Fox News demanded that Dominion Voting Systems conduct an internal investigation to determine whether it was responsible for the leak of damning text messages sent by former anchor Tucker Carlson.
Recently, Fox wrote Dominion saying evidence documents it provided to the company during recent litigation had been ‘disclosed to media organizations and published for mass consumption.’
Fox asked Dominion to launch an internal probe to ‘investigate and confirm that you are not the source of these improper disclosures.’ The outlet wrote that if Dominion were behind the leak, it would violate ‘the text and spirit of the parties agreement,’ according to The Hill.
In April, Fox agreed to pay Dominion a $787 million defamation settlement over false claims the outlet pushed about the integrity of the company’s voting machines during the 2020 presidential election.
Some of Carlson’s messages provided to Dominion during legal proceedings had previously been released, but since the settlement was announced, a number of unreleased and redacted messages – which showed racially insensitive and sexist behavior from Carlson – were leaked to the media.
Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News after the network closed a $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in April
Fox News’ office in Manhattan. The outlet asked that Dominion conduct an investigation to see if leaks of court documents and transcripts came from them
Those messages included Carlson telling a producer that a video of three people attacking a victim around January 6, 2021, were not ‘how white men fight.’
Another leak included texts showing Carlson had used the ‘C-word’ to refer to female colleagues.
Liberal watchdog Media Matters also released footage of Carlson making insensitive comments off-air. Fox sent the watchdog a cease-and-desist letter over the footage last Friday.
Dominion denied being behind the leaks, telling The Hill ‘nobody associated with Dominion shared these confidential materials with the press.’
Some of the footage released by Media Matters included Carlson joking with staff about his ‘post-menopausal fans.’
The clips were also mentioned in a New York Times report last week, which suggested they were among a trove of highly incriminating clips.
They show Tucker bantering with producers, assistants and fellow hosts.
In one, he makes a reference to someone’s girlfriend being ‘yummy,’ and later, he jokes about relying on ‘post-menopausal fans’ to tell him how he looks on-air.
Tucker Carlson was caught calling the Dominion lawyer a ‘slimy little motherf*****’ that ‘triggered’ him during his deposition. He said: ‘That guy, he triggered the s*** out of me…The amount of times I had: ‘First of all, f*** you,’ on my lips was like, it was unbelievable’
Tucker speaking to a representative of Andrew Tate during one of the leaked clips
In one video, Tucker unleashes on Fox Nation while on the phone with a representative for Andrew Tate, the British influencer arrested in Romania earlier this year.
He fumed that ‘no one’ was watching the service and that his talents were going to waste.
Carlson held the most successful show on primetime Fox News for many years. He also had a daytime show that was streamed on Fox Nation called Tucker Carlson Today.
Tate’s reps were begging Carlson to wear a sweater or t-shirt for their interview instead of his normal suit and tie.
He refused, telling them part of the show would end up on his primetime, cable news show, and that he didn’t want to become a ‘slave to Fox Nation.’
‘Nobody’s going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks,’ he said. ‘So I’d really like to just put the — dump the whole thing on YouTube. But anyway, that’s just my view,. OK. I’m just frustrated with it.
‘It’s hard to use that site. I don’t know why they’re not fixing it. It’s driving me insane,’ he continued. ‘And they’re like making, like, Lifetime movies.’
‘But they don’t, they don’t work on the infrastructure of the site. Like what? It’s crazy. And it drives me crazy because it’s like we’re doing all this extra work and no one can find it. It’s unbelievable, actually. I don’t know who runs that site.
Carlson was seen on Tuesday night with his wife Susan, driving a golf cart to dinner near their Florida home
Tucker Carlson Tonight ran from 2016 until 2023, and regularly attracted more than 3 million viewers a night
In other videos that Media Matters deemed ‘creepy’ and which the Times referred to last week, he joked about his own appearance and how his older fans would tell him how he looked on-air.
He joked under his breath that someone’s ‘girlfriend was yummy’, then said: ‘Just kidding, in case this is being pulled off the bird. Hey, Media Matters for America, go f*** yourself! I don’t even know what his girlfriend looks like.
‘And if I did, I would not find her yummy.’
To an off-camera assistant, he joked: ‘I can never assess my appearance. I wait for my postmenopausal fans to weigh in on that
Many sources have attributed his firing to his insubordinate comments about bosses, some of which were unearthed as part of the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.
The voting machine company had filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network for ‘giving life’ to a ‘manufactured storyline’ about voter fraud after the 2020 election.
