As much as many of us would have enjoyed watching the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News, et al, by now everyone has heard the case has settled in favor of Dominion for $787.5 million. In addition to the monetary award, Fox admitted to making false statements about Dominion with deliberate malice and/or reckless disregard for the truth. Attorneys for Dominion said this was a great day for Dominion and a great day for democracy!
Nevertheless, we learned from the depositions of Fox News hosts and executives the network knew there was no truth to what is widely dubbed, “The Big Lie”, but ratings and advertising revenue pushed them to cater to what their viewers wanted to see and hear, rather than the truth. In the words of Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, “…it wasn’t about red or blue it was about green.”
Throughout the furtherance and propagation of lies surrounding the 2020 presidential election by Fox and other right-wing networks, there were many hapless victims along the way. Just days before the Dominion settlement Fox settled another defamation suit with Venezuelan businessman Majed Khalil. Fox host Lou Dobbs and Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, a regular guest on Fox News, said on the air and in related Twitter posts that Dominion was using software to flip votes from Trump to President Biden and falsely accused Khalil of being the mastermind.
Here in Coos County the local MAGA election deniers known as Citizens Restoring Liberty, a far-right group founded by Coos County Commissioner Rod Taylor, launched similar unfounded and baseless claims and character assassinations against the hardworking clerk and her staff. Losing candidates for county office Pam Lewis and Diane Rich filed a frivolous lawsuit against the County, Commissioners John Sweet and Melissa Cribbins and interim Clerk Dede Murphy. That lawsuit was dismissed by a judge for lack of evidence, but the hurtful accusations remain.
Upon hearing of the Dominion settlement, I reached out to Cribbins and asked if she felt vindicated by the decision. She indicated, yes.
“I feel like it was a blatant political smear, “said Cribbins, “that never got the negative attention it deserved.”
Sweet declined to comment but Murphy shared similar sentiments.
“The people that work on elections are good people just trying to do their job.” Murphy explained. “To be deliberately targeted because of the lies told by actors around the country was so disturbing and hard to understand. I hope that more local people can trust the great job done by Oregon elections workers because of truth coming out all over the country.”
As a consequence of the findings coming from the Dominion lawsuit, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has launched a probe into allegations Trump and his allies defrauded donors by repeating false claims of election fraud enabling them to raise more than $200 million in donations. Prosecutors are seeking to identify if campaign staff and fundraising operatives misrepresented claims of election fraud to drive donations toward Trump.
Lewis and Rich took a page from the Trump playbook and launched a fundraising page falsely claiming to be “victims of election fraud.” To date they have raised $1,888 and the page is still up at this writing making the same claims even though the case was dismissed weeks ago.
Across the country innocent people have been unfairly and wrongly derided and harassed because of a lie, including right here in Coos County. Regrettably, Taylor who repeated false claims of local election fraud, (even though Trump won Coos County in 2020), inherited as one of his liaison assignments the Office of County Clerk.
So far, neither Rich, Lewis nor Taylor have responded to requests for comment. Specifically, I asked Rich and Lewis if they plan to apologize to county staff and further whether they intend to return the funds they raised through their blatant misrepresentation. Of course that would take real charater. As you can guess, it’s been crickets.
