusual that is.
	It's crazy.
	To have the chief legal counsel of a company sit for a deposition.
	I mean, you're the lawyer here, Megan.
	That is just almost unheard of.
	And I don't quite know.
	It's a mystery and maybe more will come out at trial and we'll see that perhaps Fox has a stronger case than we now know.
	But why the Murdochs wouldn't settle this is beyond me.
	They've settled far less serious matters for hundreds of millions of dollars.
	This is a major threat to the company, not just financially, but reputationally, because at issue, the issue here, at its core, is that Fox lied to its audience and it knew exactly what it was doing in a relentless and reckless pursuit for profit and ratings.
	I don't know if it's going to be a major threat to the corporation because Fox, I mean, Rupert Murdoch has more money than God and can he could afford $1.6 billion, but he's not going to be forced to pay that.
	The Dominion lawsuit, you know, it's not worth $1.6 billion.
	The company's not worth $1.6 billion.
	They can potentially get punitive damages, so it could start ramping up.
	But I just don't think it's going to be worth that much.
	So what it tells me, this is my own opinion, that they actually let Rupert sit for a deposition.
	I mean, Irena Briganti, Suzanne Scott, my God, the fact that they let all these people sit, not to mention their stars, tells me they are prepared to try the case.
	And that means that they're prepared to pay a judgment.
	And they must think it's much smaller than 1.6 billion.
	That's my armchair quarterbacking.
	But so let me just jump back because just so this audience understands, because that Dominion stuff lingered out there, you know, and we definitely covered Sidney Powell.
	And I will say when she first came out, Jeremy, it was like she had a good reputation at the very beginning.
	Do you remember this?
Dominion Lawsuit Worth Billions 00:14:51
	Because people are like, who is that?
	You're a federal prosecutor.
	Yes.
	And she was a respected appellate attorney.
	So in the beginning, I was like, whoa, wait, what?
	Giuliani, I put him in a different league in the beginning.
	She wound up going below him.
	But I understand at the start, when it's the president of the United States making the allegations directly, and she's his lawyer and she's a respected person, and she's saying this stuff about Dominion.
	At first, you're like, what?
	So is there a distinction between the original reporting?
	Because it's a three-week period that they're going after Fox and its reporting.
	The original and the stuff that happened over the course of the three weeks.
	So this all kind of kicks off on Maria Bartaromo's show on November 8th.
	That's the first time anyone on Fox had interviewed Sidney Powell.
	And from there, that interview gets so much attention.
	They tease it on Fox and Friends.
	Other conservative media start to pick it up.
	I believe I remember hearing Sidney Powell on Rush Limbaugh a couple days later.
	So she really kind of takes off, even though she's not technically working for the Trump campaign.
	She's freelancing and there's no contract in place that shows that the Trump campaign ever hired her.
	So, what happens is Fox begins to see that this stuff is rating and that their audience really wants it.
	And the emails and texts reveal that there was such a panic going on because viewers had turned Fox off in the days and weeks after the election because Fox correctly called Arizona and then later the presidential election for Joe Biden.
	They told their audience the truth.
	You know that their decision desk there run by Arnon Michigan is world class.
	They've gone out on a limb.
	Yeah, it really is.
	And people kind of lose sight of that.
	This is there are real journalists who know what they're doing calling the elections at Fox.
	And they got it right, but that's not what Trump wanted to hear.
	And it's not what the audience at Fox wanted to hear.
	So they switched the channel to these other far-right networks, Newsmax, OAN.
	And what you get a sense of in these emails is this kind of frantic scramble.
	How do we get these people back?
	You hear Rupert texting Suzanne Scott saying we're getting creamed by CNN.
	So they kick in motion this plan to protect the Fox brand.
	And what that basically entails is driving ratings back up by what we now know to be spreading false statements knowingly.
	And that's the heart of defamation law.
	As you know, it's not enough to just allow people on the network to lie.
	You have to knowingly lie.
	And this evidence that we've seen goes a long way toward proving that many inside Fox News knew that they were peddling falsehoods to their audience.
	And you have Rupert Murdoch saying things like he thinks Sidney Powell is crazy.
	You have producers of shows saying they think she's on LSD.
	Sidney Powell is on LSD.
	You have them mocking Trump.
	And it's just, it peels back the curtain.
	And as one person described it to me, it kind of shows you how little some of these people really think of their audience, that they're willing to lie to them and have them swallow these preposterous, fanciful conspiracy theories.
	Tucker Carlson is another one.
	I mean, in my book, I reported that Trucker told people he was voting for Kanye West in 2020.
	I mean, this is how little he really thinks of Donald Trump.
	This stuff has never been out there this publicly before, but we're now beginning to.
	But let me ask you something about that.
	Let me ask you something about that.
	Okay.
	So I can attest that it is possible to think very little of Donald Trump, but to go on to cover him fairly.
	And the same is true of Barack Obama.
	You can think very poorly about a politician or a president or a lawyer and find a way to report on them fairly.
	And so the thing that bothers me about this case is you and I know as reporters, a lot of the times you do have to cover people with whom you disagree and you think what they're saying is complete nonsense or you kind of know it's not true, you know.
	And so you go out there and maybe you report it, you report it skeptically, you challenge, but your opinion isn't news.
	You're just the reporter.
	Right.
	Well, that's the difference between people like, you know, who approach their jobs like you and I do and people like Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
	I mean, Megan, I remember I was in the room when you asked Donald Trump that question at the first debate in Cleveland about calling women fat dogs and pigs and slobs.
	You asked tough questions that put people like Trump on the spot and held them accountable.
	That's not what Sean Hannity does.
	That's not what Tucker Carlson has ever really done with Donald Trump, although he's been more critical of Trump and of some of these voter Dominion conspiracy theories.
	Tucker did it to Sidney Powell.
	Remember, he didn't get her on the show, but he's the one who excoriated her and did a report saying she's a liar.
	We can prove it.
	I mean, he wasn't beholden to MAGA to the point where he wouldn't call out BS with her.
	Right.
	That's true.
	But then once the audience turned on him, he stopped talking about it.
	And a month later, two months later, he hosts Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, who was an even, you know, almost just as bad of a conspiracy theory monger.
	So if there's one theme that kind of emerges from the Dominion complaints and all the evidence that they've told us about so far, it's that Fox saw its audience slipping away.
	And in order to get them back, they told them what they wanted to hear, even though inside Fox, they knew that that wasn't true.
	I understand why Tucker put Mike Lindell on of the My Pillow stuff because he was being canceled on Twitter.
	And it was a story about cancel culture.
	It wasn't to platform his lies about Dominion, though they were mentioned in the segment.
	But the thing about seeing the audience diminish, that is, you're right, that is reflected in those texts.
	They're in a panic.
	The audience is mad at them over the correct Arizona call.
	And they're struggling with how to win the audience back and not to lose too many of them.
	And I have to say, to me, it's so disappointing, that piece of it, because even here on this show, you know, I have a right-leaning audience.
	I have a lot of Democrats too who watch and listen.
	But I got a lot of pushback from people saying, how can you defend the Arizona call?
	Or why aren't you open-minded to the Sydney Powell stuff?
	And, you know, you have to disappoint your audience sometimes if you're going to adhere to the truth.
	And most of us are in the long-term game with our audience.
	Most of us are in the game of, you're going to be sad that I'm telling you sad truth today, but long term, you're going to trust me.
	You're going to trust me to tell you the truth.
	And when I tell you the sweet nothings, you're going to know they're real because I'm not in a tank for anybody.
	I really feel like, Jeremy, Roger Ailes, I don't think he would have let this happen.
	I really think Roger Ailes would have had his hands on 10 and 2 because if nothing else, he defended the news division, which has that same approach that you and I just discussed.
	Well, and what's so startling, one of the most really kind of remarkable exchanges in everything that we've seen come out is Rupert Murdoch says that they should fire Bill Salmon, who's running the Fox DC Bureau and was ultimately responsible for making the final call on Arizona.
	Rupert says, let's fire him and give the audience what they want.
	He was willing to sacrifice somebody's career because he thought it would help the ratings.
	Somebody who had done his job the best he knew how and got it right.
	So it's beyond just giving the audience the programming that they want.
	It's now kind of the structure of the network, the people who work there, it's a much different place with, I think, a much more profit-driven, ratings-driven goal.
	I mean, that was always, you know, ratings are always important to television networks, but at what cost?
	And I think that's what you're saying is, you know, this pursuit of ratings and profit led them to just slough off their journalistic responsibility and say, you know, well, we're just going to tell them what they want to hear now.
	How do you distinguish?
	And I just want to say for the record, before I forget, even Fox is admitting the stuff about Dominion was false.
	Fox is not saying Dominion actually did do this stuff.
	And there's a chance they flip the votes.
	Fox is admitting that was not true, right?
	That the people who came on our air and said that were not telling you the truth.
	So, just in case there's anybody out there thinking, well, maybe they did.
	They did not.
	That didn't happen.
	You were misled.
	So, that doesn't mean the election was perfect or fair in all instances, and all the mail-ins and the Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania, all that stuff is still out there.
	But we're talking about whether votes were flipped from Trump to Biden, as Trump alleged by Dominion.
	So, just for the record.
	But, you know, part of what's so unseemly, Jeremy, is I watched MSNBC and CNN mislead us on Russia Gate for two years, you know, for two, maybe three, however long that lasted.
	I actually, this is my opinion, don't believe those anchors were lying.
	I believe their ideology led them to want to believe.
	And I could put some of the New York Times in this belt, but like what they wanted to believe it was too juicy.
	It was too good.
	And that is what biased their reporting to where it was wrong for so long.
	And the cable nets, you know, they have yet to apologize for it.
	So I'm just not willing to give them a pass on their dishonesty.
	This shows some people within a network who did not believe the Dominion stuff.
	For the most part, there wasn't complete overlap with the people who did report it.
	Like, I think Maria Barta Romo and Lou Dobbs are closer to the MSNBC anchors who are out there every night with like Rajagate, Rajagate.
	They believe because they wanted to believe.
	There is no Maria Bartaromo email saying, this is all nonsense.
	I don't believe a word of this.
	Right.
	And that's going to be Fox's best defense, right?
	I mean, not all of these examples of defamation that Dominion alleges are going to get to the jury.
	I'm sure the judge will toss some of them out.
	But you don't have that kind of smoking gun where a host is saying, I think this is BS, and then turning around and saying something completely different on the air.
	What you do have, though, are producers who are responsible for Maria Barta Roma, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, et cetera, those kinds of social saying that they seriously doubt this and that there couldn't have been enough fraud to change the outcome of the election.
	And Dominion's lawyers will point to that and say, no, but the people responsible, because ultimately, this is what Dominion has to prove: that the people who are responsible for the content on those shows knew that they were lying.
	It's not going to be enough, Fox will argue in court, that Rupert Murdoch thought that Sidney Powell was a nutcase.
	It's not going to be enough that he thought that Rudy Giuliani was a drunk because Rupert Murdoch wasn't producing these shows.
	But so it's these are nice headlines.
	They're salacious, provocative to hear Rupert Murdoch saying, yes, they endorsed and I could have stopped this, but I chose not to.
	How that relates to Dominion's case is a question mark.
	We just don't know if a jury will believe that because Rupert Murdoch didn't believe it, therefore the hosts knew what they were doing was defamatory.
	So it's not a slant on case.
	And I know that your next guests are going to talk about this.
	Dominion or defamation is just so hard to prove.
	And I imagine that's why Fox is willing to take this to trial.
	They're rolling the dice here and hoping that it goes the way that most defamation cases do.
	And that's that jury sides with the media.
	And we like that.
	I mean, as media members, we like that it's such a hard standard, such a high standard to get passed.
	Sidney Powell, she's on her own.
	She can deal with the lies she told in court.
	Fine.
	I don't care what happens to her.
	But I do care what happens to the press because I'm a member of it.
	And I understand as you do, we do need to be granted significant latitude to report on claims being made by a president of the United States, his lawyer about something as fundamental as the fairness of the election.
	And so the standard to sue us for reporting on those things in good faith, you know, if we don't have actual malice in our hearts and knowing it's true or recklessly disregarding whether or not it's true, it should be as high as it is.
	I don't want to see New York Times versus Sullivan.
	That's the case that set the standard, revised, reversed, changed.
	So people like us are in a weird position here because you kind of look at some of the decisions behind the scenes and you say, man, that's journalistically unethical, unsound, embarrassing.
	But a big judgment against Fox in this circumstance could hurt all of us in a way we don't want.
	I'll give you the last word.
	I think that is an excellent point.
	The law gives us the room to make mistakes as long as those mistakes are honest.
	Like, look, you and I are constantly under deadline pressure, as all journalists are.
	Things come together quickly, messily at times, and mistakes are going to get made.
	That's what the First Amendment protects.
	What it doesn't protect is the right to make those mistakes and knowing exactly what you're doing, to make intentional mistakes.
	And that's what arguing.
	Reckless.
	That's the thing.
	So it's like they don't even have to prove knowing.
	They think they can prove knowing, but even reckless disregard of the truth or falsity of it can get you to actual malice.
	And that's dangerous.
	That's like, that's where your executive producer is saying, look at this email.
	She's a nutcase.
	Her theories are based on that of a nutcase.
	This isn't true.
	We've gotten 40 letters from Dominion.
	You can't say this and you go out there and say that.
	You can't prove that anchor knew, but you could certainly get to reckless disregard of whether this thing she said is true or false.
	That could be where we are.
	Jeremy, such pleasure.
	Thank you for being back on the show.
Proving Reckless Disregard for Truth 00:14:00
	Yeah.
	Thank you for having me.
	There'll be lots to talk about in the coming weeks in this case.
	There absolutely will.
	All right.
	Now, up next, we have two sides.
	And we decided we made sure that we got people who understood the First Amendment forward and backward that weren't, you know, hateful towards Fox.
	We don't want Keith Olbermann on discussing this.
	So we've got both sides represented.
	We're going to take a deeper dive into how this is actually going to go.
	Joining me now to argue Dominion's side of this argument is Andrew Geronimo.
	He's the director of the First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
	He has tried cases and handled appeals at the state and federal level.
	And his advocacy focuses on the First Amendment and its related issues, particularly those involving speech and press rights.
	And here to argue for Fox, not representing Fox, but Fox's side, is George Freeman.
	He's a graduate of Harvard Law.
	He spent over 30 years as the chief First Amendment lawyer in the legal department of the New York Times.
	They got a New York Times guy here to defend the Fox News channel.
	So this will be fun.
	Andrew, George, welcome to the show.
	Thank you.
	Great to have you both.
	All right.
	So let me start with you.
	So, Andrew, you're just, you know, on Dominion's side for the purposes of this argument.
	What does Dominion need to prove to win a defamation case against Fox?
	Well, Dominion needs to prove that a false statement was made about it and it was made with a certain mindset.
	And really the filings that we've been talking about on air here really go to that actual malice mindset.
	So what Dominion is proposing it will prove is that Fox News published false statements about it and published those statements knowing that they were false or at least recklessly disregarding the falsity of them.
	Now, here's George already where I feel like they get into trouble, the Dominion people.
	And that's not to say I don't believe in the lawsuit, whatever, but this is where they get into trouble.
	They say that they have 20 false statements on six different shows, 20 false statements on six different shows.
	The false statements are, you know, by people like Sidney Powell, Dominion, hacked, switched votes, stuff like that on six different shows.
	But when in their effort to prove actual malice and knowledge of falsity, they for the most part cite anchors who have nothing to do with those six shows.
	They cite Tucker saying, this is all baloney.
	I don't believe a word of this.
	He wasn't one of the ones who repeated it.
	They don't cite.
	Maria Bartaromo saying, I don't believe it, or Lou Dobbs saying, I don't believe it, or Janine Pirro saying, I don't believe it.
	So is that a problem for Dominion?
	It's a problem, but not insurmountable, I would say.
	And that's because this is not like the ordinary story that's worked upon by a producer and editor and the reporter.
	And that's basically the little hub who put the story on the air.
	I mean, this is a story that went on for two months and was, you know, quite visible to the highest people in the company, including Rupert Murdock, who said himself that he could have done something about this.
	So it seems to me, as Jeremy said correctly, you know, anyone who's responsible, who had serious doubts about the truth of what they were putting on the air, I think that person's mind view is something that could be used to show actual malice.
	So you agree, you agree.
	It might not be Tucker Carlson, but it might well be Suzanne Scott.
	You agree as the stand-in lawyer for the Fox side on this, that it would be enough to show that, let's say, Maria's executive producer knew that this was baloney and had said it, or somebody with direct editorial control linked to her.
	Right.
	Linked to putting that snippet on by putting Sidney Powell on.
	Yes.
	You know, if it's Tucker Carlson, who's another host who has nothing in that line of authority on Maria's program, then he would be excludable, it seems to me.
	But it's a story where everyone in the company was involved after all.
	So the top people in the newsroom, I think, are responsible.
	Now, how do you get to, Andrew, like, how does Dominion get around the fact that this is what reporters do?
	The president of the United States was saying these things.
	It was crazy time.
	And all the papers in the world were reporting on these claims.
	And then Sidney Powell came out of nowhere and made these extraordinary claims and Giuliani eventually echoed them.
	So how does Dominion get past the fact that Fox as a news organization has an obligation to tell the audience what's being said?
	Well, certainly it will be an issue for them.
	So part of their defense is that nobody would take some of these as part of Fox's defense is that some folks wouldn't take these as statements of fact and that they should be viewed more as statements of opinion.
	I think that'll be a serious issue in the case.
	And I think, you know, especially along the lines of in a First Amendment defense to a defamation case, a lot of times what you're trying to find is a false and defamatory statement, as I mentioned earlier.
	So some of the defense that Fox will put in are things like, you know, Bartiromo saying that, do you have proof of that?
	If you say, if you were asking somebody for their proof, to me, that indicates that it's not a statement of fact or not, you're not presenting it as a statement of verifiable fact.
	So I think really a lot of the attention on the recent filings are really about evidence of actual malice and what folks in the Fox newsroom knew.
	But I do think that there are very good reasons for us to maintain strong First Amendment protections for the remaining elements of a defamation claim, specifically whether they were statements of fact or statements of opinion.
	What about that, George?
	Because you understand as a journalist, you have an obligation, especially when the other side's not there.
	You're going to put, you're going to platform Sidney Powell.
	You have a high obligation to grill her in making these incendiary claims.
	Is it enough, do you think, for Fox to have had Maria say, like, can you prove it?
	What's your proof?
	Yeah.
	I think that that's really the nub of this case, because this is one place where good journalism and good law diverge.
	For the most part, they really go parallel with each other, which is good, right?
	But in this area where it's repeating crazy statements by public officials, the law and good journalism totally diverge.
	I mean, I report, I reviewed thousands of articles at the Times, and the most troublesome were the kind of article which would say that Governor Cuomo said that Mayor Koch was accepting bribes.
	And the reporters said, this is BS.
	I don't believe it.
	But yet they wanted to publish it because it was newsworthy that the governor was saying something as crazy as that, as aggressive about the mayor, right?
	So what do you do?
	Because I would have to say legally, you're in trouble.
	We're repeating something that's libelous, and you guys don't believe it.
	That's actual malice.
	On the other hand, shouldn't the readers, shouldn't our viewers know that Cuomo is making such an irresponsible statement?
	I'm using those two names hypothetically, of course, but that really is a problem.
	And that's what this case is about.
	As it happens, and this is the weird part, which I don't understand, there's a defense that mirrors this issue exactly.
	And yet that defense hasn't been very much used or discussed in the context of this case.
	And that's called neutral portage, which was a defense that was founded simply for this exact dilemma that I'm talking about.
	But George, I think it's because there isn't one in New York State.
	New York State doesn't recognize that.
	That's the problem.
	Yeah, but we're in Delaware with the public.
	It's in a Delaware court.
	No, but it's in a Delaware court, but it's being decided with New York law.
	Both parties have agreed to that.
	That's the problem.
	They could use that privilege.
	That doesn't mean that a judge in a very visible case couldn't recognize the privilege as many judges have done around the country.
	It's still a minority view, but it's growing and courts do occasionally recognize it, even though prior courts in that jurisdiction hadn't.
	And this seems like the perfect case for it.
	So I'm surprised.
	I mean, yes, you're right that technically New York law doesn't recognize it, although the federal courts in New York do recognize it.
	I understand that, but it's such a perfect case to bring that issue out because this is a privilege that should exist.
	Because how else do you answer the dilemma that I just put as to Cuomo's statement about Koch?
	Is the answer to it from public view?
	It's the impossible position.
	Can you imagine if Fox didn't cover any of this?
	That didn't cover what Trump's.
	But there was, I mean, I will say.
	I understand they were in a tough spot, but like we were in a tough spot too, in a way, because we didn't know whether Sidney Powell was telling the truth or not.
	I certainly didn't see her whack-a-doodle email.
	At first, I went to it saying, this is a respected trial attorney, an appellate attorney.
	I'm going to listen to what she's saying and react appropriately accordingly.
	And it took not that long, frankly, but you had to keep an open mind to see whether it was true.
	And then very soon thereafter, it was like, there's no proof.
	I don't need to know whether it's true.
	There's zero proof.
	She's put nothing up.
	And by the way, Fox got there too.
	Tucker is the one who fairly early on went out and just absolutely killed her.
	We actually have a sound bite of that for people who want to be refreshed.
	Here it is.
	Watch.
	Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story.
	This election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software in order to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
	On Sunday night, we texted her after watching one of her segments.
	So we invited Sidney Powell on the show.
	We would have given her the whole hour.
	We would have given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention.
	But she never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page.
	When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.
	When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either, nor did she provide any today at the press conference.
	But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another.
	Not one.
	Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it.
	Maybe she will.
	We are certainly hopeful that she will.
	I mean, that's, Andrew, that's to me, that's compelling that, yes, they can mention Tucker as much as they want.
	And his text, you know, behind the scenes, like, oh my God, this woman's a loon.
	What he said on the air matched up with, she's a loon.
	I kept an open mind.
	I tried to report the story.
	She's a lunatic.
	Bye.
	And I think for Dominion's part on this, what they would argue is that a fair reporter, a neutral report privilege wouldn't apply in this case because it requires the folks doing the reporting to do so dispassionately and free from other bias.
	So I think that's their legal argument here.
	But I think you're exactly right about the points that have been aired and the sort of the juxtaposition of those points with other things that other folks were saying on the air.
	George, one thing I would say is simply that the early statements, I think, are subject to a much stronger defense than the later statements.
	Because as time goes on, there's more and more evidence against these allegations.
	There are more and more emails that Dominion has sent to Fox saying they're not true.
	And so the later statements are probably going to be the more problematic ones.
	So what is George is Fox's best defense?
	Oh, yeah, go ahead.
	I was just going to say that.
	So, you know, there is an issue, right?
	Fox is a very good point that newsworthy statements ought to be made.
	And that's what this neutral reportage privilege is about.
	But it does have two conditions, one of which Andrew just mentioned that Fox shouldn't be endorsing it.
	It should be reported neutrally and objectively.
	And the second is that the speakers who you're repeating have to be responsible.
	And that raises the question as to Giuliani and Powell that I don't want to get into, but who knows how a jury would come out on that?
	I mean, I'm kind of mad.
	I'm ticked off at them, at Powell and Giuliani, who are in this position of public trust and just completely misled us and did it with a straight face.
	It's just like, to me, I feel for the Fox anchors in large part because they were in a very tough position.
	And I know now we're supposed to pretend that, oh, they're the only ones who worry about money.
	Bullshit.
	And that's just not true.
	If you don't think CNN and MSNBC and ABC and NBC and CBS worry about the bottom line, you're fooling yourselves.
	Like, I'll give you this soundbite from Chris Hayes the other night at MSNBC, okay?
	Because there's a text from Tucker to Laura and Sean early on in this saying he's mad that a reporter went out there and fact-checked.
	I think the media is missing this.
	They're claiming he's mad she fact-checked Trump, who is saying all the Dominion stuff.
	As I read his email, he's mad the reporter fact-checked Sean Hannity, who was repeating the Trump claims.
	And having worked at Fox for many years, I can tell you there's a very firm rule, don't shoot inside the tent.
	You're not supposed to attack the other anchors or the primetime hosts either way because publicly, they take enough incoming.
	I think that's what he's mad about.
	But I just think that, you know, his concern about what this kind of fighting was doing to the stock price, while yes, you can make it sound nefarious, is honest.
	And here's Chris Hayes trying to pretend he has absolutely no financial motive in doing his reporting.
	Just listen.
	It's soundbite 19.
	I will never look into this camera and lie to you.
	And I won't toe a line I don't believe in because I'm worried about the stock price.
	I swear that I have never, ever in my entire life given a single second's thought to the Comcast stock price.
Suing Media on the General Thrust 00:07:19
	I can only speak for myself, but that's not why I do this.
	Not for the stock price.
	Okay.
	Can I just say, I believe him that he hasn't looked at the stock price, but there is zero chance he doesn't check his ratings every day.
	Why does he care about his ratings?
	Because if he doesn't get good ratings, they're going to cancel his show and his million dollar salary goes away.
	He does care about the money.
	News is not completely altruistic.
	That's the dirty secret of news, you know, unless you're watching, well, I don't know, arguably PBS, but not really.
	There is a profit motive for everyone involved in it.
	George, I'll start with you on that one.
	Yeah, I mean, and it depends where you are.
	Different, I think newspapers are different from magazines.
	Magazines are different from TV.
	Network TV is different from cables.
	So it's very hard to draw a big picture there.
	If I could go back, though, to what you've been really focusing on, Megan, is that I think this case is going to come down to a question that we haven't really discussed, which is, do you look at this one statement at a time and look at the 20 statements or let's say the 10 statements that end up going to the jury and look at the technical, whether all the technical legal elements were met through each of those statements?
	Or as my guess is, Dominion is going to try to urge, can you look at the whole thrust of the coverage?
	Because that would be, it seems to me, an easier thing to claim.
	And it's an easier thing for the jury to deal with.
	Whether that judge will allow that, whether that technically meets the rules of defamation law is, I think, an open question.
	You know, there are questions sometimes whether a headline can be defamatory.
	And the press says, no, you can't look at the headline.
	You got to look at each specific sentence in the article.
	And this is kind of, this, it mirrors that question in this context.
	Can you look at the thrust of a month of coverage where these people were invited again and again and again, regardless of the exact wording of what the host said?
	Or do you have to look at the exact wording?
	Because that's what counts.
	And that's what the law tends to say should count.
	So that's, I think, going to be a very important issue as to how the judge handles that.
	And in the end, you know, the jury can probably do whatever it wants.
	So how the jury handles that.
	I think you're exactly right.
	What do you think of that?
	I agree 100% with George.
	And I think, you know, not to stray too far from my assigned side here, but I think it's a dangerous proposition to say that we can start suing media entities or speakers generally for the general thrust of their statements without specifically identifying what's false and defamatory in a statement.
	You know, I think I'm glad that you mentioned New York Times versus Sullivan and the protection that it offers, because I do think it's very important to consider the underlying policy reasons behind that case, which are that everything added to the field of liable is taken from the field of free debate, right?
	Free speech should be about discussing these things and dealing with these things out there.
	And I don't think we want to stray too far from focusing on very specific false statements into just what is the general vibe of these statements overall.
	And if I could, I think that is, I have every respect for the jury system and putting these things in front of a jury.
	We've got defamation cases that we hope to present to juries in the coming year.
	But I think one of the underlying, another underlying reason about New York Times versus Sullivan is it can be very dangerous to put things like this in front of a jury who might be incentivized to find against a defendant for reasons other than their false and defamatory statements that cause damage to the plaintiff.
	You know, Megan, one irony is that if Dominion were to win a big verdict, if anything, that would strengthen Tynes V. Sullivan and I think be a step to beat up the folks that are judged this is Thomas and Gorsuch who are thinking about repealing it, because that would prove that if you have the goods, then you win such a case.
	So there's no, as I think Justice Gorsuch said, there's an absolute immunity that Tynesy Sullivan gives the media.
	So in effect, by losing a case where the jury finds that there were calculated falsehoods in the words of the Supreme Court, Sullivan would have worked.
	And I think that would take the wind out of the sails of those who are attacking it.
	So it's kind of ironic, but in a way, a loss would be a gain.
	Again, I don't want to mess with New York Times versus Sullivan.
	I think it's as a member of the media, but also I'm a public figure who gets defamed regularly.
	So in that second role, I hate it.
	But in the former role, I love it.
	And I think it's sound legal precedent.
	We're argued by our own friend Floyd Abrams, who's been on this show before and is a prince of a guy.
	Fox cites this in its brief, and I think it's telling.
	They're getting into the law.
	And they say in Blankenship versus Fox, the court held that Rupert Murdoch and Suzanne Scott's, she's the CEO, knowledge was irrelevant, their knowledge of whether something's true or false, because, quote, it is the state of mind of the speaker that is relevant.
	And I really think, Andrew, if this Dominion brief was like Maria has texts saying she knows it's BS, and then Maria platformed Sydney without giving her much of a challenge.
	There was some challenge, but it wasn't that robust.
	Lou Dobbs knew it was bullshit when he platformed and gave a complete pass.
	There's a reason Lou Dobbs got fired.
	Their case would be stronger.
	But look at all these primetime anchors who are stars who believe it.
	And then not showing.
	I mean, in Hannity's case, they have one example that they were the ones platforming Sydney and allowing this to go.
	Like that's, I think, the biggest weakness for Dominion.
	I think that's right.
	I think they are, you know, trying to conflate all of these folks in an attempt to say that this is the overall message that the network itself was conveying.
	And the network is a defendant.
	So they're trying to, you know, group all those folks together as much as possible to hold the network itself responsible for what was aired on it.
	It's just as George said, if they can group the network together and talk about thrust of coverage, Dominion is likely to win.
	If we have to go statement by statement and talk about individual anchors and state of mind, Fox is more likely to win.
	And that's why we're at impasse right now between the two parties.
	So it's a lot more complicated than many pundits are leading people to believe.
	The texts are not good for Fox.
	They don't make Fox look good.
	That's true.
	But legally, that doesn't mean this is a slam dunk for Dominion.
	I got to go quickly.
	So final word.
	Will it go to trial?
	Yes or no?
	Andrew?
	I think it does, yes.
	George?
	It's certainly not going to be dismissed by a judge because there's too many facts that are in dispute.
	I think it's a case that goes to trial and there's no settlement negotiations going on as far as I understand.
	Buckle up.
	Buckle up, Buttercup.
	It's going to get even uglier.
	Thank you guys both so much.
	We appreciate it.
	We're going to continue to watch the case and we'll report on it as the news comes in.
	Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:00 A Nation Captured by the Trial
00:07:43 The Judge's Heartbreaking Exchange
00:11:43 Why Alec Must Maintain Innocence
00:14:29 Circumstantial Evidence and Lies
00:29:57 The Juror Who Got Bounced
00:33:37 Sentencing Murdoch to Prison
00:41:40 Baldwin, Statutes, and Civil Charges
00:48:42 Fox Accused of Platforming Liars
01:01:15 Dominion Lawsuit Worth Billions
01:16:06 Proving Reckless Disregard for Truth
01:30:06 Suing Media on the General Thrust