Fox News’ lawyers sent a letter to Dominion Voting Systems requesting from their officials that they conduct an internal investigation looking into the media reports about the leaked text messages sent from former top Fox News host Tucker Carlson. As they point out in the letter sent on Friday, they had been informed that certain documents that Fox had handed over during the recent defamation case had been released to different media organizations and were now available for mass consumption.
The network in the letter calls for Dominion to launch an internal investigation to confirm that the leaked documents had not come from them, arguing that this release would not be aligned with the recent settlement.
Dominion Voting Systems had previously filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News in connection to their reporting of former President Donald Trump’s claims about the rigged 2020 election. The case was settled last month, and Fox agreed to pay $787 million to settle the defamation suit. Less than a week after the settlement, Fox announced that Carlson, who had been central in the Dominion case, had exited the network.
Only days after his departure many news outlets published portions of Carlson’s text messages that were previously redacted. These included the New York Times report which featured Carlson’s message after watching a video of three men attacking another person at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. In his comments Carlson claimed that was not “how white men fight” but that he was nonetheless hoping that the three men would hurt the other man.
